|
Article Excerpt
Judge: But we've got to verify it legally
To see ...
Mayor: To see ...
Judge: If she ...
Mayor: If she ...
Judge: Is morally, ethically
Munchkin 1: Spiritually, physically
Munchkin 2: Positively, absolutely
Munchkin Men: Undeniably and reliably dead
Coroner: As Coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her ... and she's not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.
--The Wizard of Oz (1939)
This scene from the movie version of The Wizard of Oz portrays the citizens of Oz appealing to coronial expertise. By examining the crushed body of the Wicked Witch of the East, the coroner confirms for the public her untimely accidental death. Only when he officially declares her dead, underscored by the production of an oversize "Certificate of Death," is Dorothy free from her fear of retaliation by the Witch. "Ding dong, the Witch is dead ..."
How should we understand the work of the coroners, and their mobilization of forensic-scientific expertise, in relation to the criminal-justice system's need to categorize and explain deaths? Despite the endless cultural depictions of forensic scientists as mediators of truth in television programs such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI Miami, CSI NY, and Crossing Jordan, forensic medicine is, in practice, an inexact science. A sort of forerunner to these programs was public dissections by anatomy professors for public audiences. But unlike the television programs, public autopsies introduced medical students to the uncertainty of medicine:
Whereas dissection teaches a general knowledge of anatomy, autopsies aim to determine the cause of death of a particular individual.... The popular television image of the pathologist as hero (often heroine) scientist who reads the interior of the corpse for the benefit of an otherwise medically untrained society can be very different from what actually goes on at an autopsy. Fox (1979, pp. 68-72) shows how witnessing their first autopsy is, for medical students, a key part of their training in uncertainty. They had expected pathological investigation of the corpse to reveal the truth about previously uncertain diagnoses but discover only that pathology too is an uncertain science. (Walter 2005: 395)
Yet there is perhaps a juridical assumption, not unlike that of Dorothy and the Munchkins, or of the fans of CSI, that the sorts of evidence forensic experts provide, first to the Crown and then to the court, are more objective and scientific than their discipline can deliver with respect to certain kinds of deaths. More than this, forensic-scientific experts often rely on extra-medical evidence in order to arrive at conclusions as to cause of death, particularly when they are unable to determine the exact cause of death from the medical evidence.
I show how these issues have come into play in recent wrongful accusations of, and convictions for, murder in Ontario, especially some involving mothers and caregivers. These wrongful convictions are partly a product of clashing assumptions informing legal and medical-scientific discourses and practitioners about the role of expert forensic medical evidence. Forensic science provides the opportunity for the deployment of extra-medical theories about victims and their families in scientific terms, but this often goes unnoticed and unchallenged by judges and counsel. This process can be located theoretically as part of broader governmental techniques (or rationality, in the Foucauldian sense) that transform ideas into discourse; the shift makes possible the governmental deployment of the force of criminal law (Foucault 1991; Gordon 1991). A key feature in the successful articulation of power in the context of wrongful accusations and convictions is the pre-existing suspicion within the population that mothers, especially, are the culprits when infants and children die. Once ideas about parental brutality are transformed into juridical-scientific discourse, they acquire the legitimate authority that grounds wrongful accusations and convictions for infant and child murder (see also Naughton 2005).
Wrongful accusation, wrongful conviction
William Mullins-Johnson was recently released on bail after being incarcerated for 12 and a half years following his conviction for the rape and murder of his four-year-old niece. His murder conviction rested partly on the expert testimony of forensic pathologist Dr Charles Smith (Rusk 2005). Dr Smith provided evidence that the four-year-old victim has been raped and murdered. But Dr Michael Pollanen, Ontario's chief forensic pathologist, who later reviewed the findings, concluded otherwise. According to the Globe and Mail,
Valin was not raped before she died. The enlarged anus that Dr. Smith and two other doctors cited as evidence of abuse was a natural occurrence that resulted from the relaxing of muscles after death, ... And the genital bruising taken as evidence of abuse, as well as the bruising on the neck that led the doctors to conclude she was strangled or smothered, were the result of blood pooling in those areas after death. (Friesen 2005: A14)
Mullins-Johnson was released after more than a decade in prison because Dr Smith's conclusions in a number of other cases came under scrutiny. His case was one of at least 44 child-death cases that were examined by Dr Charles Smith and are now under review by the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario.
Louise Reynolds spent two years in pre-trial detention pending her trial for the second-degree murder of her seven-year-old daughter in 1997. The murder charge laid against Reynolds stemmed largely from the interpretation of forensic evidence provided to the Crown by Dr Smith. He submitted that Reynolds had stabbed her daughter 82 times with a pair of scissors (Makin 2005a: A5). It was not until 2001 that the murder charge was dropped following the submission of a forensic interpretation at odds with that provided by Dr Smith and his colleague Dr Wood. Dr John Ferris, an Australian forensic pathologist hired by Reynolds' defence lawyers, corroborated Reynolds' statement that the little girl had been attacked by a friend's pit bull dog (Shephard 2001: A10). (1) Dr David Chaisson reached a similar...
|
