Woman Acquitted In Infant Son’s Death
Posted December 7, 2009 6:56 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
More than a decade after she was convicted for killing her infant son based on evidence from a now disgraced pathologist, the Ontario Court of Appeal exonerated Sherry Sherret-Robinson.
“The appellant’s conviction was wrong and she was the victim of a miscarriage of justice,” the three-judge panel said Monday.
Sherret-Robinson was found guilty of infanticide in 1996. Dr. Charles Smith testified that four-month-old Joshua died of asphyxia and that his death was suspicious due to a skull fracture and neck hemorrhages. As a result of her conviction Sherret-Robinson’s older son was taken away from her and adopted.
“It lifted a huge weight off my shoulders,” Sherret-Robinson said outside court.
“To be able to know that it’s actually been acknowledged, that I don’t have to continue to say, ‘I didn’t do anything,’ it just meant a lot.”
A public inquiry into Smith’s practices took place in 2007-08 after an investigation found he made questionable conclusions of foul play and homicide in 13 cases. Those incorrect conclusions led to another wrongful conviction. William Mullins-Johnson was acquitted in 2007, 13 years after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting and strangling his four-year-old niece.
Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Pollanen, and other experts, re-examined the evidence in Sherret-Robinson’s case and found the infant had no skull fracture. They also found the neck hemorrhages were caused by Smith himself during the autopsy and concluded there’s no evidence to support Smith’s claims that the woman intentionally smothered or suffocated her child.
Pollanen said it looks as though the child suffocated due to unsafe sleeping conditions.
Sherret-Robinson said in an affidavit that she wondered if she placed too much bedding in her son’s crib the night he died and now will have to live with the fact that that likely caused his death.
With files from the Canadian Press
