Oft-delayed Ashley Smith coroner’s inquest now delayed until September
Posted June 21, 2011 5:14 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A coroner’s inquest into the death of a young woman in an Ontario prison that heard just three days of evidence before being adjourned indefinitely last month has now been delayed until September.
Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old from Moncton, N.B., choked herself to death in an Ontario prison in 2007.
The coroner’s inquest into her death started on May 16, but after the coroner’s jury sat for three days and three other days were taken up with procedural wrangling, coroner Dr. Bonita Porter announced the inquest would adjourn, though she set no return date.
The coroner’s office said the delay was for Porter to take time to consider a couple of motions, which the office now says she will rule on next week.
But a spokeswoman says the inquest itself — which was originally scheduled to sit for May and June before a two-month summer break — won’t resume until Sept. 12.
Porter summoned the many lawyers involved to the coroner’s courts Tuesday to discuss an idea to webcast the proceedings when they resume. No concerns about webcasting were raised, the spokeswoman Cheryl Mahr said.
Since the inquest began, and for months prior, lawyers for advocates and the Smith family have spent much time pressing Porter to make the inquest more open and accessible to the public.
The inquest was adjourned indefinitely on May 25 for Porter to consider a couple of motions, including a request from the Correctional Service of Canada for guards’ faces to be blurred in videos.
It’s Correctional Service of Canada policy for staff to videotape, whenever possible, such use-of-force incidents. Five such videos have already been released to the media and some of the images have been published.
Porter is also considering a court ruling that ordered her to take another approach when deciding whether the inquest should include videos from a Quebec prison that Smith’s family says depict her being restrained and forcibly injected with medication.
The rulings on those two motions are what Porter announced she will release next week.
At the start of the inquest, it was estimated that hearing all the evidence could take six to nine months. It’s likely that the inquest, which wasn’t sitting on Fridays, will continue into 2012.
The troubled young woman had been in and out of custody since 2003, with most of that time spent in segregation. She was in federal custody for the last 11 months of her life and during that time was transferred between facilities 17 times.
Smith frequently tied various material around her neck and sometimes banged her head or cut herself, but the troubled youth said she wasn’t trying to hurt herself, the inquest heard.
After being kept in near-constant isolation through much of her teenage years — spent in and out of jails, youth centres and mental health facilities — she did it for the stimulation, the inquest heard.
Smith’s sentence had ballooned from days to years as time was added for numerous in-custody incidents.
