Organ harvesting spoiled autopsy, pathologist testifies

KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE REPORTER

December 13, 2007

TORONTO -- Doctors at an Ontario hospital destroyed potentially valuable evidence by harvesting the organs of a two-year-old boy before he could be autopsied in 1993, the Goudge commission was told yesterday.

The child's mother was convicted of second-degree murder in his death two years afterward and remains behind bars serving a life sentence. A second child was seized from her by Children's Aid authorities.

One of 20 cases the Goudge commission is examining as part of its probe into irregularities in Ontario's coroner system, the woman's cause has been taken on by the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

At her trial, she maintained that she found her child in bed with sheets twisted around his neck, and that it took her 20 minutes to extricate him.

When the child - known as Kenneth - was taken off life support three days later, doctors at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children obtained permission from a local coroner to harvest his organs for transplantation, according to a background document filed with the commission.

Yesterday, Pekka Saukko, a Finnish forensic pathologist who examined the case closely as part of an international review panel, said that it was a grave mistake to take the organs of a child who died under suspicious circumstances. In a written report filed as evidence, Dr. Saukko wrote that removing and transplanting organs has the effect of "leaving more room for uncertainty and speculation, and diminishing the value of the autopsy.

"This is neither in the interest of the defendant or the general public," he wrote. "An objective and professional cause of death investigation is a prerequisite for a fair criminal investigation and trial, and is one of the cornerstones of trust in the judiciary."

Not only does organ harvesting eliminate potentially valuable evidence that could point toward an accidental or intentional cause of death, he said, but surgery to remove organs can easily cause tissue damage that may later be misinterpreted.

Dr. Saukko testified yesterday that this may very well have happened in the Kenneth case. He said that the pathologist who conducted the autopsy - Charles Smith - suspected that foul play could have caused tiny hemorrhages found on the child's upper body. In fact, Dr. Saukko testified, the organ-removal surgery may have caused the damage. Dr. Saukko also criticized Dr. Smith for not ordering toxicology tests on Kenneth, and for misidentifying his cause of death as asphyxia, without giving the actual mechanism that deprived the boy of oxygen.

"This testimony was very contradictory, unscientific and confusing," Dr. Saukko said in his report. "It is illogical and completely against scientific evidence-based reasoning to give any cause of death if there are several causes that cannot be reasonably ruled out. In such a case, the death has to be classified accordingly as 'unascertained.' "

Dr. Saukko also identified several irregularities in Dr. Smith's autopsy of a child who had apparently been killed by his mentally disturbed 25-year-old mother on May 23, 1993, while she was in the grip of an intense religious experience.

The woman had summoned 17 members of her extended family together for an all-night prayer session. One by one, she told them to leave, until she was left with her five-month-old son.

When police entered her home the next day, the baby was dead and his mother was bleeding from her mouth, in a semi-delirious state. The woman was holding a rosary in one hand and a piece of glass in the other, which she had used to slash her tongue in compliance with a delusion.

Dr. Smith determined the cause of death as asphyxia, caused by blunt trauma or compression of the chest and neck. Based in part on his opinion, police charged the mother with second-degree murder. She was initially found unfit to stand trial. The charge was reduced to infanticide, and she received a suspended sentence and three years probation.

Another member of the review panel - English forensic pathologist Helen Whitwell - testified yesterday that Dr. Smith's testimony in some of the cases she reviewed was "unscientific."

She said that he went overboard in testifying at a 1991 trial that there was "no possibility whatsoever" that a 16-month-old child could have fatally struck her head in a fall.

At another point in the trial, Dr. Smith testified that his own children fell down the stairs regularly, yet their injuries are trifling and require nothing more than "a little cuddling, a little loving, and kissing whatever part of my son or daughter's body may have been injured."

In a second case, the inquiry was told that he disparaged a defence pathologist as "a paid mouth."

"I don't know the legal system here, but I suspect that in England, that testimony wouldn't be allowed," Dr. Whitwell remarked.

Copyright © 2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.

This article posted January 19, 2008.