Coroners, Death Inquests, DNA

Schools like to expose their young charges to all manner of interesting events that they might not normally have the opportunity to learn about. We do, after all, have an obligation to the young whose brains are so busy picking up knowledge and learning how and where they fit into the scheme of things. In high school teens are taken to see plays, they learn how to rappel with special equipment brought into their gyms, they sit in the school auditorium to listen to special guest speakers.

There's simply no end of innovative, fascinating events that education-enterprising teaching staff can come up with to motivate and interest those brains that sometimes seem immune to imbibing lessons. On the other hand, bring someone in who is knowledgeable, say about criminal activities, about forensic sciences, about court cases and procedures, about the law and medicine, and the creepy things that can happen to innocent people and you're guaranteed to get attention.

Sometimes the attention that becomes focused on such activities turns out to be more than the brainy school staff might have imagined they would attract. Like outraged victims of crime. Like truly annoyed parents wondering what kind of creative talent it is teaching their impressionable kids by inviting a known felon, a disgraced medical practitioner who managed despite his guilt in impersonating an expert pathologist and sending innocents for long agonized stays in prison wrongfully-charged thanks to Charles Smith's arrogant stupidity, to evade jail time.

Presumably he avoided studiously making any mention of his own larks as a knowledgeable pediatric forensics pathologist whose court testimony was responsible in sending parents and other family members to prison for deliberately taking the lives of innocent children. Except that the testimony was fabricated and bore no resemblance to reality. The outcome of which was that the innocent were found guilty, and Charles Smith has not paid the price.

Who, among the teaching staff at Prince Edward Collegiate Institute, the high school in Picton where former pathologist Charles Smith was cordially invited to speak on the inviting topic of coroners and their vital role in death inquests and DNA would have been so innocent of any knowledge of precisely whom it was he was inviting? Even students who came out to hear the hour-long talk at their grade 11 law class, might have been aware of just who this man was.

It just so happened that a woman, Sherry Sherret-Robinson who lives in Trenton, Ontario, heard of the incident. This is the very same Charles Smith who in his professional capacity as an expert in pediatric forensics gave testimony that sent her to prison fifteen years ago for the death of her infant son. To say that she was incredulous to learn of Charles Smith's address to high school students would be to under-stress her state of mind.

A piece of which she stands prepared to deliver up - hot or cold - to the eastern Ontario school board.