There was no curriculum vitae submitted when William Mullins-Johnson rose to
speak at a judicial inquiry this week, no list of credentials attesting to
his expertise, no list of professional awards, affiliations and
publications.

He is just a man, not a doctor.

Yet there was more grace, more wisdom, more humanity in a few moments by the
wrongfully convicted man, than in the days of testimony from the disgraced
pathologist whose errors helped put him in prison for 12 years for a murder
he did not commit.

Dissatisfied with the aimless apologies Smith had spoken all week, at the
inquiry probing his mistakes in 20 child-death cases that resulted in
parents or caregivers being wrongfully charged or convicted, the lawyer for
Mullins-Johnson asked the doctor to speak directly to his client.

In response to the pathologist's latest apology, Mullins-Johnson was as
blunt and forthright as Smith all week had not been.

Smith, he said, had stolen his freedom, destroyed his family relationships,
put him in a prison environment where, having been convicted of sodomizing
and killing his own 4-year-old niece, he feared every day for his life.
Still, Mullins-Johnson said he forgave Smith. He needed to, he said, for his
own well-being.

Resentments, the wronged man plainly knew, were too heavy a burden to carry.
The word comes, after all, from sentire, the Latin "to feel." Resentment
means to re-feel, to relive a terrible pain.

The wise come to know that resentment damages not the perpetrator of a
wrong, but the person who carries it. And that forgiveness is less for the
sake of the other, than to free one's self.

As Mullins-Johnson told Smith, forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting. It
doesn't mean absolving another of responsibility. It is the decision not to
let another's wrong, regardless of the harm and suffering it caused, to
define and control the rest of one's days.

Smith, it has been reported, is spiritual. But it took one of the people his
errors had profoundly harmed to provide the inquiry with its most
transcendent moment.

Through the week, for all Smith's utterings of apology and mewling
contrition, there seemed a disconnect between his words and what he appeared
to understand.

His words were pedantic, contorted and, as often as not, self-serving. The
greatest portion of his sorrow seemed reserved for himself – his
embarrassment, his being humbled. The more fulsome his apologies, the less
impact they seemed to have.

It was not clear, even in his exchange with Mullins-Johnson, that Smith
seemed to get it.

First, saying "I don't expect that you would forgive me," he still presumed
to know what was in another's heart. Worse, he still seemed to think
Mullins-Johnson's forgiveness was about him.

But Mullins-Johnson had made plain that he needed to relieve himself of the
self-destructive burden of grievance and resentment. He needed to be free of
Smith and what he had done.

In all, as the week wore on, a man once described as an icon in his field
seemed both pathetic in his demeanour and profoundly deluded as to the
avenging role he once assumed for himself.

Perhaps the most telling moment occurred early in the week, when Smith was
asked by commission counsel Linda Rothstein if he had felt a need to be
infallible.

It wasn't so much the answer – "I don't think I'd ever considered that" –
that spoke volumes.

It was the thunderous and eloquent silence of how long it took for Smith to
mull it over and reply.