The ranks of the wrongly-convicted rose by another this morning, as a Ontario woman – Sherry Sherrett-Robinson – was acquitted of killing her baby boy a decade after she served eight months in jail for infanticide.

During a morning hearing in Toronto, court told Ms. Sherrett-Robinson it was “profoundly regrettable that through flaws pathological evidence, you were wrongly convicted.”

"The tragedy of this four-month old child's death is compounded by the fact that his mother was wrongly convicted of infanticide, served a year in jail, and she lost her other child." Mr. Justice Marc Rosenberg said, on behalf of Mr. Justice David Watt and Mr. Justice Paul Rouleau.

Earlier, Ms. Sherrett-Robinson sat in an Ontario Court of Appeal courtroom as Crown counsel Riun Shandler said that the case against the Belleville, Ont. mother of two was no longer sustainable in light of serious questions that erupted surrounding the work of pathologist Dr. Charles Smith.

“In absence of a clear cause of death and expert evidence...it is not in the interest of justice to maintain this conviction,” Mr. Shandler told the court. “Ms. Sherrett-Robinson is entitled to an acquittal.”

The case was one of almost two dozen that began to fray after Dr. Smith was shown to have routinely made errors in his observations and conclusions at the autopsies of children who had died under unusual circumstances.
The case was a particularly shocking example of Dr. Smith's error-prone ways.

Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted lawyer James Lockyer told the court that all four indications of a possible homicide – skull fractures, brain swelling, burst blood vessels and small, unexpected lacerations – were either routinely found in accidental asphyxiation cases or caused by Dr. Smith's autopsy techniques.

He said that two eminent pathologists – Michael Pollanen, chief pathologist at the Ontario Office of the Chief Coroner; and an Irish pathologist, Dr. Jack Crane – both concluded that Dr. Smith made grave errors that caused police and the Crown to pursue Ms. Sherrett-Robinson for the murder of her child.

He said that the reviewing pathologists pointed toward a distinct possibility that Joshua suffocated in his crib because her became tangled in bedclothes.

“Ms. Sherrett-Robinson had not only to take on the death of her baby, but all the shame and loathing of being a baby-killer,” Mr. Lockyer said. “Not only that, but she lost her first-born, Austin, and Austin lost his mother.”

Ms. Sherrett-Robinson was convicted in 1999 largely on the basis of Dr. Smith's damning evidence.

Ten years after Dr. Smith found signs consistent with homicide on the body of four-month-old Joshua Sherrett, the child's body was secretly exhumed and found to have no marks of violence.
What Dr. Smith took to be a skull fracture was apparently nothing more than a normal anatomical feature. Moreover, neck hemorrhages Dr. Smith had testified were cause for “consternation,” instead appear to have been caused by a scalpel used at the autopsy.

Dr. Smith's work had devastating consequences. Ms. Sherrett-Robinson, Joshua's mother, spent a year in prison. Her eldest child was seized by authorities and was adopted in 2000. Ms. Sherrett-Robinson is forbidden to see him until he is 18.
One of the most arrested aspects of Ms. Sherrett-Robinson's ordeal was that an innocent woman felt compelled to accept a one-year jail sentence to avoid ending up in prison for life.

Ms. Sherrett-Robinson was refused psychiatric treatment in jail because of her refusal to accept responsibility for her crime Ms. Sherrett-Robinson's criminal conviction was one of 20 that were thrown into serious doubt after a review of Dr. Smith's case by Ontario's Office of the Chief Coroner in 2006.

Arrested for first-degree murder a week after Joshua died, Ms. Sherrett-Robinson was committed for trial in 1998. Crown counsel Sheila Walsh noted that Ms. Sherrett-Robinson may have “smothered” her child while suffering postpartum depression, and offered to drop the charge to infanticide if Ms. Sherrett-Robinson agreed not to put up a defence.

Mr. Justice Richard G. Byers of the Superior Court of Ontario was emotional at Ms. Sherrett-Robinson's 1999 sentencing. “At the end of the day, only she knows why she did it – and she is not telling,” he said. “Instead, she denies her guilt and shows no remorse.

“Who speaks for Joshua? Is his life so unimportant that his mother – who killed him without explanation; without apparent remorse – should go free without punishment? What signal does this send to the accused; to this community? Well, I speak for him now. He was important. He was a human being. He was only four months old. And, madam, you killed him. In my book, that means you go to jail.”

On May 28, 2006, Dr. Pollanen, presided over Joshua's exhumation. He concluded that Joshua never had a skull fracture, and that Dr. Smith had mistaken a normal portion of skull anatomy – known as a cranial suture – for a fracture.
“In my opinion, there is no definitive cause of death,” Dr. Pollanen wrote. “Specifically, there is no positive evidence to support manual compression of the face or neck as the cause of death, since no injuries are present.”

Of the purported neck hemorrhages, Dr. Pollanen said: “In my opinion, there is no safe inference that can be made on these findings – i.e. these findings are not evidence of neck compression . . .There is no neck injury.”

A theory that Joshua died when his comforter became bunched around his head “readily explains death on an accidental basis,” Dr. Pollanen said.

“In fact, an unsafe sleeping environment is a well-known and well-recognized factor that contributes to infant deaths in Ontario each year.”