Not only is he NOT locked up and behind bars, but he's visiting our high schools and influencing our children? Unreal.
If you ask me, "Doctor" Charles Smith is about as big of a fraudster as they come, bilking the Canadian government (in a round about way) of millions of dollars, yet he's free as a bird and seemingly rubbing it all in our faces.
Officials at an Ontario school have launched an investigation into how it came to be that a deceiving "pathologist" was invited to give a guest lecture last week at a local high school. Unless the topic was 'how to pull a fast one and earn big bucks in the process,' I'm thinking he definitely shouldn't have been.
Smith's topic though was in fact, about coroners and their role in death inquests. But here's the crazy part...
Smith has had no formal training - and that's not the worst of it. From the 1980s to the 2000s, he acted as a leading Canadian expert in pediatric forensics. Despite having no formal accreditation or training, he was a star witness in pathology for the Crown in hundreds of cases involving suspicious child deaths, usually involving parents or caregivers. For 24 years, Smith worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. In the hospital's pediatric forensic pathology unit, he conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies. Yeesh...
But wait a minute... the plot thickens...
In 2007 some began to notice there were discrepancies and the Ontario chief coroner eventually launched a two-year probe into Smith's work. What he found was serious problems with 20 of the 44 autopsies the former doctor performed. Twelve of those cases had resulted in charges or convictions, with some people spending years in prison for assaults or murders they did not commit.
Wow.
To date, the Ontario Court of Appeal has overturned seven of the convictions connected to Smith's incorrect testimony. At least six others are still waiting to be heard by the courts. Also since that time, the Ontario provincial government has paid roughly $5.5 million in compensation to nearly 30 people wrongly charged or convicted based on Smith's faulty evidence.
Why has this guy not been charged for professional misconduct? Why, at the very least, is he not being made to repay all that he's costing Canadian taxpayers?
With people like this not being held accountable for their actions, it's no wonder our legal processes are often thought of as a joke.
