Ashley Smith jurors muzzled during mom’s testimony
‘Consensus among counsel’ to block questions is not normal at an inquest
If there is an upside to the lumbering beast that is the Ontario coroner’s inquest, it is that the process isn’t held hostage by the plethora of rules that govern the criminal courts.
Because the inquest is precluded from assigning blame, because no one is ever criminally charged as a result, because its purported “truth-seeking function” is so valued, hearsay evidence is acceptable, witnesses freely give their opinions — indeed, their opinions, in the form of the “recommendations” they may suggest, are outright solicited — and most brilliantly, the jurors can ask questions of their own.
At the inquest examining Ashley Smith’s Oct. 19, 2007, prison death, the five jurors have been particularly smart and engaged.
And so they were Thursday, when, with Coralee Smith in the stand and the pack of lawyers having finished, the jurors’ turn came.
They must have been bewildered by the spectacle they’d just seen — lawyer after lawyer rising to solemnly offer condolences to Smith, but most not asking a single question, and the few who did lobbing in beach balls.
This had not happened before in the six weeks of evidence the jury has heard.
The previous 16 witnesses, most of them correctional officers who were working at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont., the morning Ashley asphyxiated in her segregation cell, were grilled.
But that didn’t happen with Smith, and God knows by this time there were questions the size of low-flying meteors hanging in the air.
The COs had testified about their conversations and interactions with their troubled 19-year-old charge. Three said Ashley, who was three days old when she was adopted by Smith and her then-husband, had confided questions troubling her about her family.
Just the day before, Michelle Lombardo, the guard who preceded Smith to the stand, testified that Ashley told her “she had a brother, he was in prison. … Someone had disclosed that who she thought was her mother wasn’t her mother.”
Lombardo also said that once, during a discussion about her ultimately lethal habit of tying ligatures around her neck, Ashley told her that “her brother had taught her (how to tie up) and he was in jail.” CO Blaine Phibbs testified that, hours before she died, Ashley told him about “her confusion as to who was her biological mother, her confusion about her biological nephew, (that) her sister was her biological mother.
“But no one from the family would talk to her about it,” Phibbs said.
Now, there are two threads to the story emerging from the inquest.
The most important, of course, is Ashley’s horrific journey through the federal prison system.
But the second thread is this very strange girl herself, and what were the forces that made her. Was she rendered freakish by her years in isolation or were the seeds of her illness already there? Was she ill or acting out or both?
Ashley was so committed to tying up that she did it up to nine times a day. She was losing her vision; a permanent mark was developing on her neck; she had burst blood vessels in her face.
She used her body cavities, as Phibbs once said, as a suitcase.
She kept her ligatures in her vagina — once, when she underwent a body cavity search at hospital, doctors retrieved one 40-centimetre ligature and another long enough to tie around her substantial mid-section — and often took them out to wash in the mornings, in the sink in her cell, only to hide them again.
Smith testified that she knew nothing of Ashley’s bizarre ligature use, only that she didn’t do it before she went to youth jail in the family’s native New Brunswick.
In truth, she didn’t know Ashley the teenager very well: She had disappeared into the youth justice system at the age of 15, after all, and though Smith visited most weeks, these were constrained visits, with each trying to protect the other.
Her testimony naturally gave an idealized picture of Ashley as a child.
She was led through her evidence-in-chief by Marg Creal, one of two very capable coroner’s counsel, with exquisite care.
A couple of times, Creal inquired if Ashley had had questions about her background, but Smith firmly interpreted that as Ashley’s curiosity about her adoptive father, her ex-husband.
So, by the time the jurors’ turn came, the big fat questions were still hanging there, and to their credit, the jurors didn’t flinch.
Juror No. 4 went first. Clearly summoning up her courage, she said the jurors had heard evidence that there was “another family member in the system, who was also self-harming.”
“I know who you’re referring to,” Smith snapped, “and I think it’s very invasive of his privacy, and I really don’t think I should answer that.”
The coroner, Dr. John Carlisle, jumped in, saying “There are many facts you might want to know, but we shouldn’t ask Coralee about that.”
To my eyes, the juror looked as if she had been slapped.
Juror No. 3 was next.
She proceeded with great dexterity.
At the start of the inquest, she said, jurors were told “we’d be painting a large canvas with a very fine brush,” and as a result of some of the guards’ testimony, there was “a family piece that Ashley was confused about, or maybe she wasn’t.”
It would be helpful, the juror said, if Smith could fill in the blanks: Ashley was confused “about her nephew being her brother and her sister being her biological mother. … Is that true? Was she confused?”
Again, Dr. Carlisle jumped in. “What was in Ashley’s mind, what she knew, is relevant,” he said, “but the fact of it is not. We must not ask Coralee what the fact of that matter is.”
I’d never seen anything comparable happen — that jurors, the common-sense seekers of the truth, should be muzzled — at an inquest before.
Afterwards, I asked Creal about it, and suggested that it looked as though the silence on this issue, these questions, had been prearranged.
“There’s been a consensus, among counsel,” she said. “A consensus that it wasn’t relevant.”
How ironic that by the very way the matter was handled, by all the dancing and skating around it, the jurors got their answers after all.