Jury duty gives nurse a fresh perspective
Lessons learned from death of child used to help others
A simple summons for jury duty ended up putting Laura Jackson’s life on hold for five months.
The Toronto-born registered nurse was used to seeing things that would make most people shudder, but the trial that began in the fall of 2015 confronted Jackson with a story of unspeakable cruelty leading to the tragic death of a child, and made her reconsider the way her profession worked.
The inquest into the death of 7-year-old Katelynn Sampson made headlines for most of that winter. Seven years earlier, the girl had been reported dead at the home of her guardians, who said she’d choked while eating, but coroners discovered evidence of ferocious beatings, and the trial uncovered a tale of a child who had fallen through the cracks of a system that was supposed to protect her from the moment her mother Bernice, a crack addict, had given her up to the care of Donna Irving and Warren Johnson.
“Some things you never forget,” Jackson recalls, “like the evidence that the pathologist presented of Katelynn’s body. I will never forget that. She had long, beautiful hair before all this happened. How did she end up dead on the floor, shaved head, mutilated, beaten black and blue. For me, how did that happen?”
Jackson had just started a new job at the Mental Health and Addictions Service unit at St. Michael’s Hospital, after five years at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and her employers had tried to get her excused from the trial. When that became impossible, Jackson decided to turn her full attention to the case — a decision that became a terrible responsibility.
“It was enormous,” Jackson says. “There were about 400 exhibits and over 10,000 pages of disclosure that we were given. For me, once I was there, I knew I was there, and I wanted to do it right. I had the time to make sure that everything was taken in and trying to be as unbiased as possible. From a nursing perspective, of course, that shapes how you view things, and some of the recommendations came as an offshoot of that.”
The recommendations Jackson refers to were delivered by the jury at the end of the trial, a long list of findings centred around what became known as Katelynn’s Principle, which proposes a more “child-centred approach” to officials dealing with children in foster care and the child welfare system. It was written into Bill 57, a private member’s bill that’s waiting for its hearing at a standing committee in the Ontario legislature.
Jackson hadn’t imagined something like the Katelynn Sampson trial when she decided, as a girl, to follow her mother into nursing. She completed her undergraduate work at Ryerson University and her master’s degree at the University of Toronto, then worked at St. Mike’s for two years as a fresh grad before taking a job at CAMH. She was always idealistic about her profession, and saw her duties as “so many ways to give back.”
Her specialty in mental health care and addiction gave her a perspective not only on the life of Katelynn and her mother, but of the couple who took her into their home and, ultimately, ended the child’s life.
“There were so many factors in play,” Jackson says. “Not to excuse the criminality of it, but to understand the groups that were involved — people who are racialized, they’re experiencing poverty, intergenerational poverty from residential schools, mental illness and addictions. All of those factors clouded this whole thing.
“Maybe my education helped me to be able to tune into that. And also understanding how these things intersect, being involved in the criminal justice system, victims of violence — how do these things oppress people? It was my civic duty, but it was just by chance that I had RN behind my name.”
A year since the trial ended, Jackson has taken a personal interest in the verdict, and Katelynn’s Principle, in particular, corresponding with the office of Monique Taylor, the Hamil- ton MPP who introduced the bill. She has also tried to bring the lessons she learned during five months of jury duty to her job as a clinical leader and manager of her unit at St. Mike’s.
“I’ve been fortunate to share some of this with my teams,” Jackson says. “So, there’s an opportunity to help. I manage the in-patient mentalhealth program and the psychiatric emergency service. Understanding mental health and addictions played a huge factor in all of this. With treat- ment, things might have been different.”
Cases such as Katelynn Sampson’s are painful examples of failure, but Jackson thinks that lessons learned from them will strengthen new generations of nurses in their public duty. “A lot of nurses are going back to school to get their master’s, so the bar is raised even higher,” she says.
“They’re advancing the profession from an academic perspective, and it will be a positive thing to see more nurses in leadership positions, in and outside hospitals.”
Ultimately, Jackson says, it underlined the responsibility of anyone dealing with vulnerable children, from child-care workers to teachers to doctors and nurses, in the “duty to report” — a responsibility that can be overlooked or ignored.
“I think it’s about listening to the child, and understanding that they might not articulate their views verbally. They might even not be able to talk yet, but there are ways to solicit that. Really trying to support them, so their voices can be heard. They might not be able to talk, they might have a disability, but there is a way to get them involved in their care. I think that’s the crucial thing. That opportunity wasn’t provided to Katelynn, which is a crying shame.”