MANDEL: Wrongly convicted of shaking her newborn to death, Ontario woman lost 'everything'
· Toronto Sun
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She is a monster no more.
When Jennifer Gaskin returned from the Ignace, Ont. funeral for her infant son Joeseph 27 years ago, child protection workers were waiting to take her baby daughter right out of her arms.
Charged in 2000 with second-degree murder on suspicion she’d shaken her newborn to death because she was frustrated by his crying, Gaskin was out on bail when she gave birth to another baby boy. She wasn’t even able to hold him before they took him away as well.
As Gaskin, 51, stood on the steps of the Court of Appeal on Tuesday morning, minutes after being acquitted of manslaughter, she was asked what she has lost since she was wrongly convicted more than two decades ago and labelled a monster for killing her own child.
“Everything,” she said simply. “I lost my other children when they were taken from me. I lost my son first of all and that I can never undo. No one can ever give me the time I lost with my daughter and my son. So yeah, everything.”
In 2002, a jury found Gaskin guilty of manslaughter after Crown evidence that 12-week-old Joeseph had been the victim of shaken baby syndrome. She was sentenced to two years less a day in jail — of which she served 18 long, terrifying months. She recalled the other inmates threw her a “blanket party” where they restrained her with a blanket over her head and took turns beating her.
Meanwhile, her two children were adopted out to two families in Dryden.
After her release, Gaskin went to live with her mom Barbara Levesque in Cornwall, and comforted only by family support and a usb with photos of her little girl before she was taken away, she tried to survive under the weight of being known as a convicted baby killer.
‘Branded as a killer’
“As I’ve always said, I did nothing to cause Joeseph’s death but I’ve been branded as a killer for all these years,” she wrote in an affidavit filed with the court. “I never struck Joeseph and I never shook him. I did nothing to cause his death. I never felt able to breath freely because everyone sees me as a monster.”
But no longer.
Flanked by her mom, who never doubted her, and her adult daughter, who she’d met in person only the day before, Gaskin sat sobbing in Ontario’s highest court as an emotional Justice Peter Lauwers agreed with both the Crown and the defence that the scientific theory that ruined her life has now been roundly discredited.
“This is another in the sad litany of cases of wrongful convictions based on the discredited “shaken baby syndrome” as the cause of a child’s death brought
about, in part, by unreliable expert evidence,” he declared. “Fresh evidence shows that Ms. Gaskin’s conviction is unsustainable. She is a victim of a miscarriage of justice.”
The judge then looked into her eyes.
“As this court has stated in similar cases, it bears repeating that it is profoundly regrettable that, because of what has been shown to be flawed pathological evidence, Ms. Gaskin was wrongly convicted.”
Three experts retained by her lawyer James Lockyer said the cause of death was undetermined and it was likely Joeseph, who had been born nine-weeks premature, died from sudden unexpected infant death rather than the unproven “hypothesis” of shaken baby syndrome.
‘Junk justice’
“It’s what I call junk science,” Lockyer said outside Ontario’s highest court.
A landmark New Jersey case last year found the theory of shaken baby syndrome was “scientifically unreliable” and Lockyer expects the Ontario decision could be as significant.
“It may be the beginning of the end, if not the end, of shaken baby syndrome in Ontario and potentially in Canada,” he said. “To refer to it as a discredited science is really a giant leap forward in the jurisprudence and will make our task easier for any other cases that we may have coming up.”
For Gaskin, her never-ending smile would not dim. She planned to spend the rest of the day getting to know her long-lost daughter. A reunion with her son is also being planned.
“When the judge looked at me and addressed me directly, I think that’s where everything kind of broke and this is real now. This is me now. And it feels wonderful.
“Now I’m just going to live my best life,” she vowed. “It’s awful that it took so long but you know what? The only quote I can think of is ‘Sometimes the best things take time’ and this is the best thing that could ever happen.”