Video exclusion
Posted Mar 1, 2011 05:18:15 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The lawyer for Ashley Smith’s family is among those challenging a decision to exclude a video from April’s coroner’s inquest into the teen’s death at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women.
Julian Falconer says Ontario’s Deputy-Chief Coroner Dr. Bonita Porter has decided to exclude a video from the proceedings – a video he says shows Smith strapped to a stretcher for hours and forcefully injected with tranquilizers.
That video was from her time spent in an institution in Quebec and not Kitchener.
Still, Falconer tells the Toronto Star the decision “runs completely afoul of the fundamental purpose of an inquest to be a public process.”
Smith died in 2007 after choking to death on a piece of cloth in her prison cell.
The inquest will look at Smith’s time spent in custody, not only in Kitchener but across the country, and is aimed at coming up with recommendations to prevent similar deaths.
