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Tammy Marquardt A Look At Her Wrongful Conviction

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Tammy Marquardt A Look At Her Wrongful Conviction

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A news video on the man who put Tammy behind bars for years along with many other.

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Article from the Toronto Star on the charges against Tammy being dropped and her being released.

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The language of justice is often eloquent, but rarely includes the words "we're sorry."

That was true even on Tuesday when the Crown withdrew a murder charge against Tammy Marquardt and a judge offered some measured and sensitive remarks.

"Ms. Marquardt, nothing I can say to you today will repair the damage that has been caused to you," Justice Michael Brown told her.

"I can't imagine what it must have been like for you to have had to bear the burden of not only losing your child, Kenneth, but also to have had to deal with being convicted of killing your son, and spending 13 years in prison as a result."

Outside the courtroom, Marquardt, 38, fell into the arms of supporters.

"Honestly, I never thought I would see this day," she said. "I. Am. Free. Now Kenneth can rest in peace."

Marquart, 38, was convicted by a jury in 1995 after now-discredited pathologist Charles Smith testified Kenneth, 2, died as a result of being strangled or suffocated.

When the case was re-examined in 2005 as part of a review ordered by the Office of the Chief Coroner, Smith's conclusions were found unscientific and flawed.

Fresh evidence points to Kenneth, an epileptic who was treated eight times for seizures, suffering a sudden, unexplained death as a result of his condition.

The Ontario Court of Appeal quashed Marquardt's conviction in February and ordered a new trial, but Crown Counsel Greg O'Driscoll announced Tuesday he would not be proceeding.

After formally recording the charge as withdrawn, Brown addressed Marquardt at length. Offering his "deepest expression of regret," he noted it was "tragic" it took so long to uncover Smith's mistakes and wished Marquardt "the very best" for the future, adding he fervently hopes she can "pick up the pieces" of her life.

Was it enough?

Marquardt's lawyer, James Lockyer, admits he would like a more direct acknowledgment of wrongdoing in these cases, particularly from the attorney general's ministry. In at least 20 cases, parents were sent to jail as a result of Smith's mistakes.

It's ironic the government seems reluctant to apologize plainly and directly and to utter the word "sorry," considering it passed an "Apologies Act" two years ago so wrongdoers could admit their mistakes without legal liability, he said.

Eva Marszewski, the founder of Peacebuilders International (Canada), an award-winning charity that runs restorative justice circles for young offenders and teaches conflict reduction, said the intentions of the person delivering an apology are "a big part" of how it is perceived.

No matter what words are used, the recipient of an apology is more likely to come away feeling good about it if they believe the person apologizing is sincere and feels badly, said Marszewski, describing the issue as "complex."

"I understand where Lockyer is coming from," she said. "These are such extreme cases of . . . wrongdoing. Very few things are worse than having someone spend time in jail wrongly."

Marquardt said hearing the words "we're sorry" could add another dimension to an apology because it would show the system accepting blame, rather than only acknowledging what she's been through. But for her personally, those two words wouldn't make much difference, she said.

"Truthfully, to me they're just empty words."

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Murder charges withdrawn against mother wrongfully convicted of killing son, 2 | Toronto Star

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The language of justice is often eloquent, but rarely includes the words "we're sorry." That was true even on Tuesday when the Crown withdrew a murder charge against Tammy Marquardt and a judge offered some measured and sensitive remarks.

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Tammy's life story told on video, a look inside her life.

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The Wrongfully Convicted and the Case of Tammy Marquardt

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This video has been completed for the final project in Sociology 3312; Wrongfully Convicted Dec. 1, 2016 Photos, videos and sound effects are not mine.

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Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. information on Tammy Marquart and her life, prison time and release.

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Introduction
Tammy Marquardt (née Wynne) was born in Toronto, Ontario. Her father was Anishinabe and her mother of European descent. Tammy was raised by her mother and, as a teen, suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. She left home when she was 17 years old.

In the summer of 1990, Tammy and her boyfriend, Robert Nelson, were expecting a child. Tammy's relationship with Robert was not to last, but on May 18, 1991, their child, Kenneth Wynne, was born. Tammy was just 19 years old.

Two months before Kenneth's second birthday, Tammy married Rick Marquardt. Sadly, like several other men in Tammy's life, Rick was abusive to both Tammy and her baby. Tammy had frequent contact with the Children's Aid Society and, while Kenneth was never taken from her, she willingly put him into care for three months in order to protect him when she felt that their living situation was untenable.

Kenneth suffered from a number of serious health issues including asthma, pneumonia and epilepsy. The latter condition caused frequent and extremely severe seizures which saw Kenneth hospitalized several times over the course of his short life.
Kenneth's Death and Autopsy
On the afternoon of October 9, 1993, Tammy went to check on Kenneth - then 2 ½ years old - who was napping on the bed in their spare bedroom. She thought she had heard him calling her. When she got to the bedroom, she found the baby tangled in sheets, gasping for breath and in obvious distress. She tried, unsuccessfully, to free him, before calling for an ambulance. The 911 operator instructed her to perform CPR, but she was unable to calm herself sufficiently to follow the instructions. The emergency crews arrived and took Kenneth to hospital, where he was revived; but tragically, the doctors determined that he had suffered irreparable brain damage. Three days later, Kenneth was taken off life support and passed away. Tammy gave permission for his viable organs to be harvested for donation, as she hoped her that her tragedy could prevent other parents from suffering a similar loss.

In 1993, Charles Smith was considered to be the leading expert in Canada on criminally suspicious pediatric deaths. He was the Director of the Ontario Pediatric Forensic Pathology Unit at SickKids Hospital in Toronto, and frequently lectured on pediatric forensic pathology to Crown counsel, police officers and coroners. He was tasked with performing Kenneth's autopsy. Smith concluded that Kenneth's death was not accidental and, on November 23, 1993 - less than two months after losing Kenneth - Tammy was charged and arrested for the second degree murder of her son.
Tammy's Trial
Tammy was tried by judge and jury in Whitby, Ontario. Smith insisted that the cause of death was asphyxia, and surmised that Kenneth's death was caused by strangulation or smothering. Smith's testimony was central to the prosecution's theory that Tammy had suffocated her son in a moment of frustration. In the eyes of the Crown, Tammy was a young mother with limited financial resources, parenting and coping skills, who was involved in an unstable relationship with Kenneth's step-father, Rick. Smith pointed to petechial haemorrhages - small red spots on the organs and tissues that had not been donated - as proof of this theory. The Crown further relied on the testimony of several Children's Aid workers to lend circumstantial support to Smith's conclusion.

Tammy testified in her own defence and insisted that she was innocent, a position she unwaveringly maintained throughout her ordeal. The defence argued that Kenneth had died during an epileptic seizure, but they called no medical expert of their own to support this theory. Perhaps not surprisingly, the jury accepted the Crown's theory and, on October 24, 1995, Tammy was convicted of Kenneth's murder. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 10 years.

Tammy appealed her conviction to the Ontario Court of Appeal. On January 22, 1998, her appeal was dismissed by a unanimous court. Since Legal Aid Ontario refused to provide her with further funding, she was not able to make an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Having lost her son and her case, Tammy languished in prison.
AIDWYC and Tammy's Exoneration
As early as 1991, concerns were voiced in regards to Smith's professional competence. That year, trial judge Justice Dunn acquitted a 12-year-old girl who had been charged with manslaughter following the death of the 16-month-old child she was babysitting. Justice Dunn was critical of Smith's evidence, methodology and conclusion. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Smith continued to garner negative attention - though given what is now known about Smith's reign of terror during these years, in retrospect the complaints were relatively few and far between.

In February 2003, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) wrote to the Crown Law Office Criminal (of Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney General), requesting the release of autopsy materials from another of Smith's patients for their work on the Bill Mullins-Johnson case. AIDWYC soon grew suspicious of Smith's conclusions in other cases as well. In 2004, Tammy applied to AIDWYC for help with her case. In April 2005, AIDWYC wrote to Dr. Barry McLellan (then the Chief Coroner for Ontario) and Michael Bryant (then the Attorney General), urging a full public inquiry into Smith's work.[1]

On June 7, 2005, Dr. McLellan announced in a press release that a formal review would be conducted of criminally suspicious child deaths for which Smith had performed the autopsy. By this time, Tammy had spent over a decade in prison. As part of the Chief Coroner's Review - the precursor to the later and broader Inquiry into Pediatric Forensic Pathology in Ontario, commonly referred to as the Goudge Inquiry - Dr. Pekka Saukko, a Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Turku, Finland, was assigned to review Kenneth's case.

In his October 2007 report to the Chief Coroner, Dr. Saukko concluded that Smith's finding of asphyxia was "illogical and completely against scientific evidence-based reasoning." He found that "[t]here is not sufficient evidence for the diagnosis of asphyxia to be made. It cannot be based only on petechial hemorrhages [the "red spots"] of thymus, pulmonary pleura and epicardium which are non-specific findings. The cause of death should be given as unascertained." Later at the Goudge Inquiry, Dr. Saukko testified that the evidence that Smith had given at Tammy's preliminary inquiry and trial was unprofessional and misleading.

In 2008, Dr. Simon Avis, the Chief Medical Examiner for the Province of Newfoundland, conducted a second comprehensive review of the medical evidence and circumstances surrounding Kenneth's death. In his report, Dr. Avis agreed that Smith had wrongly attributed Kenneth's death to homicidal asphyxia, and concluded that Kenneth may have died during an epileptic seizure or from other natural causes. While Smith stated that the harvesting of several of Kenneth's organs prior to autopsy was merely a "minor inconvenience," both Dr. Avis and Dr. Saukko were critical of this fact.

On February 10, 2009, AIDWYC brought an application for leave to appeal Tammy's case to the Supreme Court of Canada, along with the necessary application for an extension of time to file said appeal. The following day, the request for an extension of time was granted and, on March 12, 2009, Tammy was released from the Grandview Penitentiary in Kitchener, Ontario, pending the decision on her application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. She had spent nearly 14 years in prison.[2]

On April 30, 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada issued an order remanding the case to the Court of Appeal for Ontario for consideration of the fresh evidence and a determination of whether Tammy's conviction constituted a miscarriage of justice. This process took two years, but on June 7, 2011, the Ontario Court of Appeal quashed her conviction and ordered that a new trial commence on February 10, 2012.

Before the new trial could begin, however, the Crown withdrew the charges against Tammy. That decision was no doubt based on the fresh medical evidence provided by experts: the aforementioned Dr. Avis, and Dr. Christopher Milroy, an expert retained by the Crown. Both agreed that Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) could not be ruled out as the cause of death in Kenneth's case. Furthermore, Dr. Avis suggested two additional alternative natural causes for Kenneth's death, both well-known causes of sudden deaths in infants and children due to inborn errors of metabolism. These two alternative causes are known as medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (MCAD) deficiency and cardiac conduction defects.
The Causes of Tammy's Wrongful Conviction
Clearly, the overriding cause of Tammy's wrongful conviction was the evidence of Charles Smith. As Commissioner Goudge put it, Smith had "neither formal forensic pathology training nor board certification in that field." In short, he was a pediatric pathologist, not a forensic pathologist. In addition to being unqualified to do the autopsy work on which he spent so much time, Smith was a terrible expert witness. He consistently gave misleading statements and, at times, told outright lies on the witness stand. The reader is encouraged to view Commissioner Goudge's report in its entirety.[3]

If not for Charles Smith, it is unlikely that Tammy would have spent almost 14 years in prison for a "crime" that never happened. That said, there were other factors that contributed to her wrongful conviction. The jury heard a considerable amount of evidence regarding her demeanor at the hospital, Kenneth's funeral and upon her arrest. If this unreliable evidence were led at a trial today, it would likely be ruled inadmissible. While the trial judge instructed the jury not to place any weight on this evidence concerning the appropriateness of Tammy's emotional reaction, the fact is that they heard countless witnesses recount and opine on how an innocent, grieving mother should react to losing a child. Further, the fact that the defence did not call its own medical expert to testify at trial in support of their theory that Kenneth had died as a result of an epileptic seizure was problematic. Legal Aid Ontario's refusal to fund an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada also cannot be ignored.
The Wounds AIDWYC Cannot Heal
Tammy's wrongful conviction - like all wrongful convictions - had multiple causes. Most people cannot imagine the pain not only of losing a child, but also of having that pain unbearably compounded by an arrest, trial and wrongful conviction for his murder. Tammy experienced it all and spent 13 years in prison for a crime that did not happen. Though nothing can bring Kenneth back or restore the years that Tammy lost, AIDWYC fought for Tammy - as it does for all of its clients - and the truth of her innocence was revealed.

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Introduction Tammy Marquardt (née Wynne) was born in Toronto, Ontario. Her father was Anishinabe and her mother of European descent. Tammy was raised by her mother and, as a teen, suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. She left home when she was 17 years old.

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Article about Tammy.

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John Chipman's book Death in the Family delves into the lives of four of the families devastated by a child's death and then victimized by Dr. Charles Smith, Ontario's top pediatric forensic pathologist. Years later Smith would be found guilty of professional misconduct.
Scarborough native Tammy Marquardt spent 13 years in prison for murdering her 2-year-old son, Kenneth Wynne. She lost another son to adoption through Children's Aid, then entered prison pregnant. Her conviction in October 1995 was quashed in 2011 because it relied on flawed testimony from Smith that pointed to asphyxiation. A new trial was ordered, but the Crown withdrew charges.
Tammy and the other new prisoners were first taken to Admissions and Discharge. Everyone was strip-searched, then given their prison kit: two pairs of sweatpants, two sweaters, two T-shirts, five pairs of underwear, five pairs of socks, two bras, four towels, four facecloths, two sheets, one pillow, one pillowcase, a blue blanket and some basic toiletries and personal hygiene products. All of her worldly belongings could now fit inside a pillowcase.

After intake, the new inmates were taken to see the OIC, or the officer-in-charge, and he had some words of advice for Tammy. "If you want that child to live," he said, pointing to her stomach, "you don't tell anyone what you're in here for."

It had never occurred to Tammy that none of the other inmates would know what she was in for. She asked McGinnis what she should say if people asked.

"Tell them you killed your husband," he said.

It was good advice, crucial advice; advice he didn't have to give her. She was never sure whether he told her for her baby's sake, for her own safety or to save himself the trouble of dealing with the aftermath if an inmate tried to beat her to death.

P4W was a multi-security prison, since at the time it was the only women's penal institution in the country. The prison was made up of two ranges, called A and B, a segregation unit and a separate area called the Wing. New inmates - the "fresh fish" - were housed in A range; B range was for the troublemakers, the inmates who liked to start fights and otherwise stir up trouble.

Protective custody was in the segregation unit; it was for the baby killers and "goofs" - the pedophiles. The protective custody-special needs unit housed the mentally unstable. The Wing - split into North and South sections - was for minimum-security inmates, or lifers. Inmates were given slightly more freedom down on the Wing, where the cells looked a bit more like rooms than concrete boxes. The Wing was the carrot; if you behaved yourself, that's where they'd put you.

Charles Smith on his last day of testimony at the Pediatric Forensic Pathology Inquiry, known as the Goudge Indquiry, in 2008. It followed a review that found mistakes in 20 child-death investigations. (Aaron Lynett)

Tammy started out double-bunked on A range. A and B ranges were long, two-tier corridors that ran parallel to each other. Though the walls were concrete, sound travelled through them as if they were paper. Each range housed more than 50 cells, tiny boxes that barely measured nine feet by six. Jammed inside each was a metal bunk bed with mattresses that weren't much thicker than a folded-up blanket. There was a tall cabinet for personal belongings, a metal desk, a metal drawer, a sink on one wall. The toilet was mounted on the back wall, behind the bed.

It was such a tight squeeze that the front of the toilet was under the lip of the bed, making it almost impossible to sit on the toilet properly. You had to either sit sideways or straddle the toilet and then carefully slide your feet under the bed frame and your knees up against it in order to sit down. Tammy was barely five feet tall and 85 pounds and even she couldn't sit on it properly.

And there was no hope of privacy. Prisoners were allowed to hang a blanket across the metal bars of their cells, but the door itself always had to be kept clear. Inmates and guards, female and male, could see inside as a prisoner squatted in the back corner.

And then there was her roommate. Tammy would be sharing the tiny cell with another pregnant inmate. When she couldn't hold it any longer, Tammy would have to s--- in the open cell with her roommate within arm's reach.

But that indignity didn't last long. Lifers weren't supposed to be double-bunked. At her first meal that evening, Tammy met the chair of the lifers group, who immediately started petitioning for her to move down to the Wing, where living conditions were more passable. The cells there had locks on the inside. The guards could still open them, but it gave the inmates some privacy from other inmates. Tammy was transferred down to the Wing after a month.

She'd been living on the Wing just a couple of weeks when another lifer called her into her cell. Her name was Agatha, and she was pushing 70, Tammy figured. She was a nice woman who'd taken Tammy under her wing. Agatha reminded her of Tweety Bird's Granny: matronly, but fierce when someone she cared for came under threat.

Agatha asked Tammy if she watched the news. Tammy shook her head. Agatha said she'd seen a story that she thought might be about Tammy, and asked her point-blank what she was really in for.

Tammy started to sob. She hadn't meant to lie, she admitted, but she'd been warned she'd have to if she wanted her baby to live. Agatha only cared what Tammy had been convicted of.

"They said I killed my son."

Death in the Family tells four stories, from child's death through to forensic analysis to the legal system and finally the inquest into Dr. Charles Smith.

Agatha said she would get the guards to move Tammy into protective custody, or PC, a separate unit that was a sort of prison within the prison, meant for inmates who couldn't live in the general population because their crimes made them targets - crimes like killing your child.

As if on cue, inmates began banging on Agatha's cell door, screaming obscenities. "Get that f---ing baby killer out of here!" "She's just having that kid so she can kill another one!" "We're going to f---ing kill her! We're going to torture her!" "Let her out, you bitch! You're harbouring a baby killer!"

The screaming continued for several minutes; it felt like hours to Tammy, cowering in the cell while inmates pounded on the bars and threatened to beat her to death. Prison guards finally arrived to clear the hallway and take Tammy away. They took her first to segregation. She was strip-searched again, and that's when she realized she was covered in blood. The baby was in distress.

The guards rushed her to the health-care unit, which then rushed her to Kingston General Hospital. There, the obstetrician gave her a quick examination and an ultrasound. The baby was fine, she said. No need to worry, just some spot bleeding.

Back at the prison, Tammy was returned to segregation. Her bleeding slowed but didn't stop. After a couple of days, she was transferred to the protective custody unit. This was actually two units: protective custody, and protective custody-special needs. Tammy ended up in the special needs unit at first. The cell was just outside the guards' office, and she was under constant supervision. She wasn't allowed out except to shower. She was then moved to protective custody.

It would be her home for the rest of her time at P4W, locked away from the other inmates for her own protection.

"Basically, you had a price on your head [in protective custody]. You were targeted the second you walked in there," Tammy recalled years later.

She would be living alongside baby killers and pedophiles, the mentally unhinged and "psychos." She'd be living in the same unit as Karla Homolka.

Tammy remembers watching Homolka bounce down the stairs, her hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail. She reminded Tammy of Marsha from The Brady Bunch.

"Hi, I'm Karla," a bubbly Homolka said outside Tammy's cell. "If you need anything, just holler up and I'll get it for you."

Tammy only nodded. She couldn't bring herself to respond.

They didn't become friends. Tammy kept her distance, and the serial killer didn't push it. But some interactions were unavoidable. Karla was the prisoner representative for the protective custody unit. Any complaints Tammy had about life in PC needed to be funnelled through Karla, who would bring them to the inmate committee and eventually the prison administration. So although some conversation was inevitable, Tammy said she did her best to keep it to a minimum.

Despite the close quarters, there weren't that many opportunities to interact anyway. There were no shared meals in a mess hall. In PC, inmates ate their meals alone, locked in their cells. The unit was on almost constant lockdown, not because of disruptions there but because both of the two PC guards needed to be present if the cells were to be left open. But one of the guards was frequently called away to help quell disruptions in other parts of the prison, leaving only one on duty - and leaving everyone locked in their cells.

Teresa and Lauralie were the only other women in protective custody. Tammy wasn't sure what they were in for, but the talk among inmates was that they had killed their children. Lauralie was tight with Karla, at least when Karla was within earshot. Otherwise Lauralie would complain that she couldn't stand her. Teresa was large, aggressive and moody.

They had occasional access to the adjacent protective custody-special needs unit as well, but it wasn't a place you'd want to visit. That's where the mentally unstable prisoners were housed, the ones who likely should have been in a hospital rather than a prison. They wailed and screamed, banged their heads against the metal bars of their cell doors. Several tried to kill themselves. One woman threw her own feces at other inmates if they got too close to her cell.

And that was Tammy's world: two alleged child killers, Karla Homolka and a ward full of the mentally unhinged.

Author John Chipman.

Moving around the prison was a problem. P4W was a violent, dangerous place - especially for convicted child killers. But Tammy needed to get around - she was pregnant. She had regular pre-natal appointments in the health clinic, plus she had prison-mandated sessions with a psychologist. But getting from her cell to her appointments could be dangerous.

As a convicted child killer, Tammy was always escorted by a prison guard, who would take her down to a basement tunnel to move her about the prison. "The tunnel was the danger zone," Tammy explained years later. "There were little hidden corners, little breaks in the walls. I had coffee thrown at me. I had shoes thrown at me. I had bodily fluids thrown at me.

"I had one girl come up behind us and hit me with her coffee cup."

There was a blind corner at the end of the tunnel. The lighting was poor, the shadows were long, and you had no idea who was waiting around the corner. And sometimes Tammy's escort turned away.

"That was the extreme danger zone," she said. "That's where I got jumped more times than I care to remember. The guard would just walk away or turn around." One time, four women were waiting for Tammy. At first she fought back, but she soon realized it was pointless - it was far from a fair fight. So Tammy learned to go down quickly, turtling on the floor, her arms protecting her head, her legs pulled up tightly to protect her abdomen as a torrent of fists and feet pounded her.

"It was only after I was down on the ground that I guess the guard figured, 'That's enough. Don't actually kill her.' Then she would step in."

Eric Anthony Steven Marquardt was born on June 20, 1996, at Kingston General Hospital. Tammy gave birth in shackles and handcuffs. The prison guards refused to take them off because she was a maximum-security prisoner. As well, Tammy was appealing her conviction, which made her a flight risk.

The restraints meant she couldn't get her feet into the stirrups for the birth. She pulled her feet up and in, pushing her knees out to the side, her legs contorted into a diamond shape. The obstetrician draped a blanket over her legs and did the best he could. Labour lasted a day and a half.

After the birth, the guards undid her handcuffs so she could hold her newborn. But they kept the shackles on and chained one arm to the wheelchair. She did her best to breathe in her son, to memorize the lines and creases of his face. Then the social workers bundled Eric up and took him away. Tammy shuffled into the prison transfer wagon and headed back to P4W.
Excerpted from Death in the Family by John Chipman. Copyright © 2017 by John Chipman. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved. Correction - February 21, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Barry McGinnis was the officer-in-charge (OIC) at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in 1996 when Tammy Marquardt began serving a life sentence for murdering her 2-year-old son. In fact, McGinnis was not working at the prison at that time and was not the guard who pointed at Marquardt's stomach and said, "If you want that child to live, you don't tell anyone what you're in here for."
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Falsely convicted, in maximum security and pregnant | Toronto Star

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John Chipman's book Death in the Family delves into the lives of four of the families devastated by a child's death and then victimized by Dr. Charles Smith, Ontario's top pediatric forensic pathologist. Years later Smith would be found guilty of professional misconduct.

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A video taken outside the courthouse they day Tammy was fully acquitted of all charges.

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Murder charges dropped against Oshawa mother, Tammy Marquardt

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Our Case study assignment by Rebecca, Lindsay and Chelsea

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Tammy now lives in Toronto with her daughter Tiffany, her fiance Rick Hanley, his teenage daughter and his mother.

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Tammy's name was finally cleared on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011. The judge said that he hopes she can now move forward with her life, which now includes her daughter. Tammy was also seen saying to the media "I'm finally free".

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Tammy received a $250,000 compensation for her wrongful conviction. Tammy always claimed her innocence throughout her entire time behind bars.

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Prior to being put in prison she lost one of her sons to  Children's Aid Society, and gave birth to two more sons while in prison who were taken by Children's Aid Society. Both boys,  Eric and Keith, had different fathers but were adopted by the same family,  asper Tammy's request.

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Tammy was in prison due to Smith's autopsy report.

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Tammy was in prison due to Smith's autopsy report.

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Tammy was released due to the findings of the  investigation into Charles Smith. Had it not been for his incorrect testimony and autopsy findings, it is likely that Tammy would have not spent 14 years behind bars.

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After her release from prison.

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This is Kennth Wynne, who passed away two months shy of his 2nd birthday.

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Being of European decent on her mother's side and Anishinabe on her father's side, she was first nations. Tammy was raised by her mother, and suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. Eventually, Tammy moved out at 17 years old.

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In 1990, Tammy and Robert Nelson were expecting their first child, even though their relationship was not going to last. Tammy gave birth at the age of 19 to their child Kenneth Wynne. Tammy and her boyfriend were living in an Oshawa apartment.

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On October 9th, 1993, Tammy found her son, two year old Kenneth, tangled in his sheets gasping for breath and in distress. She called 911, but was so distraught she was unable to perform CPR. Once at the hospital, he was declared brain dead and three days later he was taken off life support. Tammy made the decision to donate his organs to help those who needed them.

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In 1993, Charles Smith was an expert on criminally suspicious pediatric deaths. Smith who performed the autopsy concluded that Kenneth's death was not an accident and on November 23rd, 1993 Tammy was arrested and charged with the second degree murder of her son.

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At the trial of Tammy, Smith insisted that Kenneth had died due to asphyxia. The crown then argued the fact that since Tammy was a young mother and was in an unstable relationship she had strangled/smothered Kenneth as she could not handle the stress. The defense argued that Kenneth had died from an epileptic seizure, however, they never had anyone take the stand to clarify this. In the end, Tammy was charged with second degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the eligibility for parole for 10 years.

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Tammy appealed her conviction stating her innocence. However, on January 22nd, 1998 it was dismissed.

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Tammy wrote to AIDWYC in 2003 to help with her case. The AIDWYC requested a full public inquiry into Smith's work.

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Investigation into the Death of Kenneth and Smith's work.

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Investigation into the Death of Kenneth and Smith's work.

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Throughout 2005-2009, the work of Smith was looked into and it was not until Dr. Avis concluded, that Smith's finding were wrong. The truth about Kenneth's death was revealed and his findings concluded that Kenneth did not die due to asphyxia.

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On March 12th, 2009, Tammy was granted release due to the AIDWYC appealing her conviction. At this point Tammy had already spent 14 years in the Grandview Penitentiary in Kitchener, Ontario.