Marlys Edwardh is a legal giant.
At the moment, she is one of several lawyers from the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, a non-profit law organization well-known for its honourable work, arguing a fresh evidence application before the Ontario Court of Appeal on behalf of the convicted killer Steven Truscott.
Ms. Edwardh has earned a great list of honours, chief among them the G. Arthur Martin Criminal Justice Award, the Vox Libera Award for her commitment to the principles of free speech, and an honorary doctorate a few years ago from the Law Society of Upper Canada. She, like her long-time law partner, Clayton Ruby, has taken on some of the biggest and most important briefs of the day.
And now this woman with three decades of experience and a stellar reputation has decided, as an officer of the court, to raise concerns with the Law Society of Upper Canada about Sharon Shore -- a middle-aged student lawyer who hasn't yet been called to the bar.
Ms. Edwardh and Liz McIntyre, who not long ago represented two Hospital for Sick Children nurses Ruth Doerksen and Anagaile Soriano, have jointly launched a complaint against Mrs. Shore with the Law Society, questioning Mrs. Shore's character, her "governability" as a potential lawyer and her "fitness to practice."
I have copies of their lengthy letter, written by Ms. Edwardh and dated Dec. 9 last year, to the head of the Law Society's investigations department, and of Mrs. Shore's even longer answer to those allegations, dated March 5 of this year, four days after the Society faxed the complaint to her.
I should say off the top that I have written before about the case -- the 1998 death of Mrs. Shore's 10-year-old daughter Lisa at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, where she went for treatment of leg pain.
Lisa's death, which Mrs. Shore always believed was not a benign tragedy but rather the result of sloppy care, was the propellant that brought her into contact with the workings of various arms of the justice system and into Ms. Edwardh's orbit and that sent her at a relatively advanced age to law school.
Though she is not a close friend, my admiration and affection for Mrs. Shore is no secret. I have enormous regard for the tooth-and-nail battle she waged to achieve a measure of accountability for her daughter's death, not to mention that during the protracted fight, despite the demands of a busy family (she and her husband Bill have two sons) and her active role in her late father's tax business, she managed to get into law school and graduate in the spring of last year.
It is a complicated case, and I don't want to bury you with detail.
Suffice to say that there was a plethora of proceedings -- first, a coroner's inquest; then charges of criminal negligence causing death laid against the two nurses; then the withdrawal of those charges, in some measure, admittedly, as a result of Mrs. Shore's own conduct, and always in the background, on hold pending the results of other proceedings, Mrs. Shore's complaint against the nurses at the College of Nurses of Ontario.
That complaint was finally resolved in September of last year, when the nurses each pleaded guilty to a single count of professional misconduct for failing to properly assess and monitor the lovely little girl who had been their patient.
It was a plea bargain, and their sentences of a month's suspension were, themselves, immediately suspended, because, as the college's prosecutor Linda Rothstein said: Since they had been already extensively retrained, the public was protected.
But Ms. Rothstein was blunt. "Ruth Doerksen and Anagaile Soriano failed to do enough to adequately assess Lisa Shore," she said, "and failed to get her the help she needed" when there were "warning signs she was experiencing respiratory depression."
If the outcome wasn't what Mrs. Shore wanted, it nonetheless proved that for all those years when she was a lone voice in the wilderness, she was right: Those nurses had, indeed, failed her daughter and, by their guilty plea, they admitted it.
But some of Mrs. Shore's alleged actions resulted in Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre writing to the Law Society less than three months later.
There are four corners to the complaint she lodges -- two incidents where the lawyers say Mrs. Shore failed to disclose certain reports, one a handwriting analysis, the other a doctor's letter, that were germane to their defence of the nurses; Mrs. Shore's refusal to remove damning expert assessments of the nurses' conduct from the website she maintained, and her public comments, allegedly disparaging, about the College of Nurses' process.
Mrs. Shore thoroughly addresses each allegation.
She disputes that she withheld the handwriting analysis and, indeed, says she told the College once she had the exculpatory results, and says, in any event, this particular aspect of the charges was dropped early on.
She admits, and did so at the preliminary hearing before she was to take the witness stand, that she had in her grief and rage destroyed the letter from the doctor who believed Lisa's pain was psychological in nature and never told anyone about it, including the criminal prosecutor Hank Goody. So, late in the game, with the credibility of Mrs. Shore at issue and with other aspects of the case against the nurses collapsing, Mr. Goody withdrew the charges.
Mrs. Shore admits she put the two expert reports on her website, but says Mr. Goody allowed her to have copies since all legal proceedings were over, and that no restrictions were placed on their use. Both experts, incidentally, concluded that, as one of them put it, "if not for failures to act, omissions and commissions" of the two nurses, "Lisa Shore would be alive today."
Finally, Mrs. Shore admits being critical of the College after the nurses' hearing, but questions how that can be said to raise doubts about her character or fitness as a lawyer.
"Rather, I would submit that it represents, broadly speaking, the highest ideals of the legal profession -- a refusal to be intimidated by other counsel, a willingness to speak out when the lawyer feels that an injustice has occurred, and the qualified criticism of regulatory organizations that do not appear to be fulfilling their mandate to the public."
I would have thought so too. God knows, I have seen defence lawyers blast the system, play fast and loose with the rules, skate to the very edge of being cited for contempt. I've seen them stage press conferences on courthouse steps; I've had them slip me documents if it is useful to their clients. The very nature of their game is robust advocacy and Mrs. Shore was a very robust advocate long before she studied a single word of the law.
But there are limits, I guess, and the question for the Law Society is whether Mrs. Shore has stepped over the line.
The Law Society is now investigating the complaint. Mrs. Shore is scheduled to be called to the bar next month.
