TORONTO -- Stop the presses: As so often happens, the initial allegations were a whole lot worse -- heftier and more substantive sounding -- than the actual evidence bears out.
Why, when prominent Toronto lawyers Marlys Edwardh and Liz McIntyre first made their lengthy written complaint to the Law Society of Upper Canada against Sharon Shore, alleging she was unfit to be called to the bar, they painted her conduct as heinous, the law as the most noble of callings and themselves as its dutiful servants.
That was last December; my, how the landscape has changed.
A bit of background first. Sharon Shore is a 50-year-old student lawyer who went to law school as a mature student, with a distinguished career as a chartered accountant behind her, proceeded to win an academic award, pass the requisite exams with flying colours and complete her articling. She has been offered a job with a reputable firm. She was scheduled to be called to the bar last month.
Ms. Shore was also the mother of Lisa Shore, a lovely 10-year-old girl who in October of 1998 went to the Hospital for Sick Children with excruciating pain from a recently fractured leg and who died unexpectedly while under the care of two nurses who later became clients of Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre.
After a variety of legal proceedings, including at one point charges of criminal negligence causing death, the nurses last fall pleaded guilty at the College of Nurses of Ontario to a single count of professional misconduct for failing to properly assess and monitor the little girl, for which the nurses were assessed a month's suspension, which punishment was itself promptly suspended.
Some short time later, Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre filed their complaint against Ms. Shore, claiming that during criminal proceedings against their clients she had concealed or destroyed relevant evidence that exculpated the nurses, and was thus not of sufficient "good character" to be a member of their sterling profession.
As I said, things have changed since then.
For one thing, there were four corners to the lawyers' original complaint. Two of those allegations have been utterly taken off the table, Law Society prosecutor Sean Dewart said yesterday, because they "don't constitute evidence of bad character or misconduct." A third complaint is apparently destined for the same fate. As Mr. Dewart said of this one, "It is far from a foregone conclusion there's anything to it."
That leaves the panel now hearing the matter with the lone allegation to which Ms. Shore long ago voluntarily came forward to confess and which she carries to this day with palpable shame.
This was her failure to disclose a brief note from a Boston doctor that suggested Lisa's pain was in her head.
Ms. Shore first saw this note about a month after her daughter's death, and tossed it in her despair. More recently, as the preliminary hearing for the nurses' criminal trial loomed in the spring of 2003, she got another copy of Lisa's records, saw the note again, and once more tossed it, coming forward to the prosecutor only on the eve of her scheduled testimony at the hearing.
In significant measure because of the damage done to her credibility as the prosecution's star witness, the criminal charges against the nurses were withdrawn.
As serious as was her failure to disclose the doctor's note at the get-go, it is surely telling that Ms. Shore came forward on her own and made a clean breast of it -- even as she knew, as she said yesterday, "I had given a weapon of sorts to the defence to attack me."
As for the august profession that is the law, as Ms. Shore's lawyer Ben Zarnett noted yesterday in his opening salvo, "The following have been found to be of good character and admitted to the bar" -- people convicted and sentenced for perjury; people charged with forgery; people found to have sexually assaulted their colleagues in the workplace; people disciplined in other self-regulating professions who subsequently lied about it to the Law Society and people who, in one case for four long years, falsified their law school transcripts.
And that doesn't even count Sébastien Brousseau, the man who stabbed his mother 40 times before finishing her off with a slash to the throat and who a panel of three Quebec Court judges just last month deemed nonetheless has "the morals, behaviour, competence and knowledge" to practice law -- forcing the Quebec Bar Association to admit Mr. Brousseau.
Convicted mother-killer, good enough; mother who made a mistake while in the throes of grief over her daughter, not so much.
Then there is the question of why Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre made the complaint against Ms. Shore in the first place.
They would cast it -- and indeed, Ms. Edwardh did characterize it like this -- as their duty as officers of the court. "We feel an obligation to report the conduct we observed as it relates to the governability and good character of Sharon Shore and her suitability for candidacy as a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada," Ms. Edwardh said in their complaint.
Until yesterday, that was where the matter lay.
But Mr. Dewart was only about five minutes into his opening remarks when Heather Ross, a lawyer from Goderich, Ont., who is one of the hearing panelists, asked the first of her pointed questions.
Mr. Dewart had just explained that two of the four complaints against Ms. Shore were effectively off the table.
Ms. Ross was on it like white on rice.
Is there anything in those two now-irrelevant complaints that "would lead us to any conclusions behind the motives of the complainants themselves?" she asked.
As it turned out, Mr. Dewart said, there wasn't. Mr. Zarnett added, "You may form a view about the motives of the complainants, but not from the evidence."
Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre were not at the hearing yesterday. Mr. Dewart isn't calling them, or anyone else, as witnesses. Had they been present, they would have seen Ms. Shore weep as she recalled the night Lisa died, and show more regret and sorrow at her conduct -- and the temporary madness which led to it -- than their clients ever showed at their own disciplinary hearing.
