TORONTO -- Sharon Shore's destruction of a document that should have been disclosed in a criminal trial was "an aberration in an exemplary life," a Law Society of Upper Canada hearing panel ruled yesterday.
As panel chair Joanne St. Lewis read aloud the decision that the 50-year-old student lawyer "is of good character and shall be admitted as a member of the Law Society," Ms. Shore sat holding the hand of her husband, Bill, and across the aisle, her elderly mother quietly wept.
The decision means Ms. Shore can be called to the bar next month and begin practising and marks the end of an ordeal that began Oct. 22, 1998, with the unexpected death of her 10-year-old daughter, Lisa, at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Ms. Shore was the subject of a complaint from two prominent Toronto lawyers, Marlys Edwardh and Liz McIntyre, who alleged that her destruction of the document rendered her unfit to be a lawyer.
The lawyers represented the nurses caring for Lisa when she died, and who last fall pleaded guilty to professional misconduct for their failure to properly assess and monitor the little girl. The document Ms. Shore failed to hand over to the criminal prosecutor was a two-page report from a Boston doctor who suggested the pain Lisa was suffering months after she'd broken her leg wasn't real, but psychological.
Ms. Shore later voluntarily came forward and told him about the note, damaging her credibility as a witness and in part the cause of why the charges were withdrawn.
That she "came forward despite the cost of doing so," the panel said, was evidence that she did so "to set the matter right." Although the panel found her misconduct severe, they deemed her to be a person of the "highest integrity, candour and honesty," who had acted out of a desire to protect the memory of her child.
