Ontario woman acquitted in infant son’s death 24 years after ‘miscarriage of justice’

TORONTO — An Ontario woman sobbed in court Tuesday as she was acquitted in the death of her infant son after more than two decades labelled as his killer.

Jennifer Gaskin pulled her mother into a long and tearful hug after Ontario’s top court found that she had been wrongfully convicted of manslaughter in the death of her 2 1/2-month-old son Joeseph based on now-discredited science.

On her other side stood her daughter, with whom Gaskin was reunited a day earlier for the first time since they were separated by child welfare services a day after Joeseph’s funeral.

Outside the downtown Toronto courthouse, Gaskin said she finally felt free after decades branded as a monster.

“Now that this is over, I’m hoping that I won’t feel like people still look at me that way, because I won’t look at myself that way,” she said. “Now I’m just going to live my best life.”

Though it took a long time, the court eventually “made it right,” she said.

Gaskin’s case is one of several wrongful convictions based on the “discredited” shaken baby syndrome, the Appeal Court said in its ruling.

“She is the victim of a miscarriage of justice,” Justice Peter Lauwers said.

One of Gaskin’s lawyers, James Lockyer, said the court referring to shaken baby syndrome as discredited science “was really a giant leap forward in the jurisprudence” and will make it easier to argue future cases on the issue.

“It was an important day. It may be the beginning of the end of shaken baby syndrome, at least in Ontario, potentially in Canada,” he said outside the courthouse.

It took a while for Gaskin’s challenge to move forward in part because her team was “waiting for the science to change,” and because the experts retained to review her case were busy, Lockyer said. At one point, Gaskin moved to a different city without telling her lawyer her new address or phone number, forcing them to deploy a private investigator to find her, he said.

Lockyer said he doesn’t know how many other shaken-baby cases there may be, but Innocence Canada, a national organization that aims to help clear people wrongfully convicted of crimes, is working on “more than one.”

“It was a hypothesis that was used frequently in courtrooms and it wasn’t properly refuted by the defence and people got convicted because of shaken baby syndrome when it never really had any validity,” he said, calling it “junk science.”

Gaskin was convicted in 2002 after two medical experts testified the child had died as a result of shaken baby syndrome.

Significant concerns about that medical evidence emerged years later after a coroner’s review found major flaws in the work of Dr. Charles Smith, who conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies during his tenure as the head forensic pathologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

That led the Ontario government to launch an inquiry into pediatric forensic pathology, then a review of shaken-baby cases from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. Joeseph’s case was eventually examined by an international panel of medical experts.

The panel found there was uncertainty regarding the cause of Joeseph’s death and the timing of his injuries, court heard. His head injuries had been mischaracterized as bruising when they were in fact infarcts, or strokes, and it wasn’t clear whether they had caused the boy’s death, the panel found.

Gaskin’s legal team later retained three more experts to look over the file.

Court heard the three experts couldn’t rule out the possibility of an inflicted injury, but found Joeseph — a premature baby who spent the first two months of his life in hospital — could also have died from sudden unexpected infant death, previously known as sudden infant death syndrome.

The Crown agreed that the new findings should be admitted as fresh evidence and Gaskin should be acquitted, offering her its “deepest sympathies.”

“As of today, the original expert evidence supporting the conviction of the appellant at trial has been wholly undermined and placed in grave doubt,” the Crown said in its written submissions.

“The investigation of infant death is complex, involving forensic examination and external and internal dissections – none of which were available at the time of the appellant’s conviction.”

Gaskin, who served 18 months of her nearly two-year sentence in prison, laid out the impact of her conviction in an affidavit that was read out in court.

“As I have always said, I did nothing to cause Joeseph’s death, yet I have been branded as a killer for all these years,” she said.

“I could never grieve for Joeseph properly. I lost my other two children … I did not see them grow up and that has hurt a lot. For 20 years, I missed them and wondered how they were.”

Gaskin had not yet been convicted when her children, a daughter roughly a year older than Joeseph and a son born while she was on bail, were taken by child welfare services, she said outside court Tuesday. She didn’t have the chance to hold her son after he was born, she said.

They got in touch recently through social media and Gaskin met her daughter Monday at the hotel where they were both staying, she said. Her son was set to attend court as well but fell ill and had to turn back, court heard.

While nothing can make up for the time she lost with her children, Gaskin said she looks forward to bonding with them from now on.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2026.

Paola Loriggio, The Canadian Press