CHRISTIE'S FINAL SUBMISSION installment 6of 10 Contesting Jensen's Summary / 494

If you are new to this, Paul's and Zabeth's 3 children have been in court ordered foster care since Oct 22, 2007. After a 2010 court case, they were told on Mar 2, 2011 it would be another 6 months of care (now corrected to three [3] months.)

Yesterday we published points 11-14 from the transcript of Doug Christie's final SUBMISSION IN RESPONSE to Finn Jensen's closing summation. This is a public document, delivered on behalf of Paul and Zabeth Bayne on November 4, 2010. This is the sixth installment in a brief series of quotations.

Yesterday I quoted Mr. Christie's Submissions and Analysis points 11-14. Today it is....
Submissions and Analysis,  ….points 15-17 beginning, "Mr. Jensen claims that the director’s medical witnesses are part of an unbiased team...This argument does not hold water."

15. "Mr. Jensen claims that the director’s medical witnesses are part of an unbiased team, just trying to do what is best for the children. He claims that the defence medical witnesses have “an agenda” and thus are not to be trusted. This argument does not hold water. Colbourne made a premature diagnosis of shaking. She made a pre-diagnosis, which is the worst diagnosis in medicine. She had to do a lot of backtracking and damage control. Dr. Gardiner was her close colleague and SBS promoter. She certainly had an agenda. It can be noted that Dr.Poskett, who did the actual radiology exams, declined to testify for the director and Dr. Sergeant was a substitute. Dr. Sergeant gave a fair and professional report and his interpretation was very similar to that of Dr. Barnes for the defence. He only differed on the matter of rickets. He did not give any opinion on cause of injury and certainly did not support Dr. Colbourne. In fact he made it clear that the long time lag in diagnosis had made it impossible to tell whether there was one injury or more and also what damage might have been caused due to prolonged subdural hematoma. On the topic of the femoral fracture he makes one very useful observation. He says that the damage was caused on or about October 6th, 2007. This was the actual date of the radiology and confirms Mr. Baynes opinion that the fracture was actually caused during the examination because the nurse had to pull hard on Bethany’s legs to straighten her out for the exam. More detail will be given on this later. Dr. Randall Alexander has a very large agenda. He is little more than a hired gun who will sell his opinion to any prosecution for $10,000 a day plus expenses. He had his mind made up before he even saw the medical background. He was asked to testify exactly because he had an “agenda.” Did the Bayne witnesses have an agenda. They certainly had no financial agenda, because most of them made no charges. Dr. Plunkett was only reimbursed for direct expenses. One could say that they all had a very specific agenda in that they were all working for the achievement of justice. They were all convinced that a lot of damage was being done by unjustified accusations against parents, due to the shaken baby syndrome. They wrote and campaigned and appeared as defence witnesses."

16. "Mr. Jensen enters into lengthy discussion attempting to discredit Zabeth Bayne’s account of sibling impact. He says she is unclear on date and has brought in no witness to corroborate and so on. He goes through each doctor’s report and says they have no grounds for supporting her story and their testimony should be discarded etc. These allegations are simply not true and Mr. Jensen himself inadvertently provides corroboration at a later date. Zabeth was always very clear on two points. She saw the impact, but there was no sound. Bethany was whimpering afterwards and unhappy. Zabeth was worried that there might be an injury and took Bethany to the doctor the next day, but was reassured that there was no problem. She gave the dates and the name of the doctor to Adrienne Glen the hospital social worker and Dr. Colbourne confirms in her testimony that Zabeth reported seeing a Dr. Torry at the Murakami clinic. Note; it is normal for a doctor to accept the word of a parent unless there is good reason to believe otherwise. If the doctor holds an opinion that the injury is consistent with the cause described, his opinion should carry as much weight as any other medical opinion. The judge is perfectly free to conclude that the parent’s story may be true and if so, then the comments by the defence doctors are certainly reasonable. Mr. Jensen also repeatedly seems to hold the view that no defence statement can be believed unless there is eyewitness corroboration. Basically he says that Zabeth lies about everything unless she has a witness. This position is not acceptable. One more thing needs to be understood. Zabeth Bayne admits that she was careless in leaving the baby on the rug for a minute while she did something else. Nobody can offer her any admonishment that she has not offered herself. Such lapses are not uncommon in normal households and most of the time we think little of it until the unexpected happens."

17. "September 30th. Mr. Jensen portrays the Hoffmans as benevolent caring friends whose offers of friendship have been rebuffed by the needy Baynes. All their busybody interference is seen as reaching out to help. Inadvertently he reveals something that Loren Humeny was reluctant to state. He confirms that Zabeth was a successful music teacher with a thriving student body. Could that not be considered as strength? We draw two things to the attention of the court, which compel one to state that the Hoffmans are simply not credible witnesses and that their testimony should be totally disregarded. First, Mr. Hoffman is a very slow reader and the court had to stand down for half an hour while Mr. Hoffman tried to plough through 18 pages of transcript. When he finally got through it, he could not remember one thing that he had told the RCMP, but conceded that if it was in the transcript he must have said it. This shows that he must have a very poor memory and calls into question whether any of his testimony could be relied on. The second thing is that all the time he was claiming to be a good friend, he was running off to the RCMP making malicious and silly reports. I do not think that we need to go into the details of his inane testimony. The stupid allegation of Muenschausens by proxy and so on. His unwarranted and ignorant assumptions and his mixture of hearsay, malicious gossip and uninformed opinion. Neither he nor his wife had a shred of factual evidence to show that the Baynes had ever hurt a child, or were likely to hurt a child. The Baynes were wise to start avoiding them, even if it meant being labelled as recluse and withdrawn. Mr. Jensen repeatedly makes an argument that sounds plausible, but does not bear close scrutiny. He states that all the evidence must be accepted at face value unless the Baynes call rebuttal evidence. When one looks at the ridiculous testimony of the Hoffmans, it is easy to see the fallacy of this argument."

To be continued …................