I sneak the odd peek at Sophia Anderson, who sits a couple of rows behind me every day at the coroner's inquest now examining the circumstances of her sister Diane's death, and the deaths of two of Diane's children, in a house fire on Dec. 22, 2007.
I often wonder what Sophia thinks of the curious process she is watching unfold, but haven't dared ask.
Even at its best, an inquest was always the justice system's version of kissing your sister.
It is not meant to be adversarial. It is not supposed to point fingers of blame. And with discretionary inquests such as this one, the goal is less to answer the requisite five questions (who died, when, where, how and by what means), which are mostly answered long before the inquiry begins, but rather to shed light on issues of public interest with a view to preventing similar deaths.
The five-member juries are to come up with recommendations to do that, although they have no force of law, and are just that - suggestions.
Years and years ago, it became the norm that inquests are replete with lawyers.
At the Anderson inquest, for instance, there are nine different parties, many social services agencies whose workers were involved with the family, which have official standing and are entitled to be represented by a lawyer, and as many as a dozen lawyers present on any given day.
The result is that the coroner's motto - "We speak for the dead to protect the living" - could be changed to, "We speak for the dead but sometimes at such interminable length and to so little purpose that the living in this particular room may also wish they were dead."
Certainly, I've felt that way frequently at the Anderson inquest, now into its third week, no more so than on Tuesday, when for the 100th time, various of the lawyers were asking the witnesses a variation of the following question, "Would it be helpful if social services agency X had all the money and resources in the world?" and the witnesses all brightly replied, as though they had been asked a real question, with a variation of, "Why yes, that would be helpful."
The fire at the Andersons' small townhouse in a rent-subsidized complex in a beleaguered and poor part of Toronto was started, the jurors have heard, by two of Ms. Anderson's little boys playing with her lighter.
As she slept, with more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in her blood, they lit some school papers, accidentally unleashing the blaze that, within two minutes, had flashed over and engulfed the small house. Two smoke detectors in the unit had been disabled or weren't working at the time of the fire.
Yet lawyers for some of the agencies with standing - this appears to mean, in practice, that the agency's rear is somewhat exposed - spend most of their time making sure the exposure isn't worsened. Several lawyers appear to believe deeply that if only every worker from a children's aid society, in addition to looking for signs of abuse and neglect and substance abuse and frightened children and all the other things she or he is legally required to do, was also keeping an eye out for disabled or broken smoke detectors, all would be well.
(Thank God for Rob Saunders, a worker with the Children's Aid Society of Toronto, who by my reckoning this week became the first witness, who, when asked if it would be helpful if workers also had to check on smoke detectors on home visits, replied gruffly, "It's never been a responsibility of children's aid to check fire equipment." I almost shrieked aloud with joy: Fire equipment, surely, is the shared responsibility of fire department, landlord and tenant.)
There are two real issues of public significance here.
One is the preventability of the fire: Working smoke detectors almost certainly would have saved Diane and her kids. How can parents and landlords be persuaded, or coerced if necessary, to keep vulnerable youngsters safe? That question hasn't yet been explored, with this phase of the inquest soon to begin.
The second issue is the quality of social services received by Ms. Anderson, a single welfare mom of five who had suffered the double tragedy of losing her fiancé to gunfire and their baby to a stillborn birth and who was struggling with depression and alcohol abuse. She was sending out some fairly obvious signals of distress, yet with a couple of exceptions, most of the "help" she got consisted of referrals to other agencies, many of them distant from her home, beyond her reach, and most with long waiting lists.
I actually heard the following question on Tuesday from a lawyer to a witness: "Where's the leadership on the collaboration-strengthening coming from?"
I don't have a clue what it means, although I recognize it as a crime against the English language. What it has to do with preventing that fire or saving Diane Anderson from herself before the fire started is equally beyond me.