“How can it get worse?”

In a childlike moan, teen inmate Ashley Smith asks this question of the man who has just put her in a straightjacket made of duct tape.

He is a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a co-pilot on the aircraft that is transporting her from The Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatchewan, where she was physically assaulted by a staff supervisor, to another mental health facility for federal prisoners in Montreal.

VIDEO: Ashley Smith during 2007 prison transfer

“I will duct tape your face,” the unnamed man who is wearing sunglasses on a 6:30 p.m. flight barks.

Smith’s entire head is already shrouded in two layers of black netting — a garment the prison service refers to as a “spit hood.” It is fastened with ties around her neck and secured to a heavy blue gown around her shoulders. Her forearms are handcuffed to the arm rests of the airplane seat.

Smith pleads to use the washroom.

“Let me go! I’m not going to take it off,” she says, referring to her hood.

Her pleas are ignored.

“I think she took a dump,” says one of three prison guards visible on the surveillance footage. “It smells.”

After a two-year battle, prison videos showing abuses endured by Smith in federal custody went public in a Toronto coroner’s court on Wednesday.

“This is how Correctional Service Canada does business transferring a victim,” the Smith family lawyer Julian Falconer told the inquest into her death.

Lawyers convened at the Grosvenor Street court to debate the scope of the inquest, which is scheduled to begin hearing evidence before a jury in January.

Federal prison lawyers have filed a motion asking the Toronto coroner to dramatically narrow the inquest’s scope to examine only the final seven days of her life in custody.

Anything more, said Correctional Service Canada lawyer Nancy Noble, is “irrelevant” and would turn the inquest into a “full-blown inquiry into the operations and management of Correctional Service Canada, which is not permitted.”

The prison service has teamed up with a group of doctors who treated Smith outside of Ontario to challenge presiding coroner Dr. John Carlisle’s ruling that the inquest should examine Smith’s entire 11 months in custody.

During that time, she was repeatedly shuffled from institution to institution and confined mostly to solitary confinement cells.

Thirty-two minutes of footage was played in a Toronto coroner’s court by the family’s lawyer and other parties to support their case for a broad inquest. They say the circumstances of the 11 months Smith spent in federal prisons contributed to her state of mind at the time of her death and should be examined to prevent similar tragedies.

Broadening the inquest’s scope moves the inquest into the territory of “political crusade,” said lawyer Mark Freiman, representing doctors Carolyn Rogers, Loys Ligate, Sam Swaminath and three other out-of-province physicians who are not named.

An inquest jury, expected to make recommendations to prevent similar deaths, “cannot compile a blueprint for systemic change in organizations,” Freiman said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Lawyers representing six other parties including the Smith family, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, the prison guards’ union, the provincial children’s advocate and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association oppose the motion.

Their arguments are being heard at coroner’s court in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon.

The heart of their arguments will be made through video surveillance footage that show the treatment Smith endured in prisons across Canada.

This treatment, they say, contributed to her deteriorating mental health.

Correctional Service Canada, which has been fighting for years to keep the graphic videos secret, abandoned its efforts last week after a Divisional Court judge rejected the federal agency’s motion for an emergency stay of the inquest.

The videos showed a side of the 19-year-old woman that is much different than the prison service’s depiction of her as an out-of-control inmate, says Kim Pate, an advocate with inmate rights group Elizabeth Fry, who tried to help Smith during her incarceration.

Smith died Oct. 19, 2007, inside a segregation cell at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener. She choked herself to death with a strip of cloth while guards, instructed not to intervene, watched.

At Joliette Institution in Quebec, the video shows Smith surrounded by guards in riot gear as she is forcibly injected with heavy anti-psychotic drugs five times in the course of seven hours.

“Jail guards were in gas masks all around her, including the nurse who at one point was injecting her,” Pate says, noting that Smith was chemically restrained against her will.

Five months before she died, Smith asked Pate to review her prison files to find out why she had been confined to a windowless room 23 hours a day, for months on end wearing little more than a padded suicide gown and shackles.

The prison service continually blocked Pate’s efforts to retrieve the files, which included surveillance videos. After numerous court battles, a judge ordered the materials released. The order came more than three years after Smith’s death.

Elizabeth Fry filed an affidavit in support of releasing the videos.

This is the second inquest into Smith’s death. The first was derailed when the presiding coroner retired after numerous legal arguments delayed proceedings.

Read more about: