The CBC program The Fifth Estate has won the 2010 Michener Award, an annual honour recognizing meritorious public service journalism in Canada. Gov. Gen. David Johnston presented the award for the program's two documentaries on the case of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old woman who had initially been sentenced to a month in juvenile detention when she was 14, but ended up serving more than four years, mostly in solitary confinement. Smith, originally from Moncton, N.B., ended up strangling herself to death in her cell in an Ontario institution after many previous suicide attempts. Guards had been given orders not to enter the cell as long as she was still breathing. A coroner's inquest on the circumstances surrounding her death is currently underway.
The Fifth Estate won the Michener for documentaries titled “Out of Control” and “Behind the Wall,” which probed the issue of how people with mental illness are treated in Canada's penal system.
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