The ACLU blog follows-up on my story about Mississippi’s Dr. Michael West:

As Balko notes, the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project Director John Holdridge has successfully challenged West’s findings in the past. In 1993, John freed Larry Maxwell, an innocent man charged with three capital murders in Mississippi, and later helped to exonerate Anthony Keko, who was wrongfully convicted in Louisiana of killing his ex-wife. Both men had faced West’s dubious science in court.

John also filed ethics complaints against West with three professional organizations to which the doctor belonged; those complaints resulted in West’s resignation from two of the groups, and suspension from the other. Despite this loss of standing in the forensic community, he’s still routinely called to testify in death penalty trials, almost always for the prosecution.

As I understand it, West’s frequency of court appearances has dropped pretty dramatically in the last few years, to the point where District Attorney Forrest Allgood is the only prosecutor who still uses him regularly. Of course, that’s bad enough. And there’s also the matter of revisiting all the cases in which Dr. West has testified in the past, which should certainly be done. But I’m just getting started on Mississippi. The worst is yet to come.

MORE…The Innocence Project’s blog also weighs in, noting that faulty bite mark evidence has sent at least four other innocent people to jail.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 10:41 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Forensics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.