In his latest post, Patterico cites the Mississippi Court of Appeals ruling in the Tyler Edmonds case, and faults me for not mentioning their decision upholding Edmond’s conviction, particularly the part where they uphold Dr. Hayne’s testimony.

This again is a pretty cheap criticism. By an almost unanimous vote (there was one dissent, and even that justice conceded Hayne may have been in error), the conservative state supreme court in Mississippi voted to overturn the state’s court of appeals. I’d submit that to say I should have taken the space in a 1,000 word article to cite and refute the Court of Appeals ruling (as I do in this post) that the state supreme court near-unanimously overruled is asking a bit much.

Again, how far back do these disclosures need to go? Do I really need to recount the entire appellate history of the case? The state supreme court wrote a near-unanimous opinion stating that Dr. Hayne wrongly asserted that the bullet wounds in the victim were consistent with the prosecution’s theory that there were two hands on the gun that fired the fatal bullet. That’s what I wrote.

But let’s look at that state appeals court decision, anyway.

Patterico notes that the opinion makes hay of the fact that Tyler Edmonds confessed to killing his sister’s husband, and in the confession, said that he did in fact hold the gun simultaneously with his sister when pulling the trigger.

Edmonds later recanted that confession, saying his sister coerced it. But that’s beside the point. I have no opinion on Edmond’s guilt or innocence. Nor do I have any opinion about whether or not the crime happened exactly as prosecutors say it did. It may well have.

I do however have a problem with Hayne testifying that his expertise tells him the crime happened as prosecutors say it did. As does the Mississippi Supreme Court. Because that just isn’t feasible.

The state court of appeals opinion tries to argue that Hayne didn’t really say that. It attempts to look beyond Hayne’s words, into his brain, to divinie his true meaning, and concludes that despite the plain meaning of the words, what Hayne was really saying is that given Tyler’s confession, that in that confession he says he didn’t aim the gun, and given that the shot was toward the middle of the victim’s head (which I guess is impossible to do without aiming, even if you’re just inches away), Hayne was merely factoring all of these things together, they argue. The first problem here is that this is no longer the expert opinion of a forensic pathologist. It’s weighing all of the evidence together, as a juror would, and coming to a conclusion.

The appeals court writes, referring to Hayne:

He knows that you cannot look at a bullet wound and tell whether it was made by a bullet fired by one person pulling the trigger or by two persons pulling the trigger simultaneously.

Except that that is exactly what Hayne was saying. Consider this passage, from the trial transcript:

Q:

Dr. Hayne, you testified earlier that the defendant’s statement that you saw was consistent with how the gunshot wound occurred?

[Note: This would by Edmonds' initial confession, later recanted, but now endorsed by the prosecution.]

A:
It would be consistent with the physical findings that I observed and the information provided to me by opposite side counsel.

Q;
And do you understand that the evidence is that two people fired that shot?

A:
That was essentially the summary of the information given to me and seen on the video.

Q:
And let’s suppose if one person had fired that shot, would your opinion be the same?

A:
I could not exclude that; however, I would favor that a second party be [sic] involved in that positioning of the weapon.

Q:
And what would be the distance of the shot?

A:
The distance?

Q:
Based on the fact that if one person had done this?

A:
The distance of the shot, if you’re addressing the muzzle of the weapon to the back of the head, all I can tell you it’s at least two to three inches away. If you are talking about the relative position of the weapon, then I would indicate that the weapon was placed much more towards the bed and that would be consistent with one person assisting another person to achieve that trajectory, the aiming of the weapon. Since it would be past the center line of the decedent’s head when fired, 20 degrees past the center line of the head, so, therefore, it would be consistent with two people involved. I can’t exclude one, but I think that would be less likely.

In the emphasized passage, Hayne is very clearly claiming that based on the trajectory of the bullet in the victim’s head, he thinks it’s likely that two hands were on the gun that fired it. He has left Edmond’s confession, and is speculating now about where the gun was in relation to the bed, and about two hypothetical people assisting one another in positioning it–again based not on other evidence already presented, but on the where the bullet entered the victim’s head.

I’m not a ballistics expert (neither is Hayne–more on that below). But I have a hard time conceiving of how one could say from a bullet wound that the gun that made it would be more likely to be in a position where two people were holding it than where one person would be. I can’t even conceive of what that position might look like.

Also, the important thing here is not what an appellate judge divines Hayne may have been saying or meant to say, but what a juror would have actually thought he was saying. If a juror thought Hayne was saying that, in his expert opinion, there were two hands on the gun that fired the fatal bullet–an interpretation that pretty plainly fits with Hayne’s words–that’s what’s he’s going to factor into his decision to convict or acquit.

There’s one other area where the appeals court errs, here, and where courts in Mississippi have made repeated errors about Hayne is in allowing him to give too much testimony on what happened before the bullet entered the body. Whether Hayne is even a qualified forensic pathologist is debatable. But he is not a crime scene investigator. His job is to determine how the victim died (in this case, it should have been limited to “a gunshot to the head”).

Hayne routinely oversteps his bounds in this area. He did it in the Cory Maye case, when he speculated about Cory’s position in the room based on the trajectory the bullet took through Ron Jones’ body, despite not knowing other important variables. The state’s supreme court also just denied an appeal in another case where Hayne offered up testimony that was more ballistics in nature than medical.

Patterico says the state supreme court misstated the appeals court’s argument. He’s right, here. They did. I don’t know why they did. They didn’t need to. Maybe they were being coy. Maybe they thought the appeals court’s ruling was absurd.

What’s pretty clear is that they didn’t buy it. And with good reason.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 4:05 am by admin and is filed under Forensics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.