This one’s all over the web right now:

Here’s the story.

It’s money that they never requested in the first place, but the TMZ expose of their lavish parties in L.A. apparrently spurred the bank to hand back the cash.

Some of you chastised me for criticizing Northern Trust in my prior post on this story. I should have been more clear. I don’t really care how Northern Trust spends its own money. If swanky parties in L.A. for clients and employees have helped the company’s bottom line (and that may well be the case–the bank doesn’t appear to be in any trouble), then by all means, live it up.

But when Hank Paulson & company were making the case for the bailout, I doubt most taxpayers envisioned government-backed loans going to high-end banks who sponsor lavish parties with Tiffany gift bags, Sheryl Crow, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Again, I wasn’t clear enough, but my animus here is directed at the government for forking over $1.5 billion to a bank in good financial shape that caters to the sort of clientele where glitzy parties are part of the business plan.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a forthcoming study from the National Academy of Sciences that’s extremely critical of how forensic science is used in the courtroom. The study came out a little over a week ago. In light of my story about possible forensic bite mark fraud by Mississippi forensic experts Steven Hayne and Michael West, it seems particularly relevant to look at what the NAS study had to say about bite mark evidence.

The first mentions of bite mark analysis, or forensic odontology, occur in a couple of footnotes. The first says…

…forensic odontology might not be sufficiently grounded in science to be admissible under Daubert, but this discipline might be able to reliably exclude a suspect, thereby enabling law enforcement to focus its efforts on other suspects. And forensic science methods that do not meet the standards of admissible evidence might still offer leads to advance an investigation.

Daubert refers to a trio of Supreme Court cases from the early 1990s that establish the admissibility standards of expert testimony in the courtroom. The NAS study says here that despite the fact that bite mark evidence has been introduced in hundreds, likely thousands of cases since Daubert, bite mark analysis, while possibly useful for investigative purposes, may not be steeped enough in science for consideration in a courtroom. Indeed, the report next chides the courts for not even performing a proper Daubert evaluation in too many bite mark cases.

Much forensic evidence—including, for example, bite marks and firearm and toolmark identifications—is introduced in criminal trials without any meaningful scientific validation, determination of error rates, or reliability testing to explain the limits of the discipline.

In the section directly addressing bite mark analysis, the study found that there is no scientific research showing any particular uniqueness to human dentition (put another way, there’s no basis for saying that the impressions our teeth make is unique to us the way our fingerprints or DNA are). Moreover, even if such uniqueness could be established, it’s even less clear that said uniqueness would be transferred when human teeth bite down on human skin. The study finds that due to the elasticity of human skin, swelling and healing, and unevenness of the skin’s surface, the marks made from a bite can morph over time. And the study is even more skeptical of analyses done from photographs of bite marks, given that photographs allow for further distortion of the marks.

The study’s authors are also concerned that there’s no scientific research showing that the various methods used by bite mark experts are reproducible, both “between experts and with the same expert over time.” This is one of the pillars of scientific inquiry—that a scientist’s results can be reproduced by other scientists. There are several studies in which bite mark experts plying their craft in controlled laboratory tests have shown “widely differing results and a high percentage of false positive matches.”

The authors add:

As with other “experience-based” forensic methods, forensic odontology suffers from the potential for large bias among bite mark experts in evaluating a specific bite mark in cases in
which police agencies provide the suspects for comparison and a limited number of models from  which to choose from in comparing the evidence. Bite marks often are associated with highly sensationalized and prejudicial cases, and there can be a great deal of pressure on the examining expert to match a bitemark to a suspect. Blind comparisons and the use of a second expert are not widely used.

The NAS study’s bite mark section concludes:

Although the majority of forensic odontologists are satisfied that bite marks can demonstrate sufficient detail for positive identification, no scientific studies support this assessment, and no large population studies have been conducted. In numerous instances, experts diverge widely in their evaluations of the same bite mark evidence.

Bite mark testimony has been criticized basically on the same grounds as testimony by questioned document examiners and microscopic hair examiners. The committee received no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others. That same finding was reported in a 2001 review, which “revealed a lack of valid evidence to support many of the assumptions made by forensic dentists during bite mark comparisons,” which has led to questioning of the value and scientific objectivity of such evidence.

The authors say more research is needed to see if bite mark analysis might have some probative value, for example to exclude suspects. But there’s no reliable research to back up claims that there’s any real science behind the idea that an expert can positively match a bite mark left on skin to an individual person.

That ought to be cause for pretty grave concern in any case where an expert claimed he could positively link a bite mark to a suspect, but it should cause particular concern where bite marks were the only evidence linking the suspect to the crime.

Reason posted the Twitter feeds of staffers earlier this week, so I’ll post here, too.  Those of you on Twitter can follow me at: radleybalko

I promise not to post a picture of my breakfast.

Michael Gerson is the rare public intellectual who defies even the stopped clock cliche—he manages to be wrong pretty much all of the time. The ever-earnest former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist combines a Naderite’s grasp of economics with an Ed Meese-ian appreciation for individual liberty. If all of that weren’t bad enough, Gerson manages to express his perpetual wrongness in nauseatingly flowery prose that he occasionally peppers with insulting condescension (I bet he’s great at parties!).

Gerson’s column from last week lectures us on the virtues of poverty, and expresses his hope (from his fine home in the Northern Virginia suburbs, written on his MacBook, naturally), that the recession will awaken in America a “less material orientation in life,” and “expand.. our horizons—like an escape from the dungeon of our own desires.” (See what I mean?)

Gerson may be right in some ways. I don’t doubt that temporary hardship brings people together, or that families probably spend more time together when they can’t afford to do much else. I just don’t know if that’s enough to say that poverty has an “upside,” or that I’d make the leap from that, as Gerson does, to the conclusion that severe recession is capitalism’s way of punishing us for our materialism, filling us all with Gerson-esque virtue. Or as he puts it, “Sometimes grace can arrive through an unexpected door.”

But even setting aside Gerson’s odd pining for dust bowl hardship, he really stumbles when he starts talking about crime, and attempts to draw parallels between the crime rate and the economy.

During the Great Depression — with about a quarter of Americans out of work — crime and divorce declined. During the relative prosperity of the 1960s and 1970s, crime rates shot up and families broke down.

Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. “One reasonable hypothesis,” argues James Q. Wilson, “is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime.” Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes — and that have decayed in our own.

So Gerson wants to credit the drop in violent crime in the 1930s to Tom Joad and the family singing hymns while roasting shoe leather over an open fire. Roosevelt acolytes are fond of crediting the New Deal. But there’s a far better explanation: the repeal of alcohol prohibition. Homicide rates started to climb in 1920 (the year after enactment of the Volstead Act) and peaked in 1933, the year alcohol prohibition was repealed. Rates of burglary, assault, and robbery also began a dramatic fall in 1934, just after prohibition was repealed.

Also, since when were the energy crisis, price controlled, stagflation 1970s a decade of “relative prosperity?” Relative to what? The 1820s, maybe. But certainly not the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, or 1990s. And aren’t the low-crime, family-values 1950s generally considered the decade that spawned American consumerism?

The 1990s also defy Gerson’s thesis. The 1990s economic boom was accompanied by a dramatic drop in crime and, as I noted in a post earlier this week, significant drops in the rates of divorce, abortion, rape, teen pregnancy, and incredible improvements in several other social indicators.

Gerson’s theory neatly confirms his biases: Hard times encourage us to eschew fleeting pleasures, to embrace faith and Gerson’s notion of virtue, and all of this leads to less crime and more stable families. The crass consumerism brought by prosperity, on the other hand, brings laziness, greed, and moral turpitude.

Unfortunately for Gerson, there’s just not much evidence to support any of that.

Northern Trust got a cool $1.6 billion in bailout money. But that didn’t stop the bank from paying millions to sponsor a PGA golf tournament. Not only that, but TMZ reports the bank also few hundreds of clients and employees to L.A., put them up in ritzy hotels, then threw bitchin’ parties with performances by Sheryl Crow, Chicago, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Women got trinkets from Tiffany’s. They rented out the House of Blues. Your tax dollars at work!

Meanwhile, at least one bailed-out bank is loosening up the credit a bit. Bank of America, which got $45 billion from the feds, just announced a $200 million loan to . . . the National Basketball Association.

Apparently, those poor billionaire franchise owners and their millionaire athletes haven’t yet figured out how to turn sweetheart deals at taxpayer-bought stadiums into a profit.

Good for Obama.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced this week that Obama will keep his campaign promise to end the DEA raids on clinics in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

It’ll be interesting to see if this tiny bit of federalism will hold should some states or cities decriminalize or even legalize marijuana entirely.

But this is great news.

My compliments to Rob Kampia for withstanding Glenn Beck for the entire interview.  Jumpin’ Jesus, that guy’s a douche.

So can anyone come up with a good argument why any of this should be illegal in the first place?

Professor calls the cops after student gives a report on how more relaxed conceal carry laws could prevent campus shootings similar to the one at Virginia Tech.

So as noted below, the Hattiesburg American and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger both picked up my story posted at Reason last week about a 1993 video of a bite mark examination on a 23-month old Louisiana girl named Haley Oliveaux. The video implicates Mississippi forensic experts Michael West and Steven Hayne in possible evidence tampering and perjury. It shows bite marks appearing on Oliveaux on the second day of the examination that weren’t there on the first, and it shows West repeatedly jamming and forcing a dental mold of suspect Jimmie Duncan’s teeth into Oliveaux’s corpse.

I want to focus on a few points from the Clarion-Ledger article, including a reaction from Hayne, Mississippi’s now-terminated Mississippi medical examiner who performed the Oliveaux autopsy with West, testified at Duncan’s trial, and someone I’ve been investigating for a few years, now.

Here is Hayne’s response:

Brandon pathologist Steven Hayne, who performed the autopsy in Mississippi, vehemently denies the suspicion that bite-mark expert Dr. Michael West of Hattiesburg did anything to tamper with the child’s cheek to produce the marks. “This is so patently absurd, it’s ludicrous,” Hayne said…

Hayne said the abrasion “was there before. It just became more evident. We see that all the time.”

If by “we,” Hayne means he and West, he may well be correct. If by “we” he means he and other medical examiners, he’s flat wrong. The experts I consulted with for the article say that abrasions form immediately after they’re inflicted. They don’t appear, or become more apparent, hours or days after death. That can sometimes happen with bruising, but not with an abrasion, which is what we see on Oliveaux’s cheek.

Moreover, even giving Hayne and West the benefit of the doubt on the cheek mark that appears between the first and second days of the examination, the last 20 minutes of the video show West repeatedly jamming the dental mold into Oliveaux’s body, over and over, more than 50 times. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single forensics professional—other than Hayne or West—who would argue that this is an acceptable way of analyzing forensic evidence. Those I spoke with called it criminal evidence tampering.

I’m also not sure about the explanation offered in the article that the removal of medical tape might have caused the mark on the cheek. Even if true, that explanation would still mean Hayne and West misidentified the mark as a bite mark, and you’d still have the matter of West’s violation of Haley Oliveaux’s corpse with the dental mold. But the problem with the tape theory is that in the first five minutes of the video, the tape has already been removed from Oliveaux’s face, and there are no visible marks on her cheek.

It’s also unfortunate that thus far, Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson seems to have no interest in investigating the video. You have to wonder what sort of evidence it would take for Simpson to begin an investigation into these two.

Here’s the most unsettling line in the article:

Hayne said he is now doing autopsies in Louisiana, plus private cases he handles.

So Louisiana coroners and district attorneys are apparently still giving Hayne work, ever after all that has come out about him in the last year.

My story in the April issue of Reason will address some of the other evidence against Jimmie Duncan that’s discussed in the Clarion-Ledger article.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger and Hattiesburg American both pick up the story this morning.

See if you can notice what’s missing from the Clarion-Ledger story.

I’ll have more on Hayne’s reaction a bit later.

Check in this Thursday night at 8pm ET with your questions for Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who was subject to a violent, botched drug raid last year.

Calvo’s pushing legislation that would bring transparency to how Maryland’s police departments use their SWAT teams.

Now someone at Fark has plagiarized my headline on the Kathryn Johnston story.

NOTE: No, this isn’t that big of a deal. And if these people were linking back to my site, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I do think it’s a little crappy, though, to take my headline word for word (and in this case, several blogs linked here mostly because they thought the headline was clever), then submit it to a social networking site as your own, linking to the source material, and never acknowledging who wrote the actual headline. Basically, the people submitting these stories are getting karma points for headlines someone else wrote.

Ad Age reports that cereal company Kellogg may have taken a hit for its decision to drop Michael Phelps after the bong photo fiasco.

Vanno, a website that follows 5,500 companies, compiles its reputation index by capturing “gossip, news, opinion and personal insight about companies and their reputations” submitted by users that it converts into numerical scores and rankings. Its figures shows Kellogg, which was ranked an impressive No. 9 in January, fell to No. 16 after announcing its peanut-butter-related recalls. But the company fell to No. 68 after letting Mr. Phelps go…According to Vanno, Kellogg has since fallen to 83.

I don’t know how valid Vanno’s reputation tracking formula is, but it’s at lest encouraging to see the company’s rank go down rather than up.

I’m sure the people in Group Two were a little pissed at getting matched with the great Normund Strange, who I gotta’ think is guaranteed a spot in the final twelve, despite not having much of a voice. Last night’s group is hard to call. Allison Iraheta’s take on Heart was probably the best.  She’s got great pipes, I just thought the arrangement slowed her down a little. Adam Lambert has an incredible voice and probably the best range of anyone we’ve seen so far, I just think he aurally raped Mick Jagger last night. If you like the theatrical stuff, he’s your guy. I’d like to see him tone it down a little. Lots of disapointments last night, too. I like Matt Giraud a lot, but he came up way short. Same for Matt Breitzke and Jasmine Murray.

My top three would be Iraheta, Megan Joe Corkrey, and Jesse Langseth. But you have to have a guy in there. So I’ll go with Lambert in place of Corkrey.

Prediction?  Tough call. Nick Mitchell/Normund Strange seems like a given. He’ll get the “vote for the worst” crowd and the people who just want to see him go on for the entertainment (I’d put myself in that group–the guy is hillarious).  Allison Iraheta was by far the best woman.  I’ll say Mitchell, Lambert, and Iraheta move on. There don’t seem to be any obvious favorites from this group, though.

God, it’s going to be a fun four years with Vice President Joe:

Vice President Biden, today: “This is a monumental project, but it’s doable…It’s about getting the money out in 18 months, to literally dropkick us out of this recession.”

Ouch, Joe!

Topless coffee shop opens in Maine.

Just be careful around the steamer.

A police officer in the Chesapeake area addresses the Ryan Frederick case on his blog:

Ryan Frederick will forever be known as a cop killer. He shot and killed Detective Jerrod Shivers in January 2008 while the Chesapeake Police Department was serving a search warrant at his house. He is a cold blooded killer…

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury? You have FAILED MISERABLY. You have failed the family of Detective Shivers, police officers, the City of Chesapeake, Commonwealth of Virginia and this nation. Failed. Failures each and every one of you.

The next time you need police, please be sure to tell them you were on the Frederick jury. While that is an emotional statement, I do know that no matter what, the officers will still be professional. But I bet it made you stop and think didn’t it?

Just like all the people who have voted in the polls on PilotOnline. Voting for acquittal. The next time YOU need police, be sure to tell them you think that Frederick should have been let off for killing a cop.

Classy.

I don’t have a name for it, but it’s a variation on the Stone Fence, an old drink usually made with cider and applejack.  Mine’s less sweet, a little more balanced, and tastes like delicious autumn. It also works just as well hot as it does over ice. As you can see below, I’m quite precise with my measurements. (Hey, I never claimed to be Jacob Grier.) Here’s how it’s done:

5 jiggers apple cider.

2 jiggers bourbon (I prefer Bulleit for this particular dink).

1 squeeze lemon.

Dash of orange bitters.

Mix all ingredients. Pour over ice in a tumbler, or microwave for two minutes in your favorite mug. Dust with cinnamon just before drinking.