Key Largo, Florida.

Just wanted to put up a thank-you for everyone who came out to the Reason happy hour in Philly on Friday.

It’s pretty nice feeling to visit a city and have folks come out to say hello. And, also, offer to buy me a beer.

The crew from FIRE and Students for Liberty shared hosting honors, so we had a really nice turnout all around.

Fun bar, too.

Criminal defense attorney Matt Eichelberger has found an fascinating little document I haven’t yet seen in my reporting on Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s controversial, fallen, and possibly rising again, medical examiner.

To set up the document, a quick recap: By law, Mississippi is required to have an official state medical examiner. Hayne briefly held the position on an interim basis in the late 1980s, but was forced to step down when it was discovered that he wasn’t board certified in forensic pathology. State law requires certification in forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology. Hayne took the certification exam in the mid-1980s, but failed it.

The state then hired a trio of reputable, qualified state examiners, all of whom eventually left the position in frustration after continually battling Hayne and his allies in the state’s coroner and DA offices. The last of the three, Emily Ward, left in 1995. The position has remained vacant since, leaving Hayne to do 80 to 90 percent of the state’s autopsies with no oversight.

Hayne is a doctor in private practice. Officially, he holds no position in Mississippi. Or at least he isn’t supposed to. Yet Hayne has testified in court a number of times that he is Mississippi’s “chief state pathologist,” a position that has no basis in state law.

The document Eichelberger explains where Hayne got that title. It’s a contract signed in 2006 between Hayne and the state’s then Commissioner of Public Safety, George Phillips. The contract essentially creates the uncompensated, non-position of “chief state pathologist,” and gives the title to Hayne. The position includes nearly all of the powers of the official state pathologist, save for the ability to make the rules other medical examiners are to follow while conducting official state autopsies. Given that Hayne was essentially the only game in town, and that he flagrantly violates the standards of his profession, Phillips probably found that portion of the law unnecessary.

To give Hayne the position outlined by state law would have required the legislature to eliminate the certification requirement, which probably would have attracted some negative attention. So Phillips just created a new position with most of the same powers and a similar title, and quietly bestowed it upon Hayne.

As Eichelberger points out, another interesting portion of the contract allows Hayne to conduct private autopsies at the modern, state-funded lab in Jackson at just $100 a pop. That worked out well for Hayne. For most of his career, he had been performing his all-night, marathon autopsy sessions in the basement of a funeral home owned by Rankin County Coroner Jimmie Roberts. Roberts and Hayne had a falling out in 2006. Some of my sources in Mississippi have wondered, and never been able to explain, how Hayne was able to move into the state facility despite not holding any official state position. Now we know.

It’s really pretty incredible to continue to discover the extraordinary lengths to which Mississippi officials have gone over the years—and continue to go—to keep Hayne on the witness stand.

Archive of my prior reporting on Hayne here.

I received the following email from Google AdSense yesterday.

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying
Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For
instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as
http://www.theagitator.com/2002/04/30/-meet-my-alter-ego-now/. Please note
that this URL is an example and that the same violations may exist on
other pages of your website.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to
place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. This includes
displaying ads on pages that provide links for or drive traffic to adult
or mature sites.

As a result, we have disabled ad serving to the site.

It’s an old post — the graphic doesn’t even work anymore. It was an illustration from a “create your own superhero” site. There was nothing “adult” about it all, and even if it did, the image no longer appears.

Google sent me a similar email several days ago warning me to take down the offensive content, or they’d suspend my account. I first thought they were referring to some comment spam to the post linking to adult sites. So I deleted the comments.

But that apparently wasn’t the problem, because they’ve now suspended my account anyway. I’ve sent Google AdSense two emails, but haven’t heard back.

I guess they could now be referring to other old posts with comment spam porn, even though they still include a link to the now spam-free post. If so, that’s going to be a problem. There are likely thousands of old posts that got hit with spam before I switched to a platform with better spam-blocking properties a couple of years ago. If that’s the reason Google suspended my account, it seems sort of unreasonable of them.

I guess it would be a nice start if they’d merely answer my email queries, and explain the specific content that violates their policy.

Frustrating.

The Patagonia, Argentina. Please note, some variation of a Mark Sanford joke has been made in the last half dozen Argentina photos I’ve posted. So if you’re going to make one, make it original.