Here’s the interview I did for reason.tv hashing out some of the broader issues of the case.

A few new items on the Dr. Steven Hayne debacle in Mississippi.

In Mississippi, state supreme court justices are elected, not appointed. They serve eight-year terms, but can serve multiple terms if they’re reelected. Yesterday Associate Justice Oliver Diaz, Jr. announced his plans to run for reelection.

Diaz may face a tough campaign, due in part to the fact that he’s one of the more liberal justices on the court. He’s also the only justice on the court who seems to give a damn about the sham that is Mississippi’s criminal justice system. Diaz was instrumental in building a coalition to throw out Dr. Steven Hayne’s absurd two-hands-on-the-gun testimony in the Tyler Edmonds case. My sources in Mississippi tell me the court initially was planning to uphold Hayne’s testimony and Edmonds’ conviction. Diaz not only succeeded in turning that around for a 8-1 vote for a new trial, he wrote a blistering concurring opinion stating that Dr. Hayne should never testify in Mississippi’s courts again (disclosure: he cited my reason article on the Cory Maye case in that opinion). Unfortunately, Diaz wasn’t able to convince a majority of his colleagues of his opinion of Dr. Hayne, and so Hayne continues to do the bulk of the state’s autopsies.

The other reason Diaz may face an uphill battle for reelection is because several years ago, he was indicted by the Bush Justice Department on public corruption charges. Diaz, a former Republican now backed by Democrats, maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal, refused to plea or resign his seat on the court, and was eventually acquitted on all charges. The Bush Justice Department then indicted him again. And he was acquitted again. His case is now being investigated by Congress to see if it was one of a series of overtly political and questionably meritorious prosecutions of Democratic public officials led by Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys (other prosecutions under investigation include those against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and Pennsylvania medical examiner Cyril Wecht).

One other thing: The federal charges against Diaz stemmed from his relationship with Paul Minor, a plaintiff’s attorney in Mississippi who got rich off the tobacco settlement. As Harper’s Scott Horton points out, the case against Diaz, Minor, and others was part of a GOP backlash in Mississippi against the rise and enormous influence of trial lawyers in that state. But interestingly, while Diaz is often painted as a friend of the plaintiff’s bar, it’s worth noting that Dr. Hayne is also a favorite of trial lawyers in Mississippi. Part of Hayne’s success stems from the fact that he has managed to win over both the state’s prosecutors and the state’s trial lawyers (and the county coroners, who often go out of their way to please both). Talk to any medical malpractice defense attorney in Mississippi, for example, and they’ll rant about Hayne’s absurd testimony in various tort cases for a good ten minutes (I’ll have more on this next week).

Diaz’s blistering opinion singling out Hayne in the Edmonds case, then, was actually a blow to the state’s trial lawyers—the very group for whom the feds and the state’s GOP accuse of Diaz of being a shill.  His continued presence on the court is important to keep the pressure on the state to do something about Hayne.

It would be unfortunate if South Mississippi’s voters were to take Diaz off the bench due to what looks like an overtly political federal prosecution. Right now, at least on criminal justice issues, he’s the only justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court who seems to even realize Mississippi has a problem.

Over the weekend, Mississippi’s largest newspaper confronted Dr. Steven Hayne about some of the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his CV.

First, there’s the matter of his alleged "board certification." If you’ll remember, Hayne told a Jackson TV station last fall that he was board certified in forensic pathology but "couldn’t remember" the name of the organization that had certified him. Since then, he’s been clinging to an organization called "The American Board of Forensic Pathology," which sounds much like the organization he should have a certification from, but that actually no longer exists.

The American Board of Forensic Pathology sounds official in name but doesn’t appear on a list of possible certifications put out by the National Association of Medical Examiners. A Google search for the board turned up only 10 listings.

When the board did exist in the early 1990s, it was administered through a little-known organization, the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons, whose Web site includes a link to books of Persian poetry written by its chairman.

But in 1995, the academy decided to limit its certification to clinical orthopedic surgery, clinical neurosurgery, neurology and clinical spinal surgery.

All other boards and the certifications the academy offered went away, said Nick Rebel, the academy’s executive director.

Hayne said he didn’t know the American Board of Forensic Pathology ceased to exist.

But when questioned in a 2004 murder trial if he knew the academy no longer offered board certification in forensic pathology, he replied, "I’m aware of that."

Rebel said no one these days can claim to be "board certified" by the American Board of Forensic Pathology.

Hayne said he believed the board’s nonexistence had no effect on his qualifications.

The doctor who proffered the test to Hayne was neurologist, not a forensic pathologist, and was later stripped of his medical license. The article then moves to Hayne’s failure to pass the forensic pathology exam of the American Board of Pathology, universally regarded as the only legitimate certifying organization for medical examiners.

This board certified Hayne in anatomical and clinical pathology, but he failed the exam for forensic pathology in 1989. About 80 percent of first-time test takers pass the examination, according to board officials.

Hayne said he failed because he angrily walked out of the exam.

"The questions were absurd, counselor, ludicrous, absolutely absurd," he testified in the 2004 trial. "I convey to the jury the last question, the final straw that broke the camel’s back. … The question was specifically: ‘What color is most associated with death?’ And it included the color black or white, the color red, the color green.

"In Western civilization, black is associated with death. In the Orient, white is associated with death. Green is a color of decomposition, certainly associated with death. … Blood is obviously associated with death … To me, it was just the final absurd question. So I got up, handed my paper to the proctor and said, ‘I leave, I quit. I’m not going to answer this type of material.’ "

After reading Hayne’s version of this event in The Clarion-Ledger, board officials contacted the newspaper.

"As the executive director of the American Board of Pathology I was surprised by Dr. Hayne’s description of the ’stupid question’ (related to colors associated with funerals) on his forensic pathology examination that caused him to walk out of the exam," Dr. Betsy Bennett said by e-mail. "Dr. Hayne took the forensic pathology examination in 1989. I pulled the text of this examination from our files, and there was no question on that examination that was remotely similar to Dr. Hayne’s description."

Hayne responded, "She is flat wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about."

He said he would stake his reputation and career on that question appearing on the test, saying, "It’s like remembering where you were when men landed on the moon."

I would think this would be a pretty easy thing to prove, particularly if copies of the exam are still around. If there’s no such question, Hayne’s lying, and has been using the "color question" as an excuse for his failing the exam. Of course, even if the question was on the test, it doesn’t excuse his misleading statement given thousands of times in court that he’s "board certified" in forensic pathology when in fact he failed the exam given by the only organization understood by his colleagues to be the gold standard for certification in the field.

My expose of Hayne for reason here. List of prior articles and blog posts on Hayne here.

One of the people I spoke with for my article last fall is a former high-ranking official in Mississippi government who repeatedly butt heads with Hayne and his lax standards. Unfortunately, his current employer wouldn’t allow him to be quoted for attribution, so my interview with him didn’t make the final edit of the article. But this fellow, who had to work with Hayne on a fairly regular basis, says Hayne and assistants would do everything they could to cut corners. He said they took no safety precautions, and would have 15-20 autopsies going at the same time.

But the best part came when he described for me the first time he visited one of Hayne’s all-night autopsy sessions. He said he was there with a couple of his assistants, in awe of what they were seeing, when someone suggested to Hayne that the office send out for pork sandwiches. When the food arrived, well, here’s what he told me:

“I couldn’t believe it. They handed out the food, and then they were eating pork sandwiches and smoking cigars while someone was running a bone saw on the skull of a crack prostitute.”

“I reached a point where we collected all evidence at the scene, because we couldn’t trust them to collect and preserve it properly. I know for sure that there were frequently [test] tubes coming from Hayne that had the wrong names on them,” he says.

If Mississippi would open up a formal investigation, I’m certain you’d see a lot more people like this guy come forward. Perhaps that’s why state officials won’t do it.

The Innocence Project seems to think so.

Governor Haley Barbour has appointed Steven Simpson, a judge from the Gulf Coast to head up the state’s Department of Public Safety. That’s the agency that oversees the crime lab and the medical examiner’s office. The new appointee has promised to make it a priority to get both agencies in order.

Judge Simpson is a former prosecutor and law enforcement officer. He comes from one of just a couple of areas of the state that hasn’t regularly used Hayne for autopsies. Though I’m told the guy they do use down there is nearly as bad, my sources in Mississippi say that on the whole, Simpson’s appointment is probably good news.

The other news is that the state legislature has appropriated (pdf) a barely-adequate budget to fund the state medical examiner position, something they haven’t done in more than a decade. The total budget for salaries, benefits, supplies, and so forth is just under $1 million. That should be at least enough to attract some decent candidates for the head position and run a bare-bones office, though probably not enough to adequately staff it.

Rep. Bob Evans’ amendment that would have withheld funding from the entire Department of Public Safety until a new state medical examiner is hired didn’t make it through the conference committee.

Still, if the new salary is high enough to at minimum attract a qualified, professional candidate with some integrity, it would likely spell the end of Dr. Steven Hayne’s autopsy practice. That’s a step in the right direction.

Henry Moses was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife Derinda. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Moses was by no means a sympathetic defendant. He had on two occasions plead guilty to misdemeanor domestic abuse. He and his wife were chronic alcoholics. It’s a sad story. But the evidence that Henry Moses killed his wife is spare at best. The prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on the testimony of Dr. Steven Hayne, a medical examiner whose credibility has since come under fire from his peers, the national and Mississippi chapters of the Innocence Projects, and yours truly.

Two doctors testified against Hayne at trial, including the two hospital doctors who attended to Mrs. Moses after she was admitted, as well as Dr. Leroy Riddick, the former state medical examiner for Alabama, whom the defense asked to review Hayne’s autopsy. I recently asked another doctor, Dr. Harry Bonnell, to look over Dr. Hayne’s autopsy, as well as Dr. Riddick’s review of it. Bonnell is a well-respected forensic pathologist who serves on the ethics committee of the National Association of Medical Examiners. You can check out his CV here. He has also had occasion to review a Hayne autopsy at the request of a court in the past. You can view that here (pdf). Bonnell told me he "completely" agrees with Dr. Riddick’s assessment of Dr. Hayne’s autopsy. He described Hayne’s errors in Derinda Moses autopsy as "very egregious," and concluded, "Mr. Moses needs the state or the Innocence Project to get him out of prison."

Here’s what happened:

On December 22, 2000, Henry and Derinda Moses checked into a motel for a week of drinking. According to Moses, after a few days, Derinda Moses began throwing up and convulsing. On December 26th, he brought her to the emergency room. She was unresponsive. Her organs began to fail, and a few days later, she died.

The hospital physicians determined—and maintained at trial—that Derinda Moses died of acetaminophen poisoning, which was exacerbated by her alcoholism. She had taken a considerable but unspecified amount of Tylenol over the previous few days days, in part to deal with the effects of the alcoholism, but also because she’d recently been in a car accident which required hip surgery. She used a walker to get around, which with the alcohol caused her to frequently fall.

Derinda Moses’ family obviously didn’t like her husband—and with good reason. They testified at trial that they believe he killed her. But they had no evidence of that. The state would turn to Hayne for the evidence. Hayne was asked to perform the autopsy. He asked Dr. Michael West to assist him.

Hayne testified that in his autopsy he found an 11-inch section of Derinda Moses’ bowel that had turned necrotic (essentially, it was dead). He said this is what caused her death. He then testified that he believed that "blunt force trauma" caused the damage to her bowel. Hayne’s exact words: "She died of blunt force trauma producing injury to the bowel and to the peritoneal lining, ultimately dying from shock." Hayne was next asked if he had determined the manner of death. He had, he said.

"With reasonable medical certainty, I came to the conclusion it was homicide, sir," he said. He later elaborated that the cause of death was "blunt force trauma, purposely inflicted." He theorized that the murder weapon might have been a shoe, or a fist, but that he couldn’t say for sure.

It was from this testimony that Moses was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. There was no murder weapon. There were no witnesses. Moses’ character flaws and Hayne’s testimony are all there was.

The problem with Hayne’s diagnosis is that there were no corresponding bruises on Derinda Moses’ body where she should have been struck to cause such damage to her bowel. Nor was there a "path of damage" connecting the external portion of her body where the blow would have had to have landed to her bowel. Dr. Riddick testified that you rarely if ever see a bruised bowel in adults, because there’s nothing hard for the bowel to be trapped against. if a blow to the outside of Mrs. Moses’ body caused the injury to her bowel, there should have been extensive internal and external damage. A CAT scan showed no such damage.

According to Dr. Riddick’s review of Hayne’s autopsy, Hayne also neglected to photograph Mrs. Moses’ bowel, another egregious oversight, given that his testimony was that the bowel was not only the cause of death, but indicative of homicide. In fact, the prosecutor in the case tried to impeach Dr. Riddick’s testimony by noting that only Hayne had actually seen the body firsthand. This of course is because prosecutors don’t typically want anyone but Hayne viewing a body. But that Hayne was indeed the only doctor to perform an autopsy on Moses makes his failure to adequately photograph Derinda Moses’ internal injuries all the more troubling.

Hayne’s sloppiness was also evident in other areas of the Moses autopsy. Hayne failed to notice Derinda Moses’ surgical scar from a hip surgery just a couple of months prior to her death, an oversight Dr. Bonnell again classified as egregious. In fact, Hayne not only failed to notice the surgery, he explicity wrote that "no evidence of acute medical intervention is appreciated" on the part of her body where it occurred. He also failed to notice any sign of injury or healing in her ribs, which she also fractured in the accident. This too should have been apparent.

More troubling, Dr. Riddick testified that he found in a tissue sample that approximately 80 percent of Derinda Moses’ liver cells were dead—a finding consistent with the diagnosis of Dr. Riddick and the two hospital physicians. Dr. Bonnell says that kind of liver damage should have been readily apparent to Hayne when he conducted his autopsy. It apparently wasn’t. In fact, Hayne listed Mrs. Moses’ liver and several other organs as being "unremarkable."

Hayne testified that he spoke with the coroner in the case as well as two police officers before he conducted his autopsy, something he regularly does. This isn’t uncommon, but experts I’ve spoken with say it can bias a doctor. Ideally, a medical examiner shouldn’t hear the state’s theory about what happened before conducting an autopsy. Of course, Hayne’s critics say he talks to prosecutors for precisely the opposite reason—to make sure his diagnosis matches the authorities’ theories about what happened.

One other thing Hayne didn’t do is review Derinda Moses’ medical history before reaching his conclusion about how she died. Dr. Riddick and the hospital physicians did review her history. They saw her history of alcoholism. And all of them concluded that Moses’ death was an accident, not a homicide.

In its review of the Moses case, the Mississippi Court of Appeals seems to acknowledge that the prosecution hadn’t assembled the strongest of cases. But they refrain from questioning the jury’s verdict, in large part because they find enough in Dr. Hayne’s testimony to support the jury’s verdict.

Regardless of what one may think of Mr. Moses as a person, four doctors believe he is not guilty killing his wife, and that Dr. Hayne’s diagnosis of homicide was incorrect. Like Devin Bennett and Jeffrey Havard, however, there’s no DNA test that could conclusively determine Mr. Moses’ guilt or innocence. It’s not a matter of who killed Derinda Moses, it’s whether or not she was killed at all. It’s in these types of cases that it’s especially important that forensic experts be carefully screened by courts. It’s in these types of cases that someone like Hayne can be particularly damaging.

Just another piece of damning evidence in the growing public case against Dr. Hayne, and another piece indicating that if Mississippi officials care at all about justice, it’s time to bar Hayne from testifying or performing autopsies again, and to conduct a thorough review of every case in which he’s testified.

Dr. Hayne has responded in Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger to a complaint filed by the national and Mississippi Innocence Projects to revoke his medical license. And to vouch for his credibility, he has summoned none other than District Attorney Forrest Allgood—the same guy who has had three murder convictions overturned, and who continued using "bite-mark expert" Dr. Michael West more than a decade after the disgraced dentist was exposed as a fraud.

Here, a closer look at Hayne and Allgood’s comments:

"My experience with Hayne is that 99 times out of 100 he testifies this guy died and this is how he died," Allgood said. "How is that in any way convicting innocent people?"

I’m not even sure what this means. In the Tyler Edmonds case, Hayne put his medical expertise behind a prosecutors theory that two people held the gun that fired the bullets that killed a man. His testimony in the Cory Maye case was critical in casting doubt on Maye’s credibility with the jury. In the Devin Bennett and Jeffrey Havard cases, Hayne’s testimony that infant deaths were homicides instead of accidents was really the only evidence presented against the men. Both were sentenced to death. Hayne routinely testifies to matters well beyond the mere cause of death, many times well beyond his area of expertise.

The National Association of Medical Examiners limits pathologists to fewer than 250 autopsies a year.

Hayne said such a number is arbitrary. "There’s one group that says you shouldn’t do more than 350, and there are other groups that don’t have a limit," he said. "Should I call the Innocence Project to see if I’ve done too many and stop?"

NAME is widely considered the guiding professional organization for forensic pathologists. But I’d challenge Hayne to find any medical organization willing to give its approval to the 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies he does per year. It isn’t that he does 10 or 15 more than he should. It’s that he does 5-8 times as many as he should. While testifying 2-3 times per week. And holding other jobs.

He estimates he works 110 hours a week. "Some people were put on this earth to party, and some people were put on this earth to work," he said. "I’ve always worked very hard."

And a forensic pathologist whose conclusions and trial testimony can determine whether or not someone is found guilty of murder shouldn’t be working 110 hours per week. It’s simply not possible to put in that kind of time and do an adequate job. Hayne’s history of sloppy work bears this out.

Innocence Project officials say Hayne has wrongly testified he is "board certified" in forensic pathology. By contending he is board certified, officials say this is an obvious reference to the American Board of Pathology.

Hayne disputed that claim.

He said the American Board of Pathology has never construed its board as superior. He said he is certified in anatomical pathology and clinical pathology by that board. He is certified in forensic pathology by the American Board of Forensic Pathology.

Any forensic pathologist will tell you that in order to work in most hospitals, testify in court, and generally be accepted as "board certified" in a particular medical specialty, you have to be certified by an organization approved by the American Board of Medical Specialties. And in forensic pathology, that means a certification in the sub-specialty of forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology.

No forensic pathologist I’ve talked to has heard of the "American Board of Forensic Pathology." It sounds suspiciously like the organization Hayne should have been certified by, but is just a bit off. The organization apparently doesn’t have a website. It’s also just one of several organization of dubious merit from which he has claimed certification over the years. Given that Hayne only seems willing to speak to the Clarion-Ledger, perhaps a reporter there could ask him more about this mysterious organization. Does he have an actual certificate from them? Where are they located? What did he have to do to get certified?

He said the American Board of Pathology hasn’t certified him because he walked out of the examination. He said he got angry at what he regarded as a stupid question - ranking in order what colors are associated with funerals instead of asking questions about forensic pathology.

"I’ve got a temper. I don’t put up with crap like that," he said. "I walked out and took another examination from another board."

And yet for decades thousands of forensic pathologists have managed to take the same exam without storming off in anger.

Sometimes defense lawyers will ask for the funds to hire an expert to challenge Hayne, Allgood said. "So far I have yet to see any of them come and testify, which only leads me to the conclusion they agree with what he said."

Allgood is flat-out lying. First, many times when a defense attorney in Mississippi asks the court for funds to hire an expert to challenge Hayne, he is denied. That’s what happened in the Jeffrey Havard case. Moreover, I personally know of cases in which Allgood was the prosecutor, where defense attorneys were able to procure an expert to counter Hayne. It’s not surprising to see Allgood hedge and mislead on this stuff. But he’s now brazenly lying on matters that can be pretty easily verified.

Finally, some comic relief:

Hayne said he’s the victim of modern-day McCarthyism by a group whose real aim is to gut the death penalty in Mississippi and other states.

I’ll have more on Mississippi’s wacky medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne over the next few days. But today, the national and Mississippi Innocence Projects have filed a whopping 1,000-page complaint to the Mississippi Board of State Medical Licensure calling for the revocation of Hayne’s medical license.

The report "outlines several violations – spanning two decades – of the Mississippi state law that regulates medical practice," including the Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks cases, as well as several of the cases I first reported for reason last October.

From the press release:

“Steven Hayne’s long history of misconduct, incompetence and fraud has sent truly innocent people to death row or to prison for life. This is precisely why regulations are in place to revoke medical licenses. Steven Hayne should never practice medicine in Mississippi again, and the complaint we filed today is an important step toward restoring integrity in forensic science statewide – and restoring confidence in the state’s criminal justice system,” said Peter Neufeld, Co-Director of the Innocence Project.

[...]

“We have only presented the tip of the iceberg to the State Board of Medical Licensure, but this evidence shows Steven Hayne’s unprofessional, dishonorable and unethical conduct that has deceived, defrauded and harmed the public,” said W. Tucker Carrington, Director of the Mississippi Innocence Project.

The complaint filed today says, “We believe the conduct in this complaint alone is sufficient to justify immediate revocation of Dr. Hayne’s license … His work compromises the accuracy and integrity of medicine and criminal justice throughout the state. We urge you to put an end to his misconduct through an expeditious, thorough investigation of his work and revocation of his license."

In February, I spoke with the head of the Mississippi State Medical Association, who said she would move to revoke Hayne’s membership in that organization.

AP coverage of the complaint here.

This past weekend in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, former Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Louisa Dixon wrote a lengthy piece calling for the full funding of the state’s medical examiner position, including a staff and budget significant enough for the office to handle the bulk of the state’s autopsies. She also says the state medical examiner should report to an independent oversight board to prevent whoever holds the position and his subordinates from being unduly influenced or coerced by the state’s district attorneys.

Dixon’s op-ed is spot-on. One thing I would add, though: Mississippi is in the position it’s in now not by benign neglect or accident, but by design. Where any sensible person would look at the current system down there and see a disaster, the state’s coroners, district attorneys, and to a large extent its plaintiff’s attorneys have long seen and utilized a system that efficiently meets their needs. The DAs get autopsy results that help them win convictions. The trial lawyers get results that help them win malpractice and negligence suits. And the coroners get the benefits that come with making both the DAs and trial lawyers happy (use your imagination as to what those benefits might be).

The state legislature has benefited by not having to fund a modern state medical examiner’s office and staff. All the money paid for autopsies in Mississippi comes from the individual counties, not the state treasury.

Indeed, the only people who don’t benefit are the relatively powerless—the wrongfully accused, particularly those who can’t afford to hire their own expert to rebut Dr. Hayne at trial; the families of the deceased whose bodies are sent through Dr. Hayne’s assembly-line autopsy practice; the families of those whose deaths may have been caused by criminal acts, but that for whatever reason Dr. Hayne determined died by "natural causes" or suicide; and the families of crime victims for which Dr. Hayne and an overzealous DA fingered the wrong man.

Such is why the last two people to hold the office of state medical examiner—Dr. Emily Ward and Dr. Lloyd White—were run out of town when they tried to implement reform. In fact, everyone who has held that office has encountered resistance, going back even before Dr. Hayne started practicing in Mississippi. The very first state medical examiner in Mississippi was a woman named Faye Spruill, who took office in 1979. Like those who would take office after her, Spruill encountered problems with the coroners and DAs, as well as with the legislature, which wouldn’t give her office enough money to keep up with the pace of autopsies that needed to be completed.

Spruill is advanced in years now, and when I spoke with her last year she couldn’t remember much at all about her time in office. But Dr. White, who would hold the position several years later, told me he sat in on state legislature hearings in the early 1980s in which Spruill threatened to resign if her office wasn’t given a proper budget. White says that after the hearing, a state senator approached him and expressed his outrage that a woman would show up at a hearing and try to demand that lawmakers give her more money. According to White, the senator said, "Well I’ll tell you what we did, we just cut her tits off. She won’t be coming here trying to tell us what to do anymore."  Sure enough, Spruill resigned from the office soon after.

Go back and peruse area newspaper articles from the 1990s during the tenures of White and Ward, and you’ll find repeated references to the tumultuous history of the office. Mississippi’s coroners and DAs have always wanted a compliant, pliable medical examiner to do autopsies for them, and when the state medical examiner has been an obstacle to that arrangement, they’ve rebelled, culminating in perhaps the most absurd example, Dr. Michael West and his fellow coroners’ childish petition calling for the resignation of the state’s last official medical examiner, Dr. Emily Ward. One of their chief complaints was that Dr. Ward would sometimes testify for defendants when her autopsy results differed from what a prosecutor wanted to hear.  West also called Ward "incompetent," which given what we now know about Dr. West, is laughable.

Louisa Dixon’s recommendations are excellent, and would go a long way toward adding some accountability to the autopsy system there (if the state wanted to be a pioneer, its lawmakers might even look to some of the suggestions reason contributor Roger Koppl has made).

But more fundamentally, the state needs to rein in its coroners and prosecutors, who over the years have accumulated way too much power.  Dr. Hayne and Dr. West are mere symptoms.  There were other pushover "experts" before them, and unless the state’s criminal justice system becomes more transparent and accountable, there will be others after them. 

Mississippi State Rep. Bob Evans—also Cory Maye’s chief counsel—introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill this week that would cut off all funding to the state medical examiner’s office until the Department of Public Safety hires a board-certified state examiner.

The amendment was approved, and now moves into a conference committee to reconcile it with the state senate version of the same bill. The amendment would have to survive the conference committee to become law, but if it did, it would put a dent in the 1,500 or so autopsies done each year in the state by Dr. Steven Hayne. If the state were to hire a competent person with the wherewithal to clean things up down there, it could put Hayne out of business entirely.

"State law requires that we have a board-certified medical examiner and, unfortunately, we haven’t had one for more than 10 years," Evans said Wednesday. "This gets specifically into my practicing of law - that’s why I was on it today and why I will continue to beat that drum."

[...]

Evans said he has also dealt with Hayne in his own trials before.

"I was involved in a case where a body was skeletonized - I mean that’s all that was left from the waist up was bone - and Hayne testified in court that the person had died as a result of strangulation," Evans recounted. "I’ve had forensic pathologists - board certified pathologists - tell me that was ridiculous. The case ended in acquittal."

Evans said instances such as these were the reasons why he, along with Rep. Brandon Jones, D-Pascagoula, sought to amend the bill to require the state medical examiner’s office to hire a board-certified examiner. Evans said that if the state were going to fund the office, then a full-time examiner should be in place and that examiner should be in full compliance with state law.

"Since we do have the office and we’re funding it, we ought to use it," Evans said. "We should not be having to depend on someone like Dr. Hayne, who is not board-certified, doing these autopsies on which people’s freedom - and sometimes their lives - depend."

Meanwhile, despite all that’s come out over the last several months, Hayne is still doing the bulk of the state’s autopsies.

My October 2007 reason feature on Hayne here.

Wow:

When Willie Mae Galmore buried her daughter in 2004, she was left with a sinking feeling that the person in the casket was not her child. DNA testing has confirmed her suspicions and now she’s on a mission to find out what happened.

Authorities reported in June 2004 that Galmore’s daughter, Rochelle Thomas, died in a car accident. She was buried in Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Lyon after a closed casket funeral.

In August 2007, the body was exhumed at Galmore’s request and DNA proved the woman was not Galmore’s child. Even more disturbing, the body is likely that of an unidentified male.

See if anything in this passage jumps out at you:

Thomas, who was a 34-year-old mother of three at the time of the accident, was reportedly found dead on June 12, 2004, beside her wrecked car in a ravine in Vicksburg.

When her mother asked then-Warren County Coroner John Thomason if she could come identify the body, she was allegedly told no due to the state of decomposition.

Thomason then told Galmore that he identified the body as belonging to Thomas and sent the body to Mississippi Mortuary Services to undergo an autopsy by Dr. Steven Hayne.

“Don’t come down here is what they told me,” Galmore said.

How could this have happened?

Meredith says there are a number of possible scenarios for the mixup. One possibility, he said, is that there were two people in Thomas’ car and her body was thrown so far from the wreck it was never found.

Or, he said, the bodies could have been switched at some point in the process between the wreck and autopsy and funeral, and Thomas is buried in someone else’s grave.

The OC Weekly follows up on an absolutely outrageous case in which a carjacking suspect took a plea under a direct threat from the trial judge that he’d put the man in prison for life if he continued to maintain his innocence and was still convicted. This, after DNA evidence excluded the man. The crime lab expert says when she showed the test results to the prosecutor, she said she "didn’t care" about the findings, "I want him not excluded." More disturbingly, she added,

About every week, we ask the crime lab to reconsider findings. Sometimes, they make changes.

Can’t think of a better argument for reforming the forensics system. Who the hell are prosecutors to ask crime lab experts to “reconsider” their findings? Findings are findings. They’re supposed to be grounded in science. If technicians in Orange County are “reconsidering” their findings at the request of prosecutors, they’re either sloppy the first time around, or they’re tweaking their results to help the state win convictions. Neither prospect reflects well on them, or on justice in Orange County. Of course, the prosecutor could just be lying about all of this. Which, given her conduct in this case, doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

But kudos to the crime lab technicians in this particular case for holding their ground. In fact, the technician here was prepared to testify for the defense. As she absolutely should do–and be permitted to do–when prosecutors proceed with a case in the face of exculpatory forensic evidence.

The suspect was later exonerated when the crime lab was able to match the DNA to a career criminal.

(Hat tip: The Innocence Blog)

Via the Clarion-Ledger, the national Innocence Project is currently representing seven clients in Mississippi, while reviewing 111 other cases. The Mississippi Innocence Project (which is separate) is looking closely at 10 other cases, and reviewing at about three dozen others where Drs. West and/or Hayne have testified.

The next year or so should be interesting.

The Clarion-Ledger reports today that Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood has now officially dropped all charges against Levon Brooks, who spent more than a decade in prison for a crime another man now admits he committed. That now makes three people Allgood has convicted of murder who were later exonerated or acquitted. And he kept one of them—Kennedy Brewer—in prison an extra five years after DNA testing cleared him, because Allgood refused to let go of testimony from disgraced bite-mark "expert" Dr. Michael West.

There’s not much other news in the article, save for this:

Neither Brewer nor Brooks is getting compensation from Mississippi for the years they wrongly spent behind bars, but they can bring lawsuits.

Mississippi’s legislators will probably want to set up some sort of structured compensation system fairly quickly. I have a feeling federal jurors aren’t going to be kind to the state as these exonerations pile up, and it comes out just how ready and willing the state’s prosecutors have been to put bad expert testimony into evidence.

The state’s second-largest newspaper says it’s time to investigate Mississippi’s embattled medical examiner.

And in pretty strong language:

Even if it means that all of the cases that Hayne and West worked on come under review, the investigation should advance. Even if it costs thousands of dollars and thousands of hours, it will be worth it if even one person wrongly convicted is freed or wins a new trial.

[...]

The Innocence Project should be commended for its efforts and the Mississippi judicial system, already under a cloud of suspicion from the indictment of powerful attorney Dickie Scruggs and others, should be ashamed.

I don’t agree with this part, though:

We also have to wonder why defense attorneys did not raise questions about the so-called experts’ testimony. Why did it take the efforts of a New York-based group to ask the tough questions and do the heavy lifting?

I might add that a certain journalist from Washington, D.C. did a fair amount of lifting in all of this, too.

And while I have certainly heard some complaints about inadequacies with Mississippi’s defense bar, there are several reasons why they’ve been unsuccessful in challenging Hayne.  First, the guy’s been getting certified by the state’s courts for 20 years.  It’s understandable if, after a dozen or so unsuccessful attempts to get the guy discredited, a defense lawyer might through up his hands, and conclude that he’s better off focusing his limited time on other aspects of a case.  Second, defense attorneys down there have tried to challenge his certification as an expert witness.  They get shot down every time.  Even since my articles on Hayne came out last fall, several defense attorneys in Mississippi have tried to file briefs calling for a Daubert hearing on Hayne.  Thus far, they’ve been rejected every time.  In one case, they were rejected even when they merely sought funds so an indigent defendant could hire an outside expert to review Hayne’s work.

Finally, there have been warnings about Hayne.  The state’s last two official medical examiners tried to sound the alarm about him in the early and mid 1990s.  State Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz warned about him in his opinion in the Tyler Edmonds case last year.  The judges in Mississippi’s courts have heard the argument against Hayne’s credibility as an expert countless times in civil cases.  Hayne also makes a lot of money testifying for plaintiff’s attorneys in medical malpractice cases.  In those cases, where the defendants tend to have the money to put up an aggressive defense, Hayne’s shortcomings have been exposed at trial and in depositions on several occasions. And the state’s best criminal defense attorneys like Andre de Gruy and Rob McDuff have been trying to call attention to Hayne for years.

Despite all of these warnings, nearly every institution in the state of Mississippi—the courts; the legislature; the executive; the professional organizations; and, yes, most certainly the press—have failed to do anything about Dr. Hayne.  It’s unfair to put this all at the feet of the criminal defense bar, which is overworked and underfunded.  Many, many far more powerful people in the state could have corrected this problem a long time ago.  They didn’t, and still haven’t.

Yesterday, I posted on the national and Mississippi Innocence Projects’ open records request, which the organizations sent to all of the state’s district attorneys. They’re for information related to autopsies embattled medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne has performed in the state crime lab in Jackson.

The A.P. reports today…

District Attorney Ben Creekmore, president of the Mississippi Prosecutors Association, said he won’t comply with the request, citing provisions in the state’s Open Records Law that prohibit the release of documents related to criminal enforcement or that contain personal information about victims.

"There are families all across the state of Mississippi who would be affected by the wholesale release of information related to the death of their loved ones," Creekmore said.

Creekmore either hasn’t read the request, or he’s intentionally mistating what it entails. The request specifically allows for the redaction of personal information. It’s not a demand for the "wholesale release of information" on possible victims of crime, it asks only for the names of the people on whom the autopsies were performed, which is certainly public information.

Creekmore’s obstinance isn’t surprising, but it’s also unacceptable. There are now very serious concerns about the quality of Dr. Hayne’s work, raised not just by me and the state and national Innocence Projects, but by Hayne’s peers in the medical profession both in and out of the state, by people who have had to work with him in the state crime lab, by the last two official state medical examiners, by law enforcement officials in the state, and by the professional organizations where Hayne is a member. As an officer of the court and head of Mississippi’s prosecutors’ organization, Creekmore not only shouldn’t be blocking attempts by outside groups to gauge the scope and extent of the damage Hayne has done, he ought to be conducting his own investigation.

The national Innocence Project and the Mississippi Innocence Project have sent open records requests to every district attorney in the state of Mississippi. The request asks for a copy of every autopsy embattled medical examiner Steven Hayne has performed on their behalf at Mississippi’s state crime lab facility in Jackson.

Though Hayne is not a state employee, he began conducting his marathon, all-night autopsy sessions at the state facility a few years ago. In the 15 or so years prior to that, he did all of his autopsies at a funeral home owned by Rankin County Coroner Jimmy Roberts. My sources say Hayne and Roberts had a falling out in roughly 2005, leading Hayne to move his operation to the state lab.

So while Mississippi has gone 14 years without an official state medical examiner (even though the position is mandated by state law), the state nevertheless allowed Hayne, a private doctor, to move into the official state lab to conduct autopsies, despite that the fact that he isn’t board certified, and therefore is barred from holding the position that’s supposed to be using that facility.

The way the open records request is phrased is interesting. The idea is that because Mississippi’s state crime lab gets federal funding, there may be cause to call for a federal investigation if Hayne is doing fraudulent work at the federally-subsidized lab. You might actually be able to argue that the sheer number of autopsies he does on a daily basis alone amounts to fraud, or at least to a kind of de facto negligence.

Mississippi does have a notably stingy open records law, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of compliance the Innocence Project gets. While researching my article on Dr. Hayne, I had a very basic, unintrusive request denied on bogus privacy grounds. But perhaps the Innocence Project’s high-profile will exert some extra public pressure and scrutiny on state officials to turn over the records.

The Innocence Project also has a nice summary of coverage of the Hayne scandal thus far here.

Finally—and most importantly!—my coverage of Hayne and bite mark quack Dr. Michael West made "News of the Weird" this week.

The lawyer’s client isn’t the most sympathetic defendant in the world (even by her own account, she apparently abandoned her kid in a public area, then went back to get him) but here’s yet more evidence of Dr. Hayne magically finding a prosecutor’s preferred cause of death where another medical professional couldn’t.

Note too this passage:

State pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne ruled that the child died of suffocation. Under state law, a petition can be filed with the state medical examiner, asking for further review of an autopsy conclusion.

But Tina Funderburk’s attorney, Hinds County Assistant Public Defender Matthew Eichelberger, said that since there is no state medical examiner, his request might be moot.

If you’ve been wondering why the Mississippi state legislature has refused to adequately fund a state medical examiner position all these years, the passage above provides a pretty plausible explanation, doesn’t it?

With no state medical examiner, there’s no one for defense attorneys to petition for a review of Hayne’s work. Meaning there’s no one to make sure he isn’t cutting corners or fudging his diagnoses. If you’re an indigent defendant and can’t hire your own expert to review him, you’re at the mercy of the court to provide funding for your own expert.  Which in Mississippi generally means you’re pretty much out of luck.

If you’re wondering why Mississippi doesn’t just give Hayne the state position, they can’t because he isn’t qualified. State law requires the official medical examiner be board-certified. Hayne isn’t.

So though Mississippi law seems to call for some safeguards to ensure the quality of autopsies done in the state, the legislature, executive, and prosecutors have found a way around them.  Don’t fund the office, and Hayne gets free reign.