More welcome skepticism of junk science in the court room.

Lawsuits filed in Victoria, Texas, allege that Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Pikett and his team of hounds — James Bond, Quincy and Clue — failed controversial sniff tests known as “scent lineups.”

Much like in traditional lineups, the dogs link human scents left at crime scenes to samples from suspects.

In each case, the suits allege, Pikett’s dogs called attention to the wrong person. Both former suspects have been cleared.

This part is fun:

Ken Sparks, county attorney in Colorado County, Texas, an enthusiastic supporter of Pikett’s work, says he understands some of the skepticism.

“Everybody who encounters it the first time says, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” Sparks says. “That’s what I said before I first saw it work.”

Pikett says the lawsuits are just attempts to win large awards. “It’s all about money,” he says.

One of the men wrongly identified by the police dog was jailed for three months before being exonerated by DNA testing. The greedy bastard actually thinks he should compensated for that.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about another police dog in Orlando whose “testimony” has come under fire.

The Supreme Court ruled today that the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause gives criminal defendants the right to cross examine the scientists who issue forensics reports that are entered into evidence. The breakdown of the 5-4 ruling was interesting, with Justice Scalia’s majority opinion joined by Justices Thomas, Ginsberg, Souter and Stevens. Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, and Breyer dissented.

Most interesting is that both the majority and dissenting opinions noted recent reports exposing the disturbingly high rate of error in areas of forensic science once thought to be foolproof. Scalia’s majority opinion states pretty matter-of-factly that the Confrontation Clause preserves the right to question forensic experts, and that the Court’s decision would have been the same even “if all analysts possessed the scientific acumen of Mme. Curie and the veracity of Mother Theresa.”

But there’s a pretty good chance that in the coming years we’ll see more challenges to the reliability and admissibility of various types of forensic testimony. So it’s encouraging to see that the justices are both aware of and have specifically taken note of the problems with the system.

My prior writing on the forensics issue here.

In part four, I talk about my reporting on Dr. Hayne and West and the problems with the forensics system.

In part five, I suggest five ways to reform the criminal justice system.

Incredible story from Orlando, where police and prosecutors were apparently convicting people of violent crimes based almost exclusively on the “testimony” of a police dog whose handler claimed has extraordinary powers.

Last weekend, we looked at the case of Bill Dillon, the Brevard County resident imprisoned for 27 years before DNA tests set him free…

At least two other men suffered the same fate — and another shared link: a dog.

Not just any dog. A wonder dog helped convict all three men: a German shepherd named Harass II, who wowed juries with his amazing ability to place suspects at the scenes of crimes.

Harass could supposedly do things no other dog could: tracking scents months later and even across water, according to his handler, John Preston.

Judges and juries apparently bought this crap for years. It finally came to an end when Judge Gilbert Goshorn ordered the dog to perform a basic tracking test after Preston claimed the dog had alerted to a suspect’s scent at a crime scene six months after the murder. The dog failed.

So far, three people have been cleared after collectively spending more than 50 years in prison, all of whom were convicted primarily due to the dog’s alerts, despite other evidence exculpating them. Florida criminal justice activists say there may be as 60 more people wrongly convicted thanks to Preston and his dog.

Yet Florida officials don’t seem to care, and have no plans to proactively look for other people who may have been wrongly imprisoned.

In a statement, [Florida State's Attorney] Wolfinger’s office said it didn’t have a list of the cases in which Preston testified — nor even the records that would allow the office to compile such a list.

Essentially, Wolfinger contends it’s up to defendants to raise questions about these decades-old cases.

“Defendants have had rights in Florida to challenge their convictions through a well established post-conviction process,” the statement said.

A similar response came from Crist’s office, which said: “We believe this is a judicial issue and should be handled on a case-by-case analysis through the judicial system.”

A spokeswoman for the state’s top cop, Attorney General Bill McCollum, simply declared the matter beyond her boss’s “jurisdiction.”

Minnesota District Attorney James Backstrom is making an impressive early run at the 2009 Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.  Backstrom, you may remember, is the prosecutor who sent threatening emails to his county medical examiner because she had the audacity to testify and let her staff testify for the defense in other jurisdictions (to my surprise, I see that last week he was publicly reprimanded for those emails).

Backstrom’s latest effort toward winning the award is this spectacularly awful op-ed arguing against a bill in Minnesota that would allow terminally ill patients to use medical marijuana to alleviate pain and suffering in their final days. The bill was so narrowly drawn, it even excluded from its list of acceptable users cancer patients who might use the drug to combat the nausea for chemotherapy.

That wasn’t enough for Backstrom, who argued that the bill still “sends a message to our children that [marijuana] is safe to use when it is clearly not.” The op-ed, which Backstrom wrote on behalf of several law enforcement agencies, employs all the usual drug warrior nonsense, including grossly overestimating the amount of usuable pot you can expect from a typical plant, repeated scare quotes around the word “medical,” and the circular reasoning that marijuana is dangerous and addictive because the government says it is.

The Minnesota Independent has a good refutation of Backstrom’s op-ed, though they appear to have misspelled his name.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed the bill this weekend, rather insultingly proclaiming his compassion and empathy for the sick in the process. Pawlenty cited law enforcement organization opposition to the bill as his primary reason for vetoing it.

It’s up now at Reason.

This ought to prove once and for all that this guy is a complete fraud, and every case he has ever testified in demands a review.

I note this in the article, but I was really struck watching the video how convincing West actually sounds. You know before the video starts that the photo and the dental mold have nothing to do with one another. But if unless they might have forensics, scientific, or dental training, it isn’t at all difficult to see how he could have swayed judges and juries into buying his bullshit.

Tomorrow, I’ll have another investigative piece here at Reason about self-proclaimed Mississippi bite mark expert, Dr. Michael West. This latest article details a sting an attorney set up on West that pretty conclusively shows West to be a fraud.

It’s good timing, because earlier this month, West gave an interview to the A.P. in which he defended his court testimony over the years. The interview came in response to  recent lawsuit filed by Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two men convicted of separate rapes and murders almost entirely thanks to West’s bite mark expertise. The two were later exonerated by DNA evidence. A third man has since confessed to both crimes.

Much of the interview consists of West’s usual defense—that someone else must have raped and killed the victims while the men West helped convict bit them. It’s absurd. It would require two boyfriends, on occasions two years apart, who lived within miles of one another, to have each bitten the young daughters of their girlfriends while a third man, the same man, raped and killed the girls.

But there are a couple of parts of the article that are worth addressing. First:

“What did I testify to that was incorrect? If they knew that they didn’t kill this child and I never testified that they killed this child, where have I torted them?” West said.

He “torted” them by giving testimony unsupported by any scientific literature (other than journal articles written by West himself), knowing full well that his testimony would be used to help convict them. West’s behavior in the Jimmie Duncan case, which occurred at about the same time as the Brooks and Brewer cases, and which I wrote about last April, suggests that at the very least he at the time was employing a method of analysis that has been thoroughly discredited, even by other experts in the already suspect field of forensic odontology. That’s at best. At worst, he was manufacturing evidence.

West, in court documents filed this week, also says his testimony wasn’t the basis of Brewer’s conviction, saying it wasn’t the “the centerpiece of the prosecution.”

This is false. The bite marks were the only physical evidence linking either Brooks or Brewer to either crime. Moreover, when DNA testing on the semen found in the victim initially cleared Kennedy Brewer back in 2002, District Attorney Forrest Allgood refused to exonerate Brewer, citing West’s bite mark testimony as proof that even if Brewer didn’t rape and kill the little girl, the bite marks West was able to match up showed Brewer must have had something to do with her death. Allgood’s clinging to West’s testimony kept Brewer in prison an extra five years.

Speaking of Allgood:

“I told Dr. West years ago that we were not going to use him anymore because, quite frankly, he carries too much baggage,” said District Attorney Forrest Allgood in Columbus. “You spent your whole trial defending him as opposed to trying the defendant.”

I don’t know what Allgood means by “years ago,” but again, he was relying on West’s testimony as late as 2007 to keep Kennedy Brewer in jail. Allgood also continued using West well after West was suspended by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1994. And note that Allgood doesn’t say he stopped using West because West is unscientific. Only because it made it harder to win and protect convictions.

“I don’t want to do any more death information. I don’t want public office,” West said. “I’ve lost faith in the system.”

Tragic. Reminds me of the old Groucho Marx line, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

District Attorney Ronnie Harper of Lauderdale County said West was once accepted as an expert by courts all over the South.

“This is not some witch doctor that people were calling because they didn’t have any other evidence. People thought the guy knew what he was talking about,” Harper said.

This is partially true. West was accepted as an expert by courts all over the south. But he was also getting calls because prosecutors didn’t have any other evidence, or at least not enough to ensure a conviction. And because prosecutors were so eager to win convictions, they didn’t bother to look at West’s ridiculous claims with any skepticism. Any scientist who claims he has developed a test that only he can perform, and that can’t be duplicated or photographed—as West did with his black light and yellow goggles method of identifying bite marks—isn’t a scientist. And his test isn’t science. Plenty of people in the forensics community were sending out red flags about West dating back to the early 1990s. Prosecutors refused to heed those warnings out of self-interest. The “everyone else was doing it” defense doesn’t fly.

Alternate light imaging that West pioneered is still being used today, said Dr. Robert Barsley, a Louisiana State University dental professor and the secretary of the American Academy of Forensic Science.

“In fact, in dentistry today, it’s used to detect cancer,” said Barsley, a friend of West.
Barsley acknowledged the attention surrounding West hasn’t helped the use of bite mark evidence at trial.

“Certainly in some cases, not only Dr. West’s cases, people disagreed with the results of odontology. Anytime you have disagreements that lessens the impact of the evidence,” Barsley said.

Penalty flag on the A.P reporter, here. It would probably be helpful to know that the expert defending West in this passage is not only a friend, but was actually a co-author on many of West’s journal articles about the use of fluorescent light to identify bite marks. Barslay absolutely has an interest in defending West’s methods, given that he helped popularize them. That should have been included in the article.

I hadn’t heard that some form of West’s methods for bite mark identification are now being use to detect cancer. That may be. But I’m not sure how that’s relevant to their efficacy in identifying bite marks, and matching them to one suspect to the exclusion of everyone else.

Finally, Barsley’s understatement of what’s at stake here is laughable. This is not about “people” disagreeing with West’s testimony. And it’s not about the “impact” of odontological evidence. It’s about near unanimity among forensic scientists that West has for years been giving testimony based on forensic methods that have zero basis in science. And he’s been doing it to help put people in prison. Or send them to death row. West’s methods are pretty roundly condemned even within the field of forensic odontology, a field that itself was recently lambasted by a report published by the National Academy of Sciences.

More coming tomorrow.

Words fail:

With no medical examiner or pathologist at the top of the state’s food chain, Attala County Coroner Sam Bell asked the Attala County Board of Supervisors to consider hiring Dr. Steve Hayne as the county’s pathologist.

Bell said Hayne had been hired by 38 other counties and he wanted Attala County to be the 39th. He said it would be at no additional cost to the county.

For years, many counties had relied on Dr. Steve Hayne to do autopsies. But in August, Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson removed Hayne from a list of approved pathologists.

The state has contracted with Forensic Medical Inc. of Nashville to conduct autopsies here. The company is paid $1,000 per autopsy.

Bell said with the Nashville company, there is a three to four month turnaround to getting the autopsies.

The company rotates a pathologist every week to perform autopsies in Mississippi. The pathologist works out of the medical examiner’s office at the state Crime Lab.

Bell added that the company’s reports are also not has extensive as the reports were from Hayne. He said District Attorney Doug Evans’ office was in favor of using Hayne.

I’m sure he is. Hayne’s typical turnaround time on an autopsy report was 6-7 months, though if there was a homicide that might require his testimony, he could get it all done quite a bit more quickly. When he was fired by the state last summer, he had a backlog of 600 cases.

Meanwhile, it’s been more than a year now, and the state still has not hired a state medical examiner, a position that’s required by state law, but has been vacant for 14 years. Oddly, the Clarion-Ledger article states that the state’s coroners and district attorneys thus far have had no complaints about the private firm in Nashville.

Browse my prior reporting on Hayne and Mississipi’s broken forensics system here.

More problems with the Houston crime lab, as a man in prison 22 years after being convicted of a rape and robbery looks to be innocent.

A jury convicted Gary Alvin Richard in a 1987 attack on a nursing student in a trial based largely on blood-typing evidence from the Houston Police Department crime lab. But, prosecutors and the defense attorney agree, new tests completed Friday show that an HPD analyst misled jurors at Richard’s trial and failed to report evidence that may have helped him.

Based on the new tests, both sides will ask a judge next week to release Richard on bond while they sort out what happened in his case.

“This is a new chapter, among many, of mistakes that were made, of sloppy work at the crime lab,” said Bob Wicoff, Richard’s lawyer. “Most troubling are the results that were not passed on to people who needed them.”

Richard’s case abounds with issues common to wrongful convictions. Among them:

The victim identified him some seven months after the attack. HPD crime lab analysts came to conflicting conclusions about the evidence, but reported only the results favorable to the case. Physical evidence collected in what is known as a “rape kit” has been destroyed, a victim of poor evidence preservation practices, leaving nothing for DNA testing now.

“The real crime is that another rape kit has been destroyed or discarded,” Wicoff said. “The standards for preserving evidence were less stringent in 1987, but that is no excuse.”

Without the rape kit, analysts at a California lab tested Richard’s body fluids and drew conclusions that Wicoff said establish his innocence.

“He could not have been the source of the semen at the crime scene,” Wicoff said.

Prosecutors have agreed that Richard should be released for the time being, but aren’t yet conceding that he’s innocent.

Richard’s case is one of more than 400 reviewed after investigators found evidence of corruption, mishandled evidence, and general incompetence in the Houston crime lab. So far, at least three other people have been wrongly convicted because of mistakes by the people working in it.

The Innocence Project of New York has asked for a review of an old Pennsylvania rape conviction based largely on dubious bite mark testimony. John Kunco was convicted in 1992 of the brutal rape of a 55-year-old woman. The woman survived the attack. Kunco is serving a 45 to 90 year sentence.

The main evidence against Kunco was the woman’s identification of his voice (he apparently has a lisp) and testimony from two bite mark analysts who claimed they could definitively match marks on the woman’s shoulder to Kunco’s dentition. Blood and hair samples collected at the crime scene were inconclusive.

Two forensic odonotologists, or bite mark experts, named Michael N. Sobel and Thomas J. David testified that they were able to use ultraviolet light to isolate and photograph the woman’s wounds. Based on that photograph they were able to match the wounds to Kunco’s teeth, to the exclusion of anyone else. Their testimony grows more absurd when you consider that the photograph was taken five months after the rape, after the wounds had mostly healed.

Sobel and David wrote an article about their analysis in the Kunco case for a 1994 edition of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. In that article, they explain that “the technique used followed the recommendations developed by other odontologists.” One of the two footnotes to that sentence points to an article written by none other than . . . now-disgraced Mississippi bite mark expert, Dr. Michael West.

The Innocence Project is trying to get the bite mark testimony thrown out while lawyers await the results of more sophisticated DNA testing unavailable at the time of Kunco’s trial.

As I noted in February, a congressionally-commissioned report published by the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year states emphatically that there’s no scientific evidence to support the notion that an expert can match bite marks made on human skin to the dentition of a single suspect.

A mother in Alabama was released after nine months in prison when several forensic pathologists said Alabama medical examiner Dr. Corinne Stern misdiagnosed an infant’s cause of death. The state’s chief medical examiner now plans to re-open 100 prior homicide cases in which Stern performed the autopsy.

The judge said in 30 years of law practice he had never seen an expert make a mistake so bad. He praised District Attorney Chris McCool for listening to a defense expert who raised the first red flags about the flawed autopsy.

“What has happened in this courtroom today is absolutely unprecedented,” said Moore.

Police found out about the baby when a couple who had been lined up to adopt the child called authorities. Lee told police what happened, but Stern’s autopsy concluded the baby was suffocated.

The body had bruises on the forehead and mouth, she wrote, indicating the use of force.

Once Lee’s defense questioned the autopsy, McCool got other experts to review the case. Evidence during the hearing showed six different forensics experts found the baby died of pneumonia caused by an infection and was stillborn. What Stern thought were bruises were actually signs of decomposition.

Stern is now working as the medical examiner for Webb County, Texas.

Troubling as Stern’s mistake is, the DA, judge, and chief medical examiner in Alabama deserve a ton of credit for recognizing the problem, addressing it head-on instead of covering it up, and taking measures to see what other damage Stern may have done during her time in Alabama.

Mississippi, are you listening?

Over the weekend, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Steven Hayne and Michael West. This part of the story is interesting:

The lawsuits filed in February represent only one side of the legal argument. Plaintiffs’ attorney Rob McDuff of Jackson said Friday he’s still waiting for a response from West.

“It took a while to serve them with the papers because it was hard to track down West,” McDuff said.

Attorney Robin Roberts of Hattiesburg, who has represented West in other cases, said he had not seen West, whose dentist office is now closed, in at least a year.

In cases just two years apart, Brooks and Brewer were each convicted of raping and murdering the young daughters of their girlfriends, almost entirely due to the bite mark testimony Hayne and West gave at trial.

Between them, the two men served more than 30 years in prison. Brewer spent most of his time on death row. Both were released last year after a check of the state’s DNA database matched a man named Justin Albert Johnson. Johnson then confessed to both crimes.

Archive of my prior reporting on Hayne and West here.