Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood has come under fire since two men he prosecuted for murder were exonerated last month. Allgood kept Kennedy Brewer in prison an extra six years after DNA testing cleared him, because he clung to the testimony of bite mark fraud Dr. Michael West.

Nevertheless, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood recently defended Allgood in the Columbus Commercial Dispatch.

“Forrest Allgood has been a straight arrow. He’s always played it by the rules,” Hood said. “I don’t think there was any prosecutorial misconduct on his part.”

He said any jury would have rendered a guilty verdict based on the circumstantial evidence and witness testimony Allgood believed to be true when he prosecuted the two defendants. “There was no rush to judgment,” Allgood said. “It was done as best as it could be.”

"Straight arrow?" The guy has now convicted three people of murder who were later exonerated or acquitted. In the case of Kennedy Brewer, whom Allgood prosecuted for raping and killing his girlfriend’s daughter while babysitting her, Allgood defended his pursuit of the wrong man to ABC News by noting there was no sign of forced entry into the home, and that there "cobwebs" on the window to the little girl’s room. Actually, the window had a gaping hole in it. Allgood next told ABC News that Brewer became a suspect because he showed little interest in the girl’s disappearance. Actually, as ABC News notes, Brewer joined family and neighbors in a frantic search for the girl.

So not only has Allgood not been a "straight arrow," he’s still not telling the truth.

In my article on Dr. Steven Hayne last fall, I noted that when Dr. Lloyd White left his contentious tenure as Mississippi’s second-to-last medical examiner, he wrote a letter to a local newspaper laying out his frustrations with Hayne and the state’s coroners and district attorneys. That letter contained an interesting passage about Allgood:

White also cited a case in which he had performed an autopsy on a woman who’d been found dead in her bathtub. White concluded it wasn’t immediately possible to determine a cause of death; he needed to wait for the results of toxicology and microscopic tests. According to White’s letter, he soon received a phone call from Hayne, who told him the body had been taken to Hayne’s office for a second examination at the request of Forrest Allgood, the district attorney for Clay, Lowndes, Noxubee, and Oktibbeha counties. Although White was the state medical examiner at the time, he said the second autopsy was performed “surreptitiously, without my knowledge or permission.”

Allgood already had a suspect he wanted to charge with the crime, White said, and “he was afraid my autopsy wouldn’t provide him with the evidence he needed.” (Allgood’s office did not respond to requests for an interview.) According to White, Hayne told him he had concluded that the woman was strangled. White said Hayne then suggested it would be in White’s “best interest” to issue a report agreeing with him.

It would be bad enough if Allgood had gotten a second opinion because he didn’t like the state medical examiner’s conclusions. But it wasn’t even that. It was that he didn’t want to wait for the tests to come back, in case they proved him wrong.

Attorney General Hood has conceded that he himself used shady medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne back when he was a district attorney in Mississippi’s third district. That means any investigation of Hayne may include looking into Hood’s convictions, and may call into question Hood’s own judgment in using Hayne.

Which means that not only should we we take Hood’s defenses of Hayne, Allgood, and Mississippi’s forensics systems with a handful of salt, it means that any honest look into Mississippi’s forensics problems will have to come from outside of the attorney general’s office.

According to the A.P., the Mississippi Supreme Court is now considering post-conviction appeals from Jeffrey Havard and Devin Bennett, two cases in which a man was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a child in his care. Both men were convicted thanks in large part to the testimony of Dr. Steven Hayne, the prolific Mississippi medical examiner I wrote about last October, and who has come under fire from the national and Mississippi Innocence Projects for his role in two recent exonerations.

Unfortunately, neither of these cases involves DNA the state could test to conclusively prove either man’s guilt or innocence. In both cases, a child died in while in the care of the accused. There were no other witnesses to the childrens’ deaths, and in each case, the men say the deaths were accidents. In both cases, the state heavily relied on Dr. Hayne’s autopsy and testimony to establish that the deaths were intentional, and to win convictions death sentences. Finally, in both cases reputable, actually board-certified medical professionals have come forward to challenge Dr. Hayne’s conclusions, thus far to no effect.

I’ve written about the Havard case before. Here’s a summary from my article last fall:

Consider Jeffrey Havard, convicted in 2002 of killing his then-girlfriend’s six-month-old daughter. Havard claims he was bathing the child when she slipped from his hands and hit her head on the toilet. But Hayne testified at Havard’s trial that bruises, scratches, and cranial bleeding indicated a case of shaken baby syndrome. Hayne also testified that the child’s anus was dilated, indicating sexual abuse. The DNA evidence was inconclusive: Havard’s DNA was not found on the baby, but both his DNA and hers were found on a sheet from the bed where she had gone to sleep that night, which was also the bed Havard shared with his girlfriend.

Because there were no witnesses to the incident, the evidence of sexual abuse was key to securing Havard’s conviction and death sentence; the charge was “murder in the commission of sexual battery.” Havard, who had no money, was assigned a public defender. His lawyer was suspicious of Hayne’s conclusions and at trial asked the court for funds to hire an independent pathologist to review Hayne’s findings. The judge refused, ruling that Hayne, the prosecution’s witness, was qualified and sufficient.

After Havard was convicted, attorneys from Mississippi’s post-conviction relief office, which represents indigent defendants in their appeals, were able to get James Lauridson, Alabama’s former state medical examiner, to review Hayne’s work in the Havard case. According to an affidavit he filed with the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2004, Lauridson found significant problems with Hayne’s testimony. Most notably, factors not related to abuse—e.g., rigor mortis—can often cause the anus to dilate after death.

In February 2006 the Mississippi State Supreme Court nevertheless upheld Havard’s conviction. It refused even to consider Lauridson’s review of Hayne’s work, ruling that any expert testimony refuting Hayne’s conclusions had to have been introduced at trial. Havard’s attorney had tried to do that, of course, but the trial judge denied him the necessary money.

[...]

The Havard case is now entering a second round of appeals. Lauridson and Havard’s lawyers wouldn’t discuss the case for this article, citing the ongoing appeal (though Lauridson did call it “a miscarriage of justice”). But according to the court clerk, at press time the case was being delayed because Hayne wouldn’t turn his autopsy records over to Havard’s defense team for review.

As for Devin Bennett, he was convicted of killing his son by (according to Hayne) shaking and/or slamming the boy’s head against a wall or the floor. Bennett says the child was sleeping in a car-seat cradle, and died when Bennett inadvertently kicked the seat off the bed during his sleep. Bennett and his ex-wife (the mother of the child) both testified that Bennett tends to kick violently in his sleep. Bennett actually had an expert testify in his defense, Dr. Emily Ward. Ward was Mississippi’s last official state medical examiner. When she took office, Ward was shocked at the way coroners and prosecutors were using Dr. Hayne to win convictions, and tried to institute reforms. She resigned in 1995 after the state’s coroners and prosecutors rose up against her and circulated a petition calling for her ouster. The man who headed up that petition? None other than Dr. Michael West. You can read a PDF of the petition here.

Again, from my article last fall:

It was West who circulated a petition among the state’s county coroners calling for Ward’s resignation. Forty-two of the state’s 82 coroners signed the document, which accused Ward of failing to support the coroners, diminishing their authority, improperly assisting defense counsel in criminal cases, and attempting to “establish a political power base.” West told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in 1995 that the state’s Department of Public Safety had “never been able to keep this woman under control.”

The Clarion-Ledger contacted 30 of the 42 signatories to West’s petition and learned that most of them sent their autopsies to Hayne. The paper also found that more than half of the signatories repeated hearsay about Ward they’d heard from other coroners, and could cite no personal grievances against her. The paper concluded that the petition was the result of a “power struggle” between Hayne and Ward.

Not all of Mississippi’s coroners agreed with West’s assessment of Ward. One told the paper the petition was “baseless” and “looked like a group of fifth-graders had written it.” Another lamented that “a small group of individuals for whatever reason—for personal gain or personal ego—have continued to badger Dr. Ward.”

Qualified medical examiners outside of Mississippi seemed to agree. Jamie Downs, who serves on NAME’s board of directors and now practices in Georgia, hired Ward to work for him when he was Alabama’s state medical examiner. “We knew what happened in Mississippi,” Downs says, referring to Ward’s experience in Jackson. “And I’ll just say that hiring Dr. Ward was a no-brainer. She’s a well-qualified, competent medical examiner. And that alone puts her in a completely different league than Dr. Hayne.”

Ward resigned her position in Mississippi in June 1995. The office has been vacant ever since.

Given her tumultuous time as the state medical examiner, Ward was reluctant to review Hayne’s work in the Bennett case. But Bennett’s lawyer persisted. Ward finally agreed, performed a second autopsy, and found that the child’s injuries were more consistent with Bennett’s story than with the testimony of Dr. Hayne. Incredibly, during a nasty, contentious cross examination, the prosecutor actually brought up Ward’s time as state medical examiner, and talked about how West and the state’s coroners rose up against her. He was trying to paint her as an outsider and a troublemaker in order to malign her credibility with the jury.

This same prosecutor who was relying on Dr. Hayne then went on to question Dr. Ward’s methods and practices. During his questioning, he read from Forensic Pathology, considered the premiere text book in the field, written by the renowned medical examiner Dr. Vincent DiMaio. The prosecutor badgered Ward, mangling her testimony with out-of-context quotes from DiMaio’s book to actually make Ward look like the incompetent physician.

But I actually interviewed Dr. DiMaio for my article on Hayne. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Vincent DiMaio, author of Forensic Pathology, widely considered the profession’s guiding textbook, says of Hayne’s remarkable annual output: “You can’t do it. After 250 [forensic] autopsies, you start making small mistakes. At 300, you’re going to get mental and physical strains on your body. Over 350, and you’re talking about major fatigue and major mistakes.” That isn’t even a quarter of the number of forensic autopsies Hayne has said he performs each year.

[...]

“The Mississippi medical examiner system doesn’t exist, except in name only,” concludes DiMaio, the forensic expert and textbook author. “This man provides a service—and at a discount. You’re not going to get any change in a system where all the people in power are happy.”

It’s rather perverse that a book written by the man who gave the quotes above was used by a prosecutor before a jury to actually validate Dr. Hayne’s conclusions and impugn the opinions of a more competent doctor questioning his conclusions.

But it worked. The jury apparently found Hayne more credible than Ward, and convicted Bennett of killing his son. The Mississippi State Supreme Court has already ruled once on this case. The court upheld Bennett’s conviction, and unfortunately found nothing untoward about the prosecutor’s questioning of Ward. Ward told me last fall that she believes Bennett is innocent. Alabama’s Dr. James Lauridson has also since joined in Bennett’s defense.

Obviously no one but Jeffrey Havard and Devin Bennett truly knows whether the deaths of the children in their care were accidents or homicides. Both men may well be guilty. Bennett seemed to have trouble keeping his story straight when talking to authorities. His defense chalked that up to trauma. But each man is due to be executed in large part because of the testimony of Hayne, a doctor whose credibility and objectivity have been called into question, to put it mildly. These aren’t your typical cases where a reuptable prosecution witness was challenged by a defense expert "gun for hire." They’re cases in which respected, credible medical examiners have questioned the conclusions of a doctor who doesn’t abide by the standards of his profession, whose credibility has been attacked by his peers and colleagues, and who played a role in the convictions of two men recently exonerated by DNA evidence.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has said it will rule on both cases based solely on the briefs filed by prosecutors and defense attorneys, and will not hear oral arguments.

It would be an awful mistake for the state of Mississippi to execute either of these men without a new trial—preferably one in which Dr. Hayne isn’t permitted to testify.

It’s good that the Mississippi’s troubled forensics system is getting national exposure, but this passage from the Associated Press concerning shady medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne, bite mark fraud Dr. Michael West, and District Attorney Forrest Allgood isn’t quite accurate. The writer is referring two recent exonerations in Mississippi involving West, Hayne, and Allgood.

Hayne said he has done nothing wrong, and he remains on the job. “All I did was present the facts that I saw,” Hayne said. “I did the post-mortem examinations. I didn’t link them or exclude them.”The district attorney who prosecuted both defendants, Forrest Allgood, disputed any suggestion that his office knowingly sent the wrong men to prison.

“It torments the innocent individual, undermines the public confidence in the justice system, and the bad guy is still running loose,” he said. “Why people would believe that’s something we would want to do is beyond me.”

Allgood said he has not used West as a forensic expert since the mid-1990s. He said West was once considered one of the world’s foremost authorities in his field, lecturing in China and England.

“Subsequently the whole situation turned into a train wreck,” the district attorney said.

Allgood just isn’t telling the truth, here. He continued to rely on West’s testimony in the Kennedy Brewer case until the state attorney general forced him off the case in 2006. Brewer was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2001. Because Allgood refused to let go of West’s testimony about Brewer’s bite mark’s on the victim’s chest, Brewer remained in prison for an additional six years. Relying solely on West’s testimony, Allgood maintained that though Brewer may not have raped the girl, he still likely bit her.

Allgood has now convicted three people (that I know of) of murder who were later exonerated. And it was Allgood who put on Dr. Hayne’s absurd “two hands on the gun” testimony in the Tyler Edmonds case.

Allgood’s also wrong about Weest being a “foremost authority” in his field. West was popular among prosecutors. He was never respected by his peers. West was first exposed as a fraud in the National Law Journal in 1994. Stories in 60 Minutes, Time, and Newsweek followed in the mid-1990s. There’s no way Allgood couldn’t have known about West’s reputation. And he continued to use him well into the 2000s.

Hayne’s now trying to distance himself from West, too. But these two have always been in cahoots. West frequently helps with Hayne’s autopsies, and often videotapes them. The two have collaborated on journal articles about bite mark evidence. And when one has had his credibility questioned on the stand or in depositions, he often cites the other to vouch for him.

All three need to be investigated.

When I was researching my article on Dr. Steven Hayne, I made an open records request to Mississippi’s state crime lab. My query was pretty simple: I asked for the number of autopsies Dr. Hayne performed on a specific date. I didn’t ask for copies of the autopsy reports, or the names of the people he performed the autopsies on on. That information is generally available in other states. But I didn’t want to give Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety the chance to turn me down. So I only asked for a number.

They turned me down anyway. Their reason? Even giving me a number would violate the privacy of the deceased persons on whom the autopsies were performed. Absurd, no?

So this bit of news from Editor & Publisher isn’t terribly surprising:

Eddie Stephenson, an insurance agent in Hattiesburg, has tried to find out details about the February 4, 2005, death of his son, Matthew, who wrecked his vehicle while being chased by Lamar County deputies. Stephenson requested radio and dispatch logs and accident and investigative reports, but officials refused.

“I feel like my civil rights have been violated because they won’t give me this information,” Stephenson said.

He spent more than two years fighting for the logs and reports, even filing a lawsuit that was settled last year. Under the agreement, he cannot disclose details of the settlement.

A number of people have told me similar stories about the problems they’ve encountered while trying to obtain records of loved ones on whom Dr. Hayne has performed autopsies.

But Mississippi isn’t alone.

Mississippi is one of 38 states that got an “F” in the 2007 study by the Better Government Association and the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

“These kinds of sunshine matters, unfortunately, generally are not high priority with an individual citizen until he or she is personally impacted,” said Leonard Van Slyke, a Jackson attorney who represents news organizations in Freedom of Information lawsuits. “But when that day arrives, that person is generally appalled with the lack of recourse.”

I ran into problems in this area, too:

Campaign finance records have been a constant source of complaints from government watchdogs who say Mississippi requires too little disclosure. A national study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center for Governmental Studies, the UCLA School of Law and the California Voter Foundation gives Mississippi a failing grade because the state does not require candidates to file campaign finance forms that are in a searchable, electronic form.

And that’s for statewide office. It’s almost impossible to track down donations to the campaigns of county coroners.

And even these easily navigable rules are relatively toothless. The fine for knowingly violating Mississippi’s public records law is all of $100. Not much to pony up if you’re a government official with something to hide.

Last week, I spoke with a defense attorney in Louisiana who is preparing a challenge to a death penalty case involving shady Mississippi medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne and “forensic odentologist” Dr. Michael West. In fact, there are two pending Louisiana death penalty cases where in what now seems to have been a familiar pattern, Dr. Hayne was called in to perform an initial autopsy, then called in Dr. West to search the victim for “bite marks” he could then trace back to the guy the prosecutors were after.

I’ll have more on the particulars of this case in a sec. But first, I want to look at how Hayne was able to extend his reach into Louisiana, despite an already growing number of complaints against him in Mississippi, and despite him not being board certified in forensic pathology. From an October 1993 article in the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Some north Louisiana law enforcement agencies are sending bodies to Mississippi, where they say autopsy results can be obtained more quickly.

Dr. George McCormick, a Bossier City forensic pathologist who also is the Caddo Parish coroner, has been performing autopsies for Ouachita Parish since the mid-1980s. But in May, representatives from the 4th District Attorney’s Office, the Monroe Police Department, the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office and Ouachita Parish Coroner Claude Smith decided to start sending bodies to forensic pathologist Steven Hayne with the Rankin (County) Medical Center near Jackson, Miss., Monroe Police Chief Joe Stewart said. “We felt we could get our reports back faster,” Smith said.

At the time, Dr. McCormick and the two pathologists who worked for him were doing about 800 autopsies a year between the three of them. Hayne at the time was doing around 1,000 by himself in Mississippi, and still reaching into Louisiana to take on more. Seems he was able to woo a fair number of prosecutors in that state, too. McCormick was already wary of Hayne’s practices, and sounded this prescient warning:

Hayne is as qualified as McCormick “from an investigative point of view,” Stewart said.

But McCormick said he has some concerns. “I do not know that Dr. Hayne will do bad work, but I have some serious questions. I will be looking at his work,” he said. McCormick refused to say what questions he has about Hayne. But “bad pathology is the worst thing that can happen in the justice system.”

According to my sources, McCormick, who died in December 2006, started a file documenting what he thought to be Hayne’s abuses and lapses in professional standards. It apparently grew rather thick. In 1995, he tried to file an ethics complaint against Hayne with the American Board of Medical Specialties. As far as I can tell, McCormick’s complaint didn’t get very far. To be fair, it’s probably safe to say that McCormick was in part upset about losing business to Hayne. And after his death, there were some questions about McCormick’s practices too (though his transgressions weren’t nearly as egregious as Hayne’s). Unfortunately, when McCormick died in December 2006, his file on Hayne apparently died with him. I haven’t been able to track it down.

One of the first cases Hayne and West worked on in Louisiana was that of Jimmie Christian Duncan. Duncan was initially charged with negligent homicide after his girlfriend’s child drowned in a bathtub while in his care. Hayne claimed in his autopsy to have found evidence of sexual abuse and bruises he said indicated drowning. He then called in West, who once again managed to find bite marks no one else had noticed. Because of Hayne and West, the charges against Duncan were elevated to first-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Duncan’s attorneys asked Dr. McCormick to review Hayne’s work, and not surprisingly, McCormick found Hayne’s autopsy lacking. But the courts weren’t interested. From a February 1994 article in the Advocate:

Attorneys for a man accused of raping and drowning a toddler in December have asked for permission to exhume the victim’s body for a second autopsy.

Peter Edwards and John Focke, who are representing Jimmie Christian Duncan, said that the Brandon, Miss., forensic pathologist who performed the original autopsy is not certified by the American Board of Pathology. The original autopsy was performed by Steven Hayne, a forensic pathologist in Rankin County, Miss. Duncan’s attorneys are asking that a second autopsy be performed by Caddo Parish Coroner George M. McCormick II.

But District Attorney Jerry Jones said the pathologist is qualified, and Jones will fight any attempt to exhume the body.

The DA won. The court ruled against an exhumation, and Duncan was convicted thanks in large part to Hayne and West—with no one from the defense team given an opportunity to check their work. Duncan is currently represented by Louisiana’s Office of Capital Post Conviction Relief, where staff have since found more evidence suggesting Duncan’s innocence, and more problems with the testimony from Hayne and West. I’ll report back when they’ve wrapped up their investigation.

There have been ample warnings about Hayne and West going back nearly two decades. Not only were those warnings not heeded, they seemed to have actually made Hayne and West more desirable to many prosecutors.

I have a piece in Slate today about the mess in Mississippi.

Jackson’s Gannett paper offers up a milquetoast criticism of Mississippi’s forensics system today. The Clarion-Ledger’s reporting on Dr. Steven Hayne has been woefully inadequate, both over the years, and in the way the paper has responded to the Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks exonerations. As I was reporting my story on Hayne that ran last fall, I started wondering more and more why a paper like the Clarion-Ledger hadn’t written this story years ago. And I’m still perplexed as to why the paper never followed up on my reporting. One reporter contacted me in the first days after my articles ran, but never called back, and her article never ran. Odd, given that all of this is transpiring in the Clarion-Ledger’s own backyard.

For now, I’ll just call attention to this portion:

The state medical examiner position has been vacant since 1995.

The lab is asking $9 million for fiscal 2009 - up nearly $1 million; the medical examiner vacancy has led to one pathologist responsible for more than 1,500 autopsies annually—an impossible standard.

The casual reader might conclude from that passage that Hayne’s prolific output is the result of him being overburdened by an underfunded crime lab—that he’d welcome a lightening of his caseload. That’s not really what has what happened.

There are two issues, here. Yes, the state does need a state medical examiner, and both the crime lab and the medical examiner’s office need significantly more funding. An actual qualified state medical examiner would also go a long way toward cleaning things up down there, provided he had the support of the legislature, executive, and could order the state’s coroners and prosecutors to comply with his reforms (none of which has been the case in the past).

But even under the current system, coroners and district attorneys are free to shop autopsies to any medical examiner in the state who wants to do them. It isn’t as if Hayne is the only medical examiner in the state (though many have left after realizing there wasn’t much work for them there). He’s popular because the people who conduct death investigations find him reliable. Not necessarily accurate, mind you. Just reliable. He in turn courts them. His workload isn’t by accident. He’s worked for it. In fact, I’ve talked to former medical examiners in the state who’ve been chased out when they began to threaten Hayne’s business. One, who now works in Georgia, told me one coroner told him flat-out that he wasn’t allowed to do autopsies in Mississippi unless he first obtained Hayne’s permission—odd, given that Hayne held no official state office at the time.

This editorial is a decent start, I guess. But the Clarion-Ledger is merely one of just several Mississippi instituitons to drop the ball, here, allowing the likes of Dr. Hayne and Dr. West to flourish.

Now that Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks have been freed, the Innocence Project is calling for a criminal investigation into Dr. Michael West. Peter Neufeld is asking that every case in which West has ever testified be reviewed. The linked article notes that there are 20 or more Mississippians in prison right now due at least in part to West’s testimony.

West still stands by his testimony. He’s now saying that even if Brooks and Brewer did not commit the two murders a third man has since confessed to committing, his testimony wasn’t incorrect: Brewer and Brooks still bit those little girls. To believe West, you’d have to believe that in two cases that occurred at about the same time, two men living just miles apart coincidentally each repeatedly bit a little girl in their care just hours before a third man unknown to either of them abducted, raped, and killed said little girls.

Alternately, you could believe that Dr. West is a quack who makes shit up. I know which theory my money’s on.

The next case involving the unholy triumvirate of West, Hayne, and District Attorney Forrest Allgood that may embarrass Mississippi is that of Eddie Lee Howard, currently on death row in Parchman for the gruesome murder of an elderly woman. The assailant stabbed the woman to death, then set her house on fire and left her to burn. Dr. Hayne testified at trial that the woman was also raped, though no semen or second-party blood or pubic hair showed up in the rape kit. Hayne did not find any bite marks. The victim was buried.

In a now-familiar pattern, Hayne then brought his buddy Dr. West onto the case. Three days later, the police detained Howard without a warrant, then immediately took him to Dr. West’s dental practice, where West took an impression of Howard’s teeth. Police then exhumed the victim, at which point West once again claimed to find bite marks no one else could see. He then noted there were similarities between Mr. Howard’s dental impression and the bite marks he said he’d found on the burned body.

There was no biological evidence linking Howard to the crime scene. The sole evidence against him was West’s testimony and the testimony of a police investigator who says Howard basically confessed to him, though the investigator never asked Howard to sign a statement of confession, nor is there any recording of it.

Eddie Lee Howard clearly has some psychological problems. The Mississippi Supreme Court granted him a new trial in 1997 after finding the trial court improperly allowed Howard, who is mentally ill, to represent himself in his own murder trial. Howard was convicted in the second trial, too. In 2006, the Mississippi State Supreme Court upheld the second conviction, and explicitly refused to throw out Dr. West’s testimony. This was well after West’s credibility had been thoroughly dismantled in the national media, after DNA proved he’d been wrong in the Kennedy Brewer case, and after he’d been thrown out of several professional organizations.

Bizarrely, the court determined that it was Howard’s fault his attorney didn’t call an expert witness to rebut West’s testimony but that, at the same time, the fact that his attorney didn’t didn’t amount to ineffective assistance of counsel. After acknowledging that Howard’s new lawyers filed piles and piles of affidavits from experts explaining that Dr. West is basically a quack, the court awkwardly came to this conclusion:

Just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot, does not mean, without something more, that he was wrong here.

If Howard is cleared, it will be the fourth (that I know of) murder exoneration involving District Attorney Forrest Allgood. Three of those people were sentenced to death. It will be the third (that I know of) involving Dr. Hayne and Dr. West. I’m investigating several others. The Innocence Project chapters in Mississippi and New York are, too.

Here’s the press release from the Innocence Project.

I just spoke on the phone with Dr. Dwalia South, president of the Mississippi State Medical Association, the state branch of the AMA.

Coincidentally, Dr. South has been working on an editorial for the organization’s newsletter raising questions about why the state medical examiner position in Mississippi has been vacant since 1995. In doing some research, she found my personal blog, contacted me, and we chatted this morning.

"I don’t know why Dr. Hayne is still a member of our organization," she says. "I’m going to try to get him booted. I can’t believe he is allowed to take the stand and use our organization’s name to boost his credentials. That isn’t right. I’m going to do what I can to change that. I’m going to do what I can make people care about this."

Dr. South has firsthand experience with Hayne and with Mississippi’s broken forensics system. She was once the elected coroner for Tippah County, and one of the few county coroners who bucked Hayne’s grip on the system. That might have something to do with the fact that unlike most of the state’s coroners, she’s an actual physician. The state requires only a high school diploma to run for coroner.

"We had all sorts of people in that office. Farmers, morticians, a really diverse group of people for that kind of office. The guy I replaced couldn’t read or write. Can you believe that? An illiterate was in charge of this county’s death investigations. He was letting the families of the deceased fill out the death certificates. Really unbelievable. When I heard that, I decided, well, I’m going to run. I did, and I won."

One of the reforms implemented by Dr. Lloyd White, who was a state medical examiner in Mississippi before Hayne and his allies drove him out, was that the coroners at least had to take continuing courses in death investigation. According to Dr. South, many of those classes are, perversely, taught by Dr. Hayne.

"He’s actually a very good lecturer," she says. "At least when it comes to his style. Very charming. The coroners loved him. He really owned them."

But South wasn’t in office long before she started to learn about Hayne’s practices. "I was hearing some really horrible things about him," she says. "The more I learned, the more troubled I was. What he’s doing is unethical and unprofessional. it’s malpractice. If the truth was known about him, there would be an upheaval in our penitentiary system, because there are probably a lot of people he’s helped put there who don’t deserve to be there."

"I’m really blown out of the water by this," she says. "One of my goals when I became president was to shed some light on this. Mississippi doesn’t need this. There’s got to be something that we as a group of doctors can do to blow the whistle on this guy."

The Mississippi State Medical Association’s next board meeting is in three weeks.

My reason feature on Dr. Hayne here.

The national Innocence Project has sent a letter to Mississippi’s Dept. of Public safety demanding an inquiry into Dr. Stephen Hayne, the Mississippi medical examiner I first wrote about in my article on Cory Maye back in October 2006, then covered in an investigative piece for reason in November of last year.

The letter states:

"By law, the State Medical Examiner must be a board-certified forensic pathologist. The State Medical Examiner is appointed by, and serves at the pleasure of, the Commissioner of Public Safety. The State Legislature created the position in order to organize and standardize the work of medical examiners across the state and to raise the level of forensic services statewide. Two pathologists served as State Medical Examiners in the mid- to late-1980s, and in 1987 Stephen Hayne was appointed Interim State Medical Examiner. Because he is not a board-certified forensic pathologist, he was set to be removed from the interim position, so he resigned. Two subsequent State Medical Examiners were appointed, until Mr. Hayne and his allies forced the last State Medical Examiner from office in the mid-1990s. This critical position has been vacant since then.

"Although a full investigation of cases involving Mr. Hayne has not been conducted, it is clear that in the cases of Mr. Brewer and Mr. Brooks, Mr. Hayne ignored the applicable science and objective facts. He provided improper testimony to help convict two innocent men in capital murder cases. In each case, he wrongly described indiscriminate scratches and bruises as human bite marks. He then compounded the error by securing an incorrect confirmation from his frequent employee and colleague, Michael West. Recently, a peer-review panel of top forensic odontologists from England, Canada and the United States issued a report completely rejecting Hayne’s and West’s conclusions in the cases of Mr. Brewer and Mr. Brooks.

[...]

"We would be happy to furnish you any additional background on Mr. Hayne’s work in these cases and the urgent need for forensic oversight in this area. We ask for your urgent attention to this matter. The grave consequences illustrated by the cases of Mr. Brewer and Mr. Brooks call for the prompt appointment and full funding of a qualified State Medical Examiner, which falls directly under your authority."

Hayne never responded to my requests for an interview. He did however respond to the Jackson Clarion Ledger for this story:

Contacted for comment, Hayne responded, "I am board certified, and my work has been reviewed by impartial reviewers."

He pointed out the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology reviewed his work on more than 50 jailhouse hangings in the early 1990s and concluded, just as he did, that each was suicide.

[...]

Hayne responded today that his work has been regularly reviewed and upheld as valid.

"When you don’t have facts, you have a tendency to engage in character assassination," Hayne said.

Actually, the AFIP reviewed a case in the late 1990s in which a woman was savagely beaten to death, and Hayne weirdly determined she had died of a stroke. His autopsy was first reviewed by Dr. Stephen Pustilnik, then practicing in Alabama. Dr. Pustilnik told me Hayne’s autopsy in that case was "new complete malpractice." Hayne had failed to empty the woman’s pockets, a standard autopsy procedure. Pustilnik also found that internal organs Hayne claimed in his report to have examined hadn’t been touched.

Hayne’s autopsy was eventually sent to AFIP. According to Pustilnik, AFIP’s review of Hayne’s work was critical. When I called AFIP, I was put in touch with the doctor who reviewed Hayne’s work in that case. All I had to say was "I’m writing a story about a medical examiner in Mississippi," and he immediately knew who I was talking about. He said he’d love to talk with me about Hayne, but that I’d first need to get clearance from the AFIP’s information office. Unfortunately, they called me back to say they were barred by HIPAA privacy regulations from discussing their review of Hayne’s work with me. That is, talking to me would have violated the privacy of the dead woman. I’ve since learned that this may have been a misapplication of HIPAA.

Thus far, I haven’t been able to get in touch with the woman’s family to get their okay for the doctors to speak with me. The woman’s death was officially ruled a homicide, though no one was ever charged in the case. Her family filed a civil rights lawsuit, but I haven’t yet been able to determine how it was resolved.

If you’re wondering why Hayne would have ruled a clear homicide a death by "natural causes," so was I. On background, several of Hayne’s critics have told me that in some areas of Mississippi, prosecutors simply don’t want to deal with murder cases, particularly when they involve low-income people. That seems to be consistent with what people in Prentiss, Mississippi have repeatedly told me about crime in Jefferson Davis County. "Murders don’t seem to get solved around here" is a popular refrain down there. A few critics of Hayne told me that they’re actually more concerned about the number of people who get away with murder down there han the number who get wrongly convicted.

Hayne is also wrong when he says his work has "been regularly reviewed and upheld as valid." Over the last year, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen medical examiners about Dr. Hayne. I’ve heard lots of colorful adjectives used to describe him. "Valid" was never one of them. His autopsies have been repudiated over and over again by other doctors, both in court and in civil depositions. I have copies of scathing reviews of his work written by his peers.

There is also at least one complaint against Hayne now pending at the National Association of Medical Examiners. It was filed by a member of the group’s ethics committee. After my article ran last fall, Dr. Joseph Prahlow, the immediate past president of the organization called to tell me the organization is very concerned about Hayne, and plans to address the issue this spring. NAME is moving far too slow for my taste, particularly given that Hayne’s testimony is still putting people in prison. But Dr. Prahlow emphasized that they haven’t yet acted should by no means be interpreted to mean that they endorse Hayne’s practices.

The coming exonerations get picked up by the AP and by MNSBC.

And here’s a longish piece from the newspaper in Columbus, Mississippi, Forrest Allgood’s home turf.

Question is, will these be looked at as isolated cases, or will people outside the state start to take a harder look at Mississippi’s system of administering autopsies?

Over the weekend, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced that 51-year-old Albert Johnson had been arrested for the brutal rape and murder of two three-year-old girls in the 1990s. Johnson had been an early suspect in both cases, but despite the fact that the state had samples of his DNA on file for more than a decade, it never bothered to test it against the DNA found in the little girls.

That’s because Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood decided early on in both cases that he had his man, and little could convince him otherwise. One of those men is Kennedy Brewer, a mentally handicapped man who served more than a decade on Mississippi’s Death Row, then served another five years even after DNA evidence had cleared him. Allgood insisted on retrying Brewer anyway, arguing that bite marks on the little girl’s body matched Brewer’s teeth.

Curiously, Allgood resisted testing the DNA from the crime scene against that of a man he had earlier convicted of an eerily similar crime—another rape and murder of a young girl in the same area. It now seems clear why Allgood resisted the test. As it turns out, the man he’d convicted for that crime, Levon Brooks, is innocent, too. Brooks had been sentenced to life in prison.

Hood is expected to announce on Thursday that Brewer has been completely exonerated. A similar announcement for Brooks could also come Thursday, or perhaps a few days after.

Had Allgood not fixated on Brooks after the first murder, he may have been able to prevent the second. Instead, we have two little girls dead, one man wrongly incarcerated for nearly two decades, and another who came perilously close to execution. And of course, there’s also the matter of a two-time child rapist and murderer running free for 15 years.

In both cases, District Attorney Allgood asked Dr. Steven Hayne to perform the autopsies on the little girls. Dr. Hayne then called in his longtime collaborator Dr. Michael West to perform "the West phenomenon," a bit of quackery using fluorescent lights and yellow goggles that West says enables him to see bite marks no one else can spot. West was Allgood’s star witness in both cases. In fact, after the DNA test exonerating Brewer in 2001, West’s testimony was all Allgood had left, and was the reason he insisted on keeping Brewer in prison until late last year. In the Brewer case, the defense called an actual, board-certified medical examiner, who testified that the marks weren’t from human teeth at all, but bug bites due to the body’s exposure in a woods.

The weekend’s events put a big, fat exclamation point on the corrupt, good ol’ boy forensics system in Mississippi I reported in a feature for reason last November.

My article focused mainly on Hayne, but Allgood and West also made appearances. Dr. Lloyd White, one of Mississipppi’s last two official state medical examiners, left his position in disgust after trying and failing to rein in Dr. Hayne and the state’s prosecutors and coroners. This passage seems particularly relevant:

White also cited a case in which he had performed an autopsy on a woman who’d been found dead in her bathtub. White concluded it wasn’t immediately possible to determine a cause of death; he needed to wait for the results of toxicology and microscopic tests. According to White’s letter, he soon received a phone call from Hayne, who told him the body had been taken to Hayne’s office for a second examination at the request of Forrest Allgood, the district attorney for Clay, Lowndes, Noxubee, and Oktibbeha counties. Although White was the state medical examiner at the time, he said the second autopsy was performed “surreptitiously, without my knowledge or permission.” Allgood already had a suspect he wanted to charge with the crime, White said, and “he was afraid my autopsy wouldn’t provide him with the evidence he needed.” (Allgood’s office did not respond to requests for an interview.)

According to White, Hayne told him he had concluded that the woman was strangled. White said Hayne then suggested it would be in White’s “best interest” to issue a report agreeing with him.

White’s replacement also resigned in disgust after butting heads with Hayne, West, and the state’s coroners and prosecutors. The office has been vacant since the mid-1990s, giving Hayne and rogue prosecutors like Allgood free reign.

This also isn’t the first time an Allgood death penalty case has been overturned. In 1990, he convicted an 18-year-old mentally handicapped woman of killing her infant son. She was acquitted and released from death row after being granted a new trial due to problems with (surprise!) the conclusions drawn by the medical examiner Allgood recruited to perform the autopsy on the boy.

Since my article (and accompanying op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger) ran, very little has changed. That’s too bad, because my sources in Mississippi tell me all the appropriate people down there were made aware of it, several times over.

Defense attorneys are more keen to Hayne, now, and are filing briefs challenging his status as an expert witness. But thus far, they’ve found little sympathy from the state’s courts. Hayne is still doing autopsies in Mississippi, and judges are still letting him testify. Last November, the new judge in Cory Maye’s case dismissed a brief in which Maye’s lawyers asked that they be allowed to question Hayne’s credentials. He said the case needed "closure." In another case, the court refused to grant an indigent defendant the funding to hire his own expert witness to review Dr. Hayne’s autopsy. In both cases, attorneys cited my reporting on Hayne. My reporting on Hayne was also brought to the attention of Mississippi’s State Supreme Court in the January 2007 case appeal of Tyler Edmonds. That case represented the first time the court had ever tossed out Dr. Hayne’s testimony. Allgood was also the prosecutor in that case, too.

So Mississippi’s courts, lawmakers, and executive agencies are all well aware of the problem. They simply aren’t interested in doing anything about it.

Attorney General Hood is doing the right thing in exonerating Brewer and (likely) Brooks. But it shouldn’t stop there. It’s time for Mississippi to conduct a thorough review of every case in which Dr. Hayne or Dr. West has ever testified. In fact, there are other medical examiners in the state whose work has been called into question, too. It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. Similar reviews have been conducted in West Virginia, Houston, and Oklahoma City after deficiencies and fraud in crime labs was exposed.

It’s probably also time to start looking at possible criminal civil rights violations by Hayne, West, and Allgood. The state’s entire medical examiner system is in need of a major overhaul. But right now, it’s more important to undo the damage already done, and free the people Hayne and West may have already wrongfully sent to prison.

• Another win for gun rights. This time, the California Court of Appeals has struck down San Francisco’s ban on handguns.
• Good feature in Rolling Stone looking into the possibility that federal anti-terrorism law enforcement officials may be creating terrorists in order to arrest them.
• Speaking of Cato, here’s a nice profile of Ed Crane in the D.C. Examiner. Cato haters might take note of what Crane says is the single most important issue at the moment.
• RIAA just gets greedier and greedier. They’re pushing a new bill in Congress that would slap a $1.5 million fine on anyone who illegally copies a compilation CD. And don’t forget, under RIAA’s interpretation of copyright law, you needn’t sell or even share the copy. Just ripping the songs onto your computer makes you a criminal.
• Canada gets its own version of Dr. Steven Hayne.

The answer in North Carolina is apparently yes—but only if it helps prosecutors.

In a bizarre case, former state supreme court justice I. Beverly Lake Jr., now in private practice, is representing a convicted double murderer named Lee Wayne Hunt. Hunt was convicted in part due to lead-bullet analysis, a discredited forensics technique long used by the FBI. The FBI now admits the technique is flawed, though the agency says it’s under no obligation to do anything about the people convicted because of it.

The other evidence against Hunt, an admitted marijuana dealer, was testimony from two fellow dealers. After one of those dealers, Jerry Cashwell, committed suicide in prison, his lawyer came forward to say that prior to his death, Cashwell told him he alone committed the two murders for which Hunt has been convicted.

Upon learning that Hunt had been convicted on faulty forensic evidence and on the word of a convict who subsequently made a deathbed confession exonerating Hunt, the court immediately granted Hunt a new trial, right?

Nope. The court not only denied Hunt a new trial, it referred Cashwell’s lawyer to the state bar for an ethics investigation into a possible breech of attorney-client privilege.

That’s odd, because in 2006, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors can force an attorney to divulge information that might help their case if the client who supplied the information has died. Hunt’s lawer, former Chief Justice Lake, wrote that opinion.

"It makes no sense that a lawyer can be required to divulge information from a dead client to the state but then not be allowed to do the same if it helps a defendant," Lake told the Washington Post.

No, it doesn’t. But it’s not terribly surprising, either.

Here’s a letter to the editor from the current issue of reason, responding to my story on Mississippi’s Dr. Steven Hayne:

As a retired crime scene investigator and fingerprint specialist, I read Radley Balko’s “CSI: Mississippi” (November) with great interest. Balko’s article illuminated the major problem facing forensic science today, namely, a gradual but continuing deterioration in ethics, honesty, and integrity.

When I entered the field in the early 1970s, the most important concept I was taught was that my allegiance was to the evidence—not to an arrest, not to a prosecution, but to the evidence. In those days, those of us on the police side and those on the crime lab side strongly believed in this. I have known several professionals who endangered their careers by maintaining their allegiance to this concept.

In the last 30 years, I have watched a change in the field. In areas like crime scene investigation and fingerprint science, many agencies have begun assigning otherwise broken personnel to these positions or, more often, cheapening the job by bringing in untrained personnel at low salaries and turning them loose. I was brought into a system that oversaw my activity and ensured that, even if on the job, my training demanded continued improvement in my knowledge, abilities, and skills.

Today many small and even medium-sized agencies employ CSI and latent fingerprint examiners whose entire training consists of some junior college courses and self-training on the job.

Within crime labs, the changes are different but just as hazardous. Where once criminologists were devoted to the evidence, many have now become more prosecution-oriented. At the same time, the entry of the newer generations, with the changes in ethics that are seen elsewhere, has endangered the quality of impartial results.

And then there’s the “CSI effect.” Since the advent of CSI, its spin-offs, and series such as Crossing Jordan and NCIS, television shows have “educated” the public in forensic science. That they are fictitious renditions is lost on too many viewers, who have taken cases to task in court for not meeting the standards established by Gil Grissom and his team.

There needs to be outreach to truly educate the public in what forensic science can and cannot do. While “every criminal leaves something and takes something” from every scene, it is not always possible to locate this evidence, especially within the limits of science as we know it.
Paul R. Laska
Palm City, FL

So Mississippi’s Forrest Allgood edged out U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan in the "Worst Prosecutor of 2007" poll.

But what about the good prosecutors?

Here’s one very good one: Dallas County, Texas District Attorney Craig Watkins.

Last year, Watkins took the reins of an office that had long had been soiled by legendary lawman Henry Wade, hero to law-and-order, James Q. Wilson-types throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Wade took a strident, string-em-up, conviction-at-all-costs approach to law enforcement.  When he retired in 1986, the Dallas Morning News released a memo Wade’s office issued to city attorneys instructing them,  "Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated," when it comes to jury selection.  The memo was first issued in the 1960s, but still circulated as late as 1976.

The man who now inhabits Wade’s old office couldn’t be a starker contrast. Watkins made history last year as Dallas’ first black district attorney, and immediately went about undoing the remnants of Wade’s legacy.

After his election, Watkins instituted significant reforms to the way Dallas fights and prosecutes crime, including major changes to the way police conduct lineups and interrogate suspects. He stopped the inexplicable tradition of destroying death penalty files after conviction, which is often a barrier to DNA-based innocence claims down the line. He fired overly aggressive subordinates, and caused still more to resign in protest or frustration.

But most notably, Watkins not only hasn’t fought innocence and wrongful conviction claims, he’s been seeking them out, correctly understanding that a prosecutor’s job isn’t to see how many people he can throw in prison, it’s to work toward the fair administration of justice.

Watkins set up his own task force to work with the Texas Innocence Project to investigate wrongful conviction claims. His is the only DA’s office in the country to work directly with an Innocence Project chapter. Since 2001, 13 15 people in Dallas County alone have been exonerated and released from prison after DNA testing. Watkins’ task force will now look at 350 more cases. Dallas now has the highest exoneration rate in the country, and trails only New York and L.A. in total exonerations. Watkins’ efforts means those numbers are only likely to grow.

Watkins’ efforts have also aided by an odd anomaly: Because Dallas has long outsourced most of its lab work, it’s one of the few jurisdictions in the country where biological evidence has been preserved (despite the best efforts of the city’s prosecutors over the years). So testable DNA evidence exists for cases from well before DNA technology came into being. (Another argument for using multiple, independent labs in forensic testing.) Consequently, Watkins and the Texas Innocence Project can go back much further to investigate innocence claims than other jurisdictions.

So in the one county in America that has preserved DNA evidence going back to the 1980s, and in one of only a few where the district attorney’s office is an asset to innocence claims instead of a roadblock, we’re seeing much, much higher exoneration rates than we’re seeing in the rest of the country. I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and guess that this isn’t mere coincidence.

Watkins deserves a ton of credit for what he’s done in Dallas. He’s not only correcting the mistakes of his predecessors, he’s putting in institutional reforms to cut down on mistakes in the future. We need more prosecutors like him.

Info above pulled from NY Times profile of Watkins here; NPR profile and interview here; and Texas Observer piece on Watkins here.

NOTE: The AP reports today that there’s been another exoneration in Dallas County. There was one more that escaped my attention in the months I’ve been following Watkins. So the number’s now 15, not 13.

A source in Mississippi tells me Dr. Steven Hayne is boasting to friends and acquaintances that he’s “untouchable,” because there has thus far been little fallout from my expose of him. We’ll see. I plan to do lots of follow-up over the next year, and there are still some wheels turning down there.

But this email from someone involved with a case in which Dr. Hayne testified captures part of the problem:

Forgive me, but I feel like I’m going a little nuts here. Why in the world do you suppose the Mississippi press did NOT pick up on your WJ article and publish ANYTHING about the totally UNBELIEVABLE nightmare/nonsense concerning the state’s lack of a medical examiner and the complete chaos that has resulted?

I’m really wondering what is going on. I mentioned this to one reporter who was kind enough to e-mail from the Columbus Commercial Dispatch, but he stopped e-mailing when I posed the Hayne coverage question. He indicated that he was aware of your article but would not answer my question about why no MS press coverage.

As far as I’m concerned, the MS press has a responsibility to inform the public, and if they aren’t going to do it, they are as much a part of the problem as the legislature.

If you have any idea why they aren’t covering your story, please let me know.

I have my suspicions. I’ve had reporters from both the Jackson Clarion Ledger and the Jackson Free Press contact me to say they’re working on stories about Hayne. But that was more than six weeks ago. And when I called both back, they never got back to me. The Jackson TV station that initially covered the Hayne story when it came out in the Wall Street Journal was supposed to do some follow-up as well, but then apparently decided against it. Same with the statewide radio station that did an interview with me shortly after the WSJ piece appeared. They were planning a big, hour-long special on Hayne, but then decided against it.

What’s behind all of this? I don’t know. No one that I know of in Mississippi has raised a single complaint about the story’s accuracy (other than Hayne, of course, who issued a couple of vague, unsupported denials in the local news piece). So the only explanation I can think of is that they know the allegations against Hayne, accept them, and don’t think they’re serious enough to merit further coverage.

Now, this could just be general lethargy on the part of the state’s media. Or it could be something more sinister. It’s hard to imagine many statewide stories more worthy of print space or air time. This guy’s been corrupting the state’s criminal justice system for 20 years. He’s likely put innocent people in prison, and allowed guilty people to go free. But Hayne’s a very powerful man in Mississippi. It’s one reason why he’s been able to thrive down there, despite numerous complaints about his methods, practices, and objectivity.

On the plus side, I do know that there will be dozens of complaints against Hayne playing out in the state’s courts over the next year or so. And I know of a couple of legislators who plan to at least try to make some noise about him in the state house. Over the coming months, I’ll be contacting state officials and office holders in Mississippi, as well as the professional groups where Hayne claims membership. I’ll ask them to respond to the article and, if they’ve already seen it, either explain what they plan to do about Hayne, or explain why they plan to do nothing.

In the meantime, Hayne’s still doing autopsies in Mississippi, and still testifying in court. One source tells me he defiantly performed 16 autopsies in a single night last month.

But thus far, Hayne may well be right. He may be “untouchable.” Too bad for Mississippi.

A circuit court judge in Mississippi has refused to let defense attorneys hire their own expert to review two autopsies done by medical examiners hired by the district attorney:

A Hinds County Circuit Court judge Thursday denied an accused murderer’s request to preserve the body of slain Jackson State University student Latasha Norman and hire an outside expert to examine her body.

A motion filed Wednesday by defendant Stanley Cole’s attorney questioned the accuracy of earlier autopsies, including the one performed by the state’s chief pathologist, Dr. Steven Hayne.

"Steven Hayne was unable to determine a cause of death. Consequently, at the behest of the state, the body was examined by a forensic anthropologist at the University of Southern Mississippi, and a cause of death was supposedly determined," the motion said.

District Attorney Faye Peterson said she aggressively fought the request because it would have been "cruel" to Norman’s family.

"This family has been through so much for so long. They have a right to bury their daughter," she said.

Cole’s attorney, public defender Matthew Eichelberger, said he sympathized with the family but that access to an independent examination is Cole’s right.

"We understand that this is painful for the family, but we still have to protect the rights of our client," he said. "We feel that it is important to have an independent examination of the evidence."

I’m a little surprised Dr. Hayne didn’t provide prosecutors with the results they were looking for. Either he’s being more cautious since my expose of him in our November issue, or the prosecution’s theory about what happened in this case is so unsupported by the victim’s body, even Hayne couldn’t bring himself to give them what they were looking for. My guess is the latter. My sources in Mississippi have told me that since my story came out, Hayne has only grown defiant, and has actually increased his break-neck autopsy workload.

But Hayne is really only the manifestation of the real problem in Mississippi—a corrupt system that allows prosecutors to shop bodies to friendly "experts," and denies indigent defendants the opportunity to have independent experts to evaluate their findings. Though I’ve heard there may be some eventual movement toward reform down there, it looks like for the short-term at least, it’s business as usual.

Via the Washington Post, the FBI conceded two years ago that a bullet-matching technique it’s been using for decades is faulty. Oddly, though, the agency doesn’t feel it needs to notify the people the technique has put in prison.

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.

The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.

In 2004, however, the nation’s most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI’s testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect’s gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."

A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.

But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau’s managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.

"We cannot afford to be misleading to a jury," the lab director wrote to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in late summer 2005 in a memo outlining why the bureau was abandoning the science. "We plan to discourage prosecutors from using our previous results in future prosecutions."

Despite those private concerns, the bureau told defense lawyers in a general letter dated Sept. 1, 2005, that although it was ending the technique, it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis." And in at least two cases, the bureau has tried to help state prosecutors defend past convictions by using court filings that experts say are still misleading. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis.