Balko discovers something rotten in the state of Mississippi

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And by rotten, I mean truly disgusting. My stomach turned reading Radley’s account of a purported “forensic expert” faking evidence of bite marks on the face of a girl just under two years old in order to convict her caretaker of rape and murder. The article contains some graphic photos and video, but you do not have to watch the video and the photos show the evidence of alteration to the girl’s face. Here’s an excerpt from Radley’s Reason article, entitled Manufacturing Guilt?:

Last year, two men that [Steven] Hayne and [Michael] West helped convict of murder in the early 1990s, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, were exonerated and freed from prison through DNA testing after serving more than 30 years combined behind bars. Both men had been accused of raping and murdering the daughters of their respective girlfriends. In what has come to be a pattern with the two doctors, in each case Hayne claimed to have found in an initial autopsy what other examiners missed: bite marks on the victim’s body. He then called in West, a forensic odontologist (dental examiner), who definitively matched bite marks to the defendants. Partly because of the testimony from Hayne and West, Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, and Brewer to death (he spent 14 years on death row). DNA testing in 2008 determined that the semen found on both girls belonged to a third man, 51-year-old Albert Johnson. As Brooks and Brewer were freed, Johnson confessed to both crimes.

The Brooks and Brewer cases form their own forensics riddle: How could West and Hayne have definitively linked previously undetected bite marks on the victims to two men who didn’t commit the murders?

Reason recently obtained shocking video from another Hayne and West collaboration that may shed light on the question. In 1993, the two conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video shows bite marks mysteriously appearing on the toddler’s face during the time she was in the custody of Hayne and West. It then shows West repeatedly and methodically pressing and scraping a dental mold of a man’s teeth on the dead girl’s skin. Forensic scientists who have viewed the footage say the video reveals not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering.

Read the whole thing. Radley has been following the misdeeds of Steven Hayne and more recently Michael West since 2006, when Hayne’s testimony was used to help send Cory Maye to Mississippi’s death row after a botched raid on Cory’s duplex. The questionable at best testimony and autopsy work of these two men has been relied on for convictions in Mississippi for over a decade, but the court system and other state leaders aren’t calling for a review of the cases in which Hayne and/or West’s testimony was used to convict. As Radley’s courageous reporting shows, it’s high time such a review was conducted. This story also makes me wonder how many other Haynes and Wests are out there, profiting from judicial systems that in many states are more concerned with successful prosecutions than meting out justice.

Here’s more information on Jimmie Duncan’s case from Radley.

Update: The new Chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Bill Waller, has said that appeals in cases involving the testimony of Hayne are being reviewed carefully. Note to Mississippi defense attorneys: this might be a good time to appeal cases.

Reactions from the libertysphere:

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings dubs Radley one of America’s finest journalists.

Tarran at The Liberty Papers condemns the actions of Hayne and West and calls for justice in Mississippi.

Julian Sanchez says: “In a just universe, they’d already be drawing up indictments for these bastards—and the Pulitzer committee would be sending Radley’s name to the engravers.”

Tim Lynch over at Cato’s blog weighs in here.