Martin’s well-reported story includes all the necessary background on Hayne, including some links to my prior reporting. But I’ll add a bit more:
First, the prosecutor in this case is Forrest Allgood, the notorious Mississippi DA who prosecuted both Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks in the early 1990s, two innocent men, also based on testimony from Hayne and the charlatan bite mark specialist Michael West. Brewer did time on death row. Brooks spent the better part of two decades in prison. Both were exonorated and released in 2008. Allgood was also the DA who prosecuted 13-year-old Tyler Edmonds based on yet more dubious testimony from Hayne. And he’s the prosecutor who put Eddie Lee Howard on death row, again due to testimony from Hayne and West. [...]
Allgood and Hayne go way back. Lloyd White, who served as Mississippi state medical examiner in the early 1990s, told me in 2007 that when he was in office — and at least in theory was in charge of overseeing state autopsies in criminal cases — Allgood once removed a body from his lab without his permission. White wasn’t ready to tell Allgood what he wanted to hear about how the woman had died, so Allgood had the body taken from White’s office and delivered to Hayne, who gave Allgood the expert opinion he was seeking.
When babies die in Mississippi, the state’s prosecutors seem particularly determined to see that someone goes to prison for it, even if there isn’t much evidence of a crime. In the past, more often than not, they would turn to Hayne. Currently, two men sit on Mississippi’s death row due almost exclusively to testimony from Steven Hayne — Jeffrey Havard and Devin Bennett. In both cases, other medical examiners have since questioned the quality of Hayne’s autopsies and the credibility of his testimony in court.
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I also want to address one more passage from Martin’s article. It’s a quote from Hayne’s attorney.
“Given the number of autopsies he’s performed, there’s certainly going to be some errors,” Cory said in an interview last week. “But a lot of the criticisms don’t turn out to be fair. Just because he’s been criticized in some cases doesn’t mean there’s any inherent unreliability in his findings. Certainly Dr. Hayne would want the truth to come out.”
This misstates what happened in Mississippi during Hayne’s reign. Hayne performed the vast majority of autopsies in Mississippi for nearly 20 years precisely because he provided opinions and testimonies that prosecutors found favorable. It was all by design. When state medical examiners attempted to rein Hayne in, the state’s district attorneys and coroners rallied behind him. They in fact forced two state medical examiners to resign.
As for “inherent unreliability,” I’d submit that when an expert witness has shown that he’s willing to give preposterous testimony that is unsupported by science, when he has spent most of his career working with a proven fraud like Michael West (including co-authoring articles on forensic analysis), when multiple defendants convicted because of his testimony have since been exonerated or acquitted, and when he has admitted to lying about his credentials, not only should his expertise be questioned in cases where his testimony in and of itself is absurd, his opinions should also be dismissed in those cases where they aren’t entirely implausible, or in instances where he was contradicted by a medical examiner who doesn’t have his baggage.
In other words, Hayne shouldn’t be treated as just another expert. When someone’s freedom or life is on the line, his disagreements with qualified medical examiners shouldn’t be viewed as an honest disagreement between two credible professionals, but as a disagreement between a credible professional and a man whose history provides little reason to afford him the presumption of integrity.
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