Reason Magazine - Topics > Corruption

Oliver Diaz, Jr.

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:50:00 EDT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weirdness in Wecht Trial Continues

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:17:00 EDT

Yesterday, I posted about a hung jury in the federal corruption trial of Pennsylvania medical examiner Cyril Wecht, and the allegations of political motivation in the case on the part of U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.

The case just gets odder. The judge apparently also instructed the jurors not to talk to attorneys or the media—even after the trial was over, and even though the jurors were under no legal obligation to obey his request.

Now, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that at least two jurors have been contacted by FBI agents, who requested interviews in their homes. Buchanan's office says this is routine. Other attorneys the paper interviewed say they never heard of such a thing, and that it smacks of intimidation.

Mary's Buggin'

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:17:00 EDT

You may remember her from such hits as "the persecution of Dr. Bernard Rottschaefer," "the first federal obscenity case in 20 years," and "the railroading of Tommy Chong."

Now it seems U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan may have finally stepped in it but good. This week, a federal jury hung on the 41 public corruption charges Buchanan brought against Pennsylvania medical examiner Dr. Cyril Wecht. A majority reportedly voted to acquit. This after a two-year investigation, a very sympathetic judge, and a bizarre trial in which the defense rested without calling a single witness. A loss or even a hung jury is rare for a U.S. attorney. Their conviction rate is over 95 percent.

Wecht's attorneys—including former GOP Attorney General Dick Thornberg—say the case was entirely driven by politics (Wecht is an outspoken Democrat). They point out that the trial itself cost about $200,000, while the total amount of money Wecht is alleged to have used from his public position to aid his private practice amounts to about $1,700.

In one post-trial interview, the jury foreman seemed to agree. The feds immediately announced plans to try Wecht again.

What I'm wondering is how the Department of Justice can see fit to spend two years and likely seven figures in taxpayer dollars to investigate a medical examiner for sending personal faxes on his publicly-owned machine, but thus far has seen no reason to look into Mississippi's Dr. Steven Hayne.

I've argued before that the real scandal with this Justice Department is not that it fired a bunch of prosecutors who didn't share the administration's priorities and political agenda. The real scandal is just how screwed-up those priorities and that agenda actually are.

Regulate it and They Will Lobby

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Writing in New Hampshire's Union Leader, 20/20 star and friend o' reason John Stossel makes a familiar-to-reason-readers yet always underappreciated point about the influence of lobbyists and perversity of reform. Clip 'n' save for the Naderite (or McCainiac, or Obamaphile) in your family.

The Public Choice school of economics calls this the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Individual members of relatively small interest groups stand to gain huge rewards when they lobby for government favors, but each taxpayer will pay only a tiny portion of the cost of any particular program, making opposition pointless. [...]
"Good government" types rightly abhor this influence-peddling, but they propose pointless reforms like bans on lobbyist-sponsored gifts, junkets and rides on corporate jets. They also back a vicious assault on free speech: campaign-finance restrictions designed to reduce the influence of lobbyists in political campaigns. Despite all these "reforms," influence-peddling goes on.
For good reason. None of the reforms gets near root of the problem.
The root is government power. When government is free to meddle in every corner of our lives and regulate the economy through taxes, regulation and subsidies, then "special interests" have every incentive to work on the politicians to preserve their turf or gain an advantage. [...]
The irony is that the "good government" types favor big government, so they undermine their own efforts to eliminate corruption. [...]
There is one way to rid the political system of this sort of corruption: severely restrict government power as the founders intended. Only when we eliminate the state's ability to meddle in business will business will stop meddling in government.

Whole thing here. Stossel in reason here.

"It is Well That War is So Terrible...."

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:16:00 EST

Via Wired.com, and from the collection of psychologist Philip Zimbardo who was a defense expert witness for one of the guards, some more gruesome photos from Abu Ghraib. Some are pretty similar to the classic hooded figure one, some of them defensible on some level as weird black humor, but for the most part showing some very dark behavior seemingly motivated from some of the very dark feelings generated by life during wartime.

[Tip via reader John-David Filing.]

Really Full Disclosure

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:21:00 EST

New way to bedevil those working in and for Congress, from the website LegiStorm's press release:

LegiStorm, the Web site that first caused controversy in Washington by publishing congressional staffer salaries, has now launched the first database of personal financial disclosures for thousands of the most powerful aides.
By law, members of Congress and their highest paid staff - who tend to be the most powerful on Capitol Hill - are required annually to disclose information about their personal finances, including details about their debts, stock portfolio, outside earned income, spousal employment, major gifts received and even their gambling winnings.
..........

Rules from the House of Representatives state, "The objectives of financial disclosure are to inform the public about the financial interests of government officials in order to increase public confidence in the integrity of government and to deter potential conflicts of interest."
[LegiStorm founder Jock] Friedly expects controversy with the new free database. "I understand that congressional aides want to jealously guard their privacy and I sympathize," he said. "However, these are the behind-the-scenes power players who control a $3.1 trillion federal budget and write all the laws of the land. It's hard to argue that they are not important public figures worthy of a little scrutiny."

Start your private investigation at LegiStorm today!

Technical Difficulties

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:15:00 EST

On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment on the federal government's pretty outrageous and politically-motivated prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Unlike much of the U.S. Attorney imbroglio, the pursuit of Siegelman reeks of genuine scandal, and may involve actual criminal acts committed by members of the Bush administration.

TPM Muckraker has the incredible video.

Also, Scott Horton at Harper's notes an even odder development:

I am now hearing from readers all across Northern Alabama—from Decatur to Huntsville and considerably on down—that a mysterious “service interruption” blocked the broadcast of only the Siegelman segment of 60 Minutes this evening. The broadcaster is Channel 19 WHNT, which serves Northern Alabama and Southern Tennessee. This station was noteworthy for its hostility to Siegelman and support for his Republican adversary. The station ran a trailer stating “We apologize that you missed the first segment of 60 Minutes tonight featuring ‘The Prosecution of Don Siegelman.’ It was a technical problem with CBS out of New York.” I contacted CBS News in New York and was told that “There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” Channel 19 is owned by Oak Hill Capital Partners . . . Oak Hill Partners represents interests of the Bass family, which contribute heavily to the Republican Party.

This is pretty brazen stuff. Siegelman's serving seven years for something that happens every day in this country, at every level of government. If this can happen to a popular former state governor, you wonder what happens to people accused of federal crimes who don't have that kind of clout.

Probably something like this.

The Hayne, West Taint Spills Into Louisiana, Too

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:45:00 EST

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 (pdf) 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 an intentional drowning. He then called in West, who once again managed to find bite marks no one else had noticed. Because of Hayne and West (as well as testimony from a jailhouse snitch), 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 report 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 Project, 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.

The point here is that 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 in the eyes of many prosecutors.

Big News in Mississippi

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:25:00 EST

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 on 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 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 were 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.

The Sacrifice of Public Service

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:18:00 EST

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an expose on W. Richard West, Jr., the founding director of the taxpayer-subsidized Smithsonian, the National Museum of the American Indian. Over the last four years, West racked up some $250,000 in globe-trotting travel expenses, hitting such obviously American Indian-relevant destinations as Athens, Bali, London, Hong Kong, Venice (four times), and Paris (12 times!).

West's defenders say his job requires outreach, and overseas travel comes with a museum director's fundraising, networking, and promotion duties. Fair enough, though that doesn't explain why when traveling on the dime of taxpayers and museum patrons, West always opted for business class airfare, first class seats on the train, and the plushest of hotel accommodations.

Now the Post reports that before West left, he commissioned a 48 x 34 portrait of himself to hang in the museum, forever reminding visitors of his legacy. The cost: $48,000. Under West's direction, the museum also spent $133,000 on a lavish going-away party for him, including $30,000 on a specially-produced DVD telling West's life story (which—and I'm just guessing, here—likely touted the splendid sacrifices West has made for a career in public service).

This is all particularly galling because by most accounts, West did a spectacularly crappy job with the museum.

Relevant factoid: Average annual income for Native Americans is about $12,900 per year.

McCain: Losing His Job in the New York Times?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:37:00 EST

Sure, he's racking up endorsements hither and yon (sweeping yon authoritatively, according to some polls), but the New York Times is holding something that could hurt (though, as David Weigel spelled out the other day, it's hard to hurt the essentially dead).

Drudge has the pre-skinny:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz has been waging a ferocious behind the scenes battle with the NEW YORK TIMES, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned, and has hired DC power lawyer Bob Bennett to mount a bold defense against charges of giving special treatment to a lobbyist! McCain has personally pleaded with NY TIMES editor Bill Keller not to publish the high-impact report involving key telecom legislation before the Senate Commerce Committee.... The paper's Jim Rutenberg has been leading the investigation and is described as beyond frustrated with McCain's aggressive and angry efforts to stop any and all publication. The drama involves a woman lobbyist who may have helped to write key telecom legislation. The woman in question has retained counsel and strongly denies receiving any special treatment from McCain. Rutenberg, along with reporter David Kirkpatrick, has been developing the story for the last 6 weeks. Rutenberg had hoped to break the story before the Christmas holiday, sources reveal, but editor Keller expressed serious reservations about journalism ethics and issuing a damaging story so close to an election.

If this is true, can anyone out there in journalism-ethics land explain to me how Keller deserves anything other than a kick out the door for this attitude?

For all the real story and analysis about McCain you can't find in the New York Times, read Matt Welch's new book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

SWAT Team + Hooters Girls + White Supremacist + Katrina Humanitarian Mission = Best Local News Story Ever

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:15:00 EST

I really can't write a summary that does all of this justice. Just head on over and click around.

Death Investigation Deficiencies

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:23:00 EDT

"The Mississippi medical examiner system doesn't exist, except in name only." So says Dr. Vincent DiMaio, a renowned forensic pathologist, and author of the guiding textbook for medical examiners. And he isn't alone. Talk to forensic pathologists across the country about how the state of Mississippi conducts its forensic autopsies and you'll get chuckles, exasperated sighs and indignation. What you'll be hard-pressed to find, however, is anyone outside the state who thinks things are being done properly.

Here's how it works: Each county in Mississippi elects a coroner to take the lead in conducting death investigations. The job requires no prior training, medical or otherwise - only a high school degree. If a death appears to have been caused by criminal activity, the coroner will consult with the local district attorney. Between the two of them, they'll then refer the body to a private medical examiner for an autopsy. If a crime did occur, that medical examiner will likely then be asked to testify at trial.

The system creates some troubling incentives. It encourages prosecutors and coroners to send bodies and the fees that come with them to medical examiners they trust. Critics say it undermines the notion of an adversarial criminal justice system. Medical examiners who have a financial incentive to keep prosecutors and coroners happy end up testifying against indigent defendants who can't afford to hire their own experts to review the state expert's work.

At the center of all of this is a Rankin medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne, the man who over the last 20 years has come to dominate Mississippi's autopsy business.

Hayne has testified in court and in depositions that he personally does between 1,200 and 1,800 autopsies per year. That range breaks down to three to five autopsies per day, assuming Hayne works every day of the year, with no time off for weekends, holidays, sick time, or personal vacations. For much of his career, Hayne has juggled this astonishing workload while also holding two administrative jobs at a local hospital and at a research facility - jobs he's said could take up to an additional 50 hours of his time each week. Hayne also testifies in court 2-4 times per week all over the state of Mississippi. Because of these other commitments, Hayne has done most of his autopsies at night and on weekends. Until only recently, he did them in a funeral home owned by Rankin County Coroner Jimmy Roberts.

According to the National Association of Medical Examiners, a single doctor should try to do no more than 250 autopsies per year. After 325, the group will no longer certify a doctor's practice. "You can't do it," says Dr. Vincent DiMaio of Hayne's workload. "After 250 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."

Hayne maintains that such standards are arbitrary, and don't account for his own work ethic. When questioned about his workload in a 2003 deposition, Hayne answered that he's simply an extraordinary physician. "If you want to compare me with the average forensic pathologist, I think it's an insult to me," he said.

After The Wall Street Journal published an article I wrote about Hayne earlier this month, Hayne told a Jackson television reporter that he isn't the only doctor in his practice who performs autopsy examinations, implying that these 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies are actually split between two or more physicians. That may well be the case today (Dr. Hayne didn't respond to my requests for an interview), but I have several depositions over the last 15 years where Dr. Hayne explicitly explains that he is indeed the only doctor in his practice licensed to perform autopsies (he has assistants, but they aren't permitted to perform the actual autopsy).

Mississippi law actually requires a board-certified, salaried state medical examiner to oversee how autopsies are meted out, and to be sure that qualified, certified medical examiners are conducting them. But that position has been vacant since 1995. The last two people to hold the office tried to impose some professional standards and clean up the system. Both left the office on bad terms after butting heads with Dr. Hayne and his supporters. The state Legislature has refused to fund the office since.

The ironic thing is that Dr. Hayne was once considered for the position. He was rejected because he isn't board certified in forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology, as required by state law (Hayne told the Jackson TV reporter this month that he is board certified, but "couldn't remember" the name of the group that certified him). Yet, by keeping the office vacant and allowing coroners to shop autopsies to freelancers, Hayne has become Mississippi's de facto state medical examiner, anyway.

Dr. Hayne's peers have found plenty of flaws in his work over the years. In 2003, for example, Dr. Harry Bonnell, a medical examiner in San Diego who sits on NAME's ethics committee, sent an unusually harsh letter to a criminal defense attorney after reviewing one of Hayne's autopsies. Bonnell described Hayne's conclusions as "near-total speculation," the quality of his report was "pathetic," and Hayne's failure to obtain specimens from the body and perform toxicology reports "borders on criminal negligence."

Dr. Stephen Pustilnik, now a medical examiner in Texas, reviewed an autopsy Hayne performed in 1998 and found that many of the internal organs Hayne claimed to have examined in the autopsy report hadn't been touched. Pustilnik describes Hayne's autopsy in that case as "near complete malpractice."

So why do Mississippi's coroners and district attorneys keep using Hayne? Critics say it's because they can rely on Hayne to come up with the conclusions they need to secure convictions. Ken Winter, president of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police and former director of the state's crime lab, says that prosecutors have told him over the years that Dr. Hayne is an "excellent witness." But Winter adds, "There's a lot more about being a professional and doing a good job than being an 'excellent witness.'"

Dr. Leroy Riddick, a well-respected medical examiner in Alabama who has opposed Hayne at trial in the past, is more blunt. "All of the prosecutors in Mississippi know that if you want to be sure you get the autopsy results you want, you take the body to Dr. Hayne," he says. J.D. Sanders, former police chief for Columbus, Miss., has tried for years to draw attention to Dr. Hayne's practices. "Prosecutors love him, because he'll testify to whatever they need him to testify to," he says.

Sanders then offers a sobering thought: "There's no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne," he says. "There may even be some on death row." Winter says he's just as concerned that Dr. Hayne's deficiencies may have wrongly classified homicides as suicides or accidents, or otherwise allowed guilty people to go free. Hayne has also testified in hundreds of civil cases over the years, including medical malpractice and torts cases.

At a minimum, Dr. DiMaio says, Mississippi should require that any medical examiner doing criminal autopsies meet the minimum professional standards outlined by NAME. That's a start. But Mississippi also needs to begin undoing the damage the current system has created. Unfortunately, that may mean revisiting what could be thousands of cases over the years in which Dr. Hayne and others like him have testified.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason. This article orginally appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

CSI: Mississippi

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:20:00 EDT

In a remarkable capital murder case earlier this year, the Mississippi Supreme Court, by an 8-to-1 vote, tossed out the expert testimony of Steven Hayne. The defendant was Tyler Edmonds, a 13-year-old boy accused of killing his sister’s husband. Hayne, Mississippi’s quasi-official state medical examiner, had testified that the victim’s bullet wounds supported the prosecution’s theory that Edmonds and his sister had shot the man together, each putting a hand on the weapon and pulling the trigger at the same time.

“I would favor that a second party be involved in that positioning of the weapon,” Hayne told the jury. “It would be consistent with two people involved. I can’t exclude one, but I think that would be less likely.”

Testifying that you can tell from an autopsy how many hands were on the gun that fired a bullet is like saying you can tell the color of a killer’s eyes from a series of stab wounds. It’s absurd. The Mississippi Supreme Court said Hayne’s testimony was “scientifically unfounded” and should not have been admitted. Based on this and other errors, it ordered a new trial for Edmonds.

But it wasn’t the doctor’s dubious claim that made the case unusual. It’s the fact that the court explicitly renounced his testimony. It was the first time that had happened to Hayne in hundreds of cases dating back nearly 20 years.

By any sane standard, the decision was long overdue. Hayne’s career in court is an egregious example of what happens when the criminal justice system fails to adequately oversee expert testimony. He may be unusually careless, but he is not unique—not in Mississippi, and not in the United States.

During the last two decades, there have been more than a dozen high-profile cases in which dubious forensic witnesses conned state and federal courts, sometimes for many years and in hundreds of cases. The most famous example is probably the West Virginia crime lab worker Fred Zain, who from 1979 to 1989 tainted so many trials with false testimony about blood, semen, and hair evidence that the state’s Supreme Court ordered a review of every case in which he’d ever testified. It turned out he had introduced deliberately falsified evidence in at least 134 cases.

Then there’s the disgraced Texas medical examiner Ralph Erdmann. Profiled in Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer’s 2000 book Actual Innocence, Erdmann dubbed himself the “Quincy of the Panhandle,” after the TV series about a peripatetic medical examiner. Erdmann claimed to perform around 400 autopsies per year, a number Scheck calls “astonishing.” His workload was so heavy, he sometimes skipped doing autopsies altogether. He once delivered a body without a head. In another case, his report included the weight of the victim’s spleen and gall bladder, which the victim’s family found odd, since both had been removed while the victim was alive. After authorities caught on to him in 1992, Erdmann was found to have faked more than 100 autopsies.

More recently, Oklahoma City was forced to review nearly 1,200 cases after the FBI found significant flaws in forensic analysis done by the police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, including problems with her hair and fiber analysis, and court testimony she presented as fact that other experts say was clearly opinion. The investigation resulted in one man’s release from death row; Gilchrist in turn was fired. Two more death row inmates were released after investigations found errors by other state forensic experts.

Such misbehavior and incompetence has persisted partly because of the complicated, highly specialized nature of the relevant fields. But Zain, Erdmann, and Gilchrist were at least eventually exposed. Hayne’s highly questionable practices are well-known in Mississippi, in neighboring states, and to forensic experts across the country. Yet he has been working in Mississippi for 20 years, and he still does the vast majority of forensic autopsies in the state. (A forensic autopsy is done to determine if the deceased died as the result of a crime or negligence; other types of autopsies are done to determine if the deceased died of a pathogen, cancer, or other medical disorder.)

Hayne, 67, has a reputation for threatening to sue his detractors, which makes many of them reluctant to speak on the record. When reformers tried to make Mississippi abide by the professional standards of forensic pathology, Hayne and his allies sabotaged their efforts and, in some cases, effectively drove them out of the state. Hayne himself did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. Phone and email queries to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state medical examiner’s office, and the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office also went unreturned.

Still, several of Hayne’s critics were willing to speak publicly about him. And what Hayne himself has conceded in trial testimony and at depositions is damning enough.

J.D. Sanders is a former Columbus, Mississippi, police chief who now works as an assistant police chief in Franklin, Tennessee. “There’s no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne,” Sanders says. “There may even be some on death row.”

Ken Winter, who was director of Mississippi’s State Crime Lab from 2001 to 2004 and currently serves as executive director of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, observes that prosecutors think Hayne is an excellent witness. But there’s a lot more about being a professional and doing a good job than being an “excellent witness.” Leroy Riddick, a state medical examiner in Alabama who has testified in opposition to Hayne, adds, “All of the prosecutors in Mississippi know that if you want to be sure you get the autopsy results you want, you take the body to Dr. Hayne.”

And that’s the problem. The aim of expert testimony should be getting at the truth, not pleasing prosecutors. According to the standards set by the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME), the field’s pre-eminent professional organization, medical examiners “must investigate cooperatively with, but independent from, law enforcement and prosecutors. The parallel investigation promotes neutral and objective medical assessment of the cause and manner of death.”

That isn’t happening in Mississippi.

The Casebook of Dr. Steven Hayne
According to NAME, a single medical examiner should perform no more than 250 autopsies per year. At 325, the group considers a doctor to have a “Phase II deficiency”; at that point, it will not accredit a practice, regardless of any other criteria.

Hayne has repeatedly testified under oath that he performs more than 1,500 autopsies per year—a staggering number that dwarfs even the output of the prolific Dr. Erdmann. That’s more than four per day, every day of the year, for the 20 years Hayne’s been in Mississippi. In a 2002 deposition, Hayne put the estimate at 1,800.

What’s more, for most of his career, Hayne also has held jobs as medical director of the Rankin Medical Center (a post he left last summer) and as director of the Renal Lab, a kidney and dialysis research center. These jobs, he has testified, would take up about 55 hours per week of his time, hours not spent performing the 30 to 35 autopsies he says he does each week. (A typical autopsy should take two to three hours, but sometimes takes an entire day, depending on the condition of the body and cause of death.) Hayne has said in depositions that he also testifies “two to three to four times per week,” all across Mississippi and occasionally in Louisiana.

How does he find the time? In his testimony, Hayne has claimed he “commonly” works 18 to 20 hours per day. He says he doesn’t take vacations, and works every weekend and every holiday.
Until recently, Hayne performed most of his autopsies not at the state lab in Jackson but at Mississippi Mortuary Services, a funeral home owned by Jimmy Roberts, the longtime Rankin County coroner. Hayne and a few trusted assistants do most of his autopsies late at night, and the operation has a gruesome reputation. People who have visited Hayne’s practice during an autopsy session have described seeing as many as 15 bodies opened at once, with Hayne and his assistants smoking cigars, sometimes even eating sandwiches, as they go from one body to the next. Critics interviewed for this article, none of them particularly squeamish about autopsies performed under normal conditions, referred to Hayne’s operation as a “slaughterhouse,” a “sushi shop,” and a “sausage factory.”

Dwayne Wolf, a doctor who works for the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office in Houston, had occasion to review one of Hayne’s autopsies when he was practicing in Alabama. “Dr. Hayne’s deficiencies are glowingly obvious when you review his work,” Wolf says. “There were a lot of things done in a substandard way.”

Harry Bonnell, a medical examiner in private practice in San Diego who sits on NAME’s ethics board, was asked by a defense attorney to review an autopsy Hayne performed in 2003 on a suspected murder victim. Bonnell was floored by Hayne’s conclusions. Using unusually strong language, Bonnell said Hayne’s conclusions were “near-total speculation,” the quality of his report was “pathetic,” and Hayne’s failure to obtain specimens from the body and perform toxicology reports “borders on criminal negligence.”

“Professionally, I think he does too many autopsies,” says Winter. “Way too many to do them in the manner they should be done.”

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.

Just a few of the ugly results:

The Case of the Forgotten Fingernails: In February 2006, Kenneth Chandler of Columbus, Mississippi, was the victim of a gruesome homicide, stabbed to death in his home. The body was sent to Hayne for an autopsy. According to sources at the Columbus Police Department, Hayne forgot to take scrapings from under the victim’s fingernails. James Starrs, a well-respected author of several books on forensic pathology and a professor of law and forensics at George Washington University, says such an oversight is inexcusable. “You do scrapings in every autopsy,” says Starrs, “especially in a homicide, and especially in a case”—such as this one—“where the victim has defensive wounds.” Columbus police personnel had to rush to the funeral home to obtain the scrapings before the body was embalmed.

The Case of the Strangled Skeleton: In 1999 the body of Prentiss, Mississippi, resident Tanya Ward was found in a wooded area, completely skeletonized from the waist up due to decomposition and wild animals. At the trial of the accused killer, Hayne testified that Ward’s remains showed signs that were consistent with strangulation—a conclusion other medical examiners say could not be reached unless there was muscle tissue to examine. After the local public defender subjected Hayne to a vigorous cross-examination, the defendant was acquitted.

The Case of the Naturally Bludgeoned Woman: In 1998, after a woman’s body was found in the Mississippi Delta, Hayne concluded she had expired of natural causes. Because the woman was a resident of Alabama, that state’s medical examiner asked Stephen Pustilnik, at that time a state medical examiner in Birmingham, to perform a second autopsy. Pustilnik found that Hayne hadn’t even emptied the pockets of the woman’s robe. Moreover, many of the internal organs Hayne claimed to have examined in the autopsy report hadn’t been touched. The woman was later determined to have died from a blow to the head.

Pustilnik, who declined to comment more broadly on Hayne’s practices, says that in this case Hayne’s autopsy was “near complete malpractice.” Starrs says such oversights are glaring. “Emptying the pockets of personal effects, taking pictures of everything on the deceased’s person—these are really standard procedures,” Starrs says. “It’s a quintessential part of a standard autopsy.”

The Case of the $37,000 Edit: Twice in 1997, years after he’d performed the autopsies, Hayne changed his diagnosis in two infant deaths from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to asphyxiation. The abrupt change came after Hayne had been contacted by plaintiff’s attorneys who wanted him to testify on their behalf in a suit against the manufacturer of an allegedly defective infant rocker. Questioned about the cases in subsequent depositions, Hayne testified that he had changed his diagnoses after reviewing medical literature but without re-examining the bodies. In one of the cases, Hayne’s practice billed the plaintiff’s attorneys $37,000 after making the alteration.

For Starrs, such an abrupt change in diagnosis is “troublesome.” SIDS, Starrs says, is a “catch-all” diagnosis often used in infant deaths when other symptoms are lacking. “It would be very difficult to change from SIDS to asphyxiation,” he explains, because the latter is a more specific diagnosis, one that would require the presences of symptoms Hayne should have noticed during the original autopsies.

On Death Row
Hayne’s testimony hasn’t just sent people to prison. In more than one case, it has helped someone land on death row.

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.

As unfair as this sounds, it isn’t at all out of the ordinary. Indigent defendants by definition can’t afford to hire their own experts. (This is one reason it’s important that state medical examiners and forensic experts retain their independence from prosecutors’ offices.) Post-conviction relief offices, which are usually established at the state level and are better funded, sometimes have the money to hire independent experts, but these offices typically don’t take a case until it’s already in the appeals phase. At that point, courts are extremely reluctant to consider new evidence, particularly expert testimony.

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.

Hayne’s Qualifications
According to his curriculum vitae, Hayne attended medical school at Brown University from 1974 to 1976 and completed his medical internship in 1976 at the Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. After practicing medicine in California, Kentucky, and Alabama, he came to Mississippi in 1987. He began doing autopsies for the state’s county coroners, elected officials who are not necessarily physicians, shortly thereafter.

Hayne briefly served as Mississippi’s interim state medical examiner in 1987 and 1988 but was forced to step down because he wasn’t qualified for the job. Under Mississippi law, the state medical examiner must be certified in forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology, the standard certifying organization in the profession. Though Hayne routinely testifies under oath that he is “board certified” in “forensic pathology,” he isn’t, at least as the phrase is understood by most of his peers. Instead, Hayne says he’s certified by other organizations that are considerably less reputable.

“When you say you’re ‘certified,’ it means the American Board of Pathology,” says Joseph Prahlow, NAME’s president. Told that Hayne routinely testifies that he is “certified” even though he never passed the American Board of Pathology exam, Prahlow replies, “That is very disturbing to me. There’s definitely a problem with that.”

Hayne has testified that he did attempt to take the American Board of Pathology’s certification test in the 1980s but failed the exam after walking out in the middle of it. (He said the questions were “absurd.”) So he can’t serve as state medical examiner because he failed the certification exam, but he has spent the last 20 years doing most of the state’s forensic autopsies anyway.

One of the groups Hayne lists on his C.V., the American Academy of Forensic Examiners, doesn’t seem to exist. Some forensic experts interviewed for this article say it is an alternate name for the American College of Forensic Examiners, which has been criticized by legal experts as a mail-order outfit where the only necessary qualification is a check. Consistent with that reputation, Hayne has testified that the American Academy of Forensic Examiners “grandfathered” him into certification without an exam.

In the past Hayne has listed another certifying group, the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons. It no longer offers specialty certifications in forensic pathology. The forensic experts I interviewed for this article had never even heard of it. The doctor the group sent to proctor Hayne’s exam for the organization has since been indicted on felony charges and no longer practices medicine.

An Absence of Oversight
In Mississippi, as in many states, elected county coroners are in charge of death investigations. Traditionally such systems include a state medical examiner’s office to make sure the coroners are referring bodies to reputable, board-certified forensic pathologists. But while Mississippi law calls for a board-certified state medical examiner to oversee the process, the office has been vacant since 1995. The legislature refuses to fund it. Autopsy fees come from individual counties, not the state treasury. So there’s no one at the state level assessing the quality of the autopsies done in Mississippi.

With so little oversight, underqualified Mississippi coroners and politically driven district attorneys can shop autopsies and the fees that come with them to their favorite medical examiners, such as Hayne. Hayne charges about $550 per autopsy. According to several sources, Hayne receives fees for other services, such as drawing fluids or sending tissue to a lab for testing. He then gets $195 per hour for trial preparation and testimony. That’s just for state cases. If a county coroner brings a body to him at the request of a plaintiff’s attorney for a private tort action, Hayne has said in depositions, he charges $1,500 or more, plus $375 per hour for trial preparation and testimony.

Hayne’s efficient operation and reliable court appearances have allowed him to dominate the forensic autopsy business in Mississippi. A 1992 internal memo from the state’s Department of Public Safety estimated that Hayne performed 80 percent of all forensic autopsies performed in the state. Sources interviewed for this article say Hayne continues to do the vast majority of forensic autopsies in Mississippi.

“It’s a racket,” says Sanders, the former Columbus police chief. “Most states pay a [state] medical examiner $100,000, maybe $200,000 per year. Do the math. Fifteen hundred autopsies per year at $500 to $1,500 a pop. Hayne’s making millions.…Prosecutors love him because he’ll testify to whatever they need him to. Meanwhile, the state legislature saves money by not having to fund a full-time state medical examiner, office, and staff.”

Hayne’s relationship with Mississippi’s district attorneys is another cause for concern. As noted above, NAME standards call for forensic experts to be independent seekers of fact. But that doesn’t appear to be the case in Mississippi, where district attorneys expect medical examiners to be part of the prosecution team. In 1994, for example, John T. Kitchens, the district attorney for Rankin and Madison counties, wrote a letter to the state commissioner of public safety complaining that the state medical examiner at the time, Emily Ward, had “unnecessarily rendered aid to the defense of criminal defendants.” Kitchens warned that “public officials surrounding the criminal justice system must remain mindful of who they work for”; that prosecutors shouldn’t have to “bear the extra burden of wondering for which side the State Medical examiner [sic] is then employed”; and that the state examiner should never confer with defense counsel without the consent of the district attorney involved in the case. Defendants, Kitchens argued, can hire their own experts with private or public funding. In response, the Department of Public Safety sent Ward a memo that essentially agreed with Kitchens’ interpretation of the state medical examiner’s proper loyalties.

At several points during the last 30 years, Mississippi’s coroners and prosecutors have attempted to make the state medical examiner report directly to the state’s attorney general. George Washington University’s Starrs says the sentiment that experts work for the prosecution, though common, is inconsistent with a medical examiner’s duty to impartially investigate a death.

Contrary to Kitchens’ apparent assumption, most criminal defendants can’t hire their own experts, and public defenders and criminal defense attorneys with heavy caseloads don’t always have time to examine the credentials of every expert witness for the prosecution. In the case of Hayne, who has been certified as an expert by Mississippi’s courts thousands of times over the years, such an exercise seems futile. Moreover, trial courts aren’t always willing to allocate public funds for independent defense experts. With a few exceptions, the most vigorous examinations of Hayne have come during depositions in civil cases—medical malpractice suits, for example—where the opposing side could afford adequate representation and could hire independent experts to review his work.

“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.”

Frustrated Reformers
Those who have tried to effect changes anyway have met considerable resistance. Lloyd White served as state medical examiner from 1989 to 1993, under Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus. He is now a state medical examiner in Tarrant County, Texas. (He performed the autopsy on the slain Tejano pop star Selena.) Among other changes, White tried to require minimal competence tests and continuing training for Mississippi’s county coroners. Most of his suggestions are officially still part of the state’s regulations, but they’re ignored.

White was especially concerned about the cozy relationships between coroners, district attorneys, and private medical examiners like Hayne, relationships that the ad hoc autopsy system seemed to encourage. “There’s a tendency to slant things to favor the people you’re working for,” White says. “The politics and power could sometimes run roughshod over people’s civil rights.”

Julia James, now retired, worked for 27 years in the state’s crime lab and served as the lab’s interim director from 2004 to 2005. “A prosecutor would sometimes come back to us on a case and say something like ‘Can’t you go further?’ or ‘Are you sure it didn’t happen this way?’ Of course, the analysts I worked with always tried to maintain their neutrality.”

White left his position in 1992 with the election of a new governor. But he went out with a bang. Before leaving, he wrote a blistering public letter to Charles Tisdale, editor and publisher of the Jackson Advocate, a hard-hitting black paper sometimes called “the most firebombed newspaper in America.” Tisdale’s paper had been doggedly pursuing a series of suspicious suicides in Mississippi’s jails that many civil rights leaders believed to be homicides.

White himself suspected the deaths really were suicides. But he didn’t believe they were being properly investigated. In particular, he was troubled that the bodies were being sent to examiners like Hayne, who, experience taught him, couldn’t be trusted to give an unbiased conclusion. White’s letter called Hayne out by name, noting that despite his lack of credentials and poor practices, “Hayne continues to autopsy jail and prison deaths, as well as persons killed by police or sheriff’s deputies, and to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal income as a result of his extremely cozy relations with…state employees and officials.”

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 successor, the last person to fill the job of Mississippi’s state medical examiner, was Emily Ward, appointed in 1993 by Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice. Her tenure was even more raucous than White’s. One of Ward’s first goals was to get the state medical examiner’s office accredited by NAME. She also proposed that the state office, which handled less than 10 percent of the forensic autopsies performed in Mississippi, take on more of the burden. It was a sensible move: The fees the counties were paying to private practitioners like Hayne could instead go to the state medical examiner’s general fund, making the office less dependent on the inadequate budget provided by the state legislature. It would also mean more autopsies would be performed by independent, board-certified forensic pathologists.

This proposal rankled Hayne and the county coroners, who stood to lose both power and income under the plan. “Dr. Ward came in here and tried to clean up the system,” says Andre de Gruy, who directs Mississippi’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel, the public defender office for death penalty cases. “Hayne and the coroners got together and chased her out.”

Two coroners with strong ties to Hayne emerged as Ward’s most vocal critics. One was Jimmy Roberts, the owner of the funeral home where, until recently, Hayne did most of his autopsies. The other was Michael West of Forrest County, a dentist who is frequently present at Hayne’s autopsies, whom Hayne has cited in depositions as a reference for his credibility, and who has collaborated with him on presentations and journal articles.

West, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has his own credibility problems. He claims to have perfected a method of identifying bite marks using laser light and orange goggles that he modestly calls “the West Phenomenon.” He has said his error rate in bite mark analysis is “something less” than the error rate of “my savior, Jesus Christ” and has compared his bite mark virtuosity with the musical talent of Itzhak Perlman. West once claimed he could trace the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich at a crime scene to a suspect. After exposés of West appeared on 60 Minutes and in Newsweek and The National Law Journal, prosecutors in Mississippi largely stopped using him, although there are still people in prison because of his testimony.

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.

Battered but Not Yet Beaten
When the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out Hayne’s testimony in the Tyler Edmonds case, it was an act long overdue. But the court didn’t go nearly far enough. In a concurring opinion Justice Oliver Diaz wrote that “there are serious concerns over Dr. Hayne’s qualifications to provide expert testimony.” Noting Hayne’s troublingly high number of autopsies and his lack of certification, Diaz concluded that the court should not “qualify Dr. Hayne as an expert in forensic pathology.” That understates what’s needed: a comprehensive review of every case in which Hayne has ever testified, the sort of review that has been conducted following other forensic expert scandals across the country.

Despite Diaz’s view, the majority in Edmonds upheld Hayne’s continued good standing as a certified forensic pathology expert in Mississippi. That means Hayne will continue his marathon all-night autopsy sessions. District attorneys will continue to send him bodies, knowing they can count on a supportive diagnosis. The state medical examiner’s office will remain vacant. And Hayne’s testimony will continue to put people in prison, even on death row.

The problems with forensic testimony extend beyond Mississippi. In March, Joseph Kopera,
a frequent prosecution witness in Maryland’s state courts and in federal courts on ballistics matters, committed suicide after he was confronted with evidence that he had lied in court about his academic credentials. Kopera had testified in hundreds of criminal trials before being exposed. Those cases will now be reviewed.

To its credit, the Maryland legislature responded by passing one of the most thorough laws in the country implementing oversight of forensic labs, establishing an independent oversight board, and codifying the standards and best practices recommended by professional organizations. Experts such as DiMaio say Mississippi could solve many of its problems through similar safeguards, such as requiring that any medical examiner certified by its courts meet NAME’s minimum standards.

A 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation of 200 DNA-based exonerations in Illinois found that more than a quarter involved faulty or fraudulent testimony by expert forensic witnesses. Hundreds of cases have been reviewed after deficient or fraudulent expert testimony was discovered in the Houston medical examiner’s office and in state crime labs in Washington state, Virginia, and Maryland. Even the FBI’s crime lab has come under scrutiny.

In those cases, the malefactors were identified and efforts were made to undo the damage they caused. Unfortunately, little has changed in Mississippi.

Ken Winter, who often worked with Hayne while running the state crime lab, thinks real change is unlikely unless the system’s shortcomings end up hurting someone with political influence. Asked why there haven’t been any serious reforms, he replies, “It sounds awful to say this, but it’s probably because the right person hasn’t been killed yet.”

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason.

Great Moments in Police Professionalism

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:00:00 EDT

The L.A. Times reports on some unusual motivational techniques in the L.A. Sheriff's Department:

One recent competition, described in an internal Sheriff's Department e-mail obtained by The Times, was called "Operation Any Booking." The object was to arrest as many people as possible within a specific 24-hour period.

Other one-day competitions have included "Operation Vehicle Impound," a contest aimed at seizing as many cars as possible. And another challenged deputies to see how many gang members and other suspected criminals could be stopped and questioned.

The prize for winning was nothing more than "bragging rights," said Lt. James Tatreau, who helped organize the events that involved teams of deputies patrolling the southeast Los Angeles cities of Lakewood, Bellflower, Paramount, Artesia and Hawaiian Gardens. The station is one of 23 that make up the nation's largest sheriff's department.

"It's just a friendly competition to have a little fun out here," Tatreau said. It was Tatreau who sent the e-mail about the booking contest Aug. 15. Tatreau said he viewed the games, which began in July, as a morale booster for overworked deputies who, because of staffing shortages, are required to work four overtime shifts a month.

Meanwhile, the police problems in Chicago are only getting worse:

Videotapes of angry officers savagely beating civilians and charges that a murder plot was hatched within an elite special operations unit have Chicago's troubled police department reeling again.

Adding to the department's woes is word from federal prosecutors that they are investigating claims that homicide detectives tortured suspects into confessing to murders that landed them on death row in the 1980s.
[...]
Craig B. Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor, says such investigations [of police misconduct] in the past were shoddy and rarely resulted in discipline against the officers.

"If they investigated crimes the way they investigate complaints against police officers they would never close a case," Futterman says.

Part of the problem is that the city seems to have difficulty taking complaints against police officers seriously.

More fun with Chicago PD here.

Sausage Making

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:58:00 EDT

In Texas, they're not even pretending anymore.

Cops Writing Cops

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:34:00 EDT

Here's a charming little website where cops nominate one another for the "Dick of the Month" award.

Nominees are cops who dared breach police "professional courtesy," and wrote a ticket to another cop whom he caught breaking the law.

Thanks to several Hit & Run regulars for the tip.

Why Do the Dems and Reps Keep Biting Their Own Asses?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:04:00 EDT

Over at Politico, occasional reason contributor and self-professed "libertarian Democrat" Terry Michael raises a question worth pondering:

The Party of God, we are shocked to learn, seems to have a libido. And, equally amazing, the Party of Reform apparently covets a little mammon on occasion.

When will self-righteous Republicans and holier-than-thou Democrats learn that hypocrisy, not sex and greed, is the original sin for which voters, and certainly cynical journalists, hold them accountable?
The anti-gay, pro-"family values" party, held captive by its Southern-based, evangelical wing, is repeatedly embarrassed when its David Vitters and Larry Craigs exhibit interest in 'hos and 'mos (translation for Beltway types: "whores" and "homosexuals.")

Likewise, the party of campaign finance "reform," intellectually imprisoned by the Washington ethics industry and its handmaidens in the ivory towers of liberal editorial pages, is caught with its Progressive Era pants down when a big pile of hot Jacksons ends up in William Jefferson's freezer, or when a financial supporter facing a felony indictment ends up on Hillary Clinton's donor list.

Michael suggests that each party whittles down the plank in its eye, if only out of self-interest:

So beware you Republican and Democratic candidates, whenever the phrases "family values" or "special interests" find their way into your talking points. Prepare to cover your behinds, because those words will come back to bite you in the bottom when one of your own is found to value an interest in sex and greed.

Whole thing here.

Checks and Balances and Freezers Full of Cash

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:53:00 EDT

Schoolhouse Rock never quite covered congressmen with wads of possibly bribery-related cash in their freezers, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. gives us a lesson in checks and balances in its decision regarding the Justice Department raid of the office of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) last year. From the AP coverage:

The Justice Department has predicted a ruling such as the one Friday will turn Congress into a haven where lawmakers can keep evidence of corruption off-limits to prosecutors.
That's not the case, said the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The raid itself was constitutional, the court held. But the FBI crossed the line when it viewed every record in the office without allowing Jefferson to argue that some involved legislative business.
The Constitution prohibits the executive branch from using its law enforcement powers to interfere with the lawmaking process.
"The review of the congressman's paper files when the search was executed exposed legislative material to the executive" and violated the Constitution, the court wrote. "The congressman is entitled to the return of documents that the court determines to be privileged."

This doesn't mean that the bleeding-heart courts are going to allow a potentially criminal congressman to just walk, though:

The court did not rule whether, because portions of the search were illegal, prosecutors should be barred from using any of the records in their case against Jefferson. That will be decided by a Virginia federal judge presiding over the criminal case, which is scheduled for trial in January.

Back in May 2006, Jacob Sullum wrote about this case and wondered why Congress only seems to care about separation of powers when its ox is gored.

Libby on the Loose

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:17:00 EDT

President ~~Cheney~~, er, Bush, commutes Scooter Libby's jail sentence--the fine and probation stand. All Republicans who actually have to run for re-election again smile very, very tight, pained smiles at the news.

How China Watches the Drug Watchers

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:16:00 EDT

This AP story makes me curious what the Chinese government will do to the guy who let bad pet food hit the shelves:

China's former top drug regulator was sentenced to death Tuesday in an unusually harsh punishment for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths.

The sentence was levied by "Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate People's Court," which really makes you wonder how tough the advanced people's court can be.

Whole story here.

Junkets Now Paid for by Taxpayers

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:46:00 EDT

If you thought the end of Abamoff meant the end of free vacations for Congresmen, think again.

Congress is keeping Andrews Air Force base plenty busy this year ferrying lawmakers all over the globe at taxpayers’ expense. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi took his wife, nine Democrats and two Republicans - Reps. Dan Lungren of California and Mike Rogers of Alabama - on a whirlwind tour of the Caribbean last week. After stops in Honduras and Mexico, they stopped in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the delegation stayed at the five-star Caneel Bay resort.
In a separate trip to the Caribbean last week, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York squired his wife and four Democratic members to Grenada and Trinidad.
All told, the military flew at least 13 congressional delegations to various destinations during the Easter recess -- at an estimated rate of $10,000 or more per flying hour.
[...]
Thompson’s office said he toured the Caribbean because he now chairs the Homeland Security Committee and wanted to see vacation hot spots to “examine border security and port security.” Three other members of the delegation also brought along their spouses.
[...]
At the Caneel Bay resort, where room rates reach $1,100 per night, the spokeswoman said Thompson and his wife paid the “government rate.” But, according to the reservations department, Caneel Bay doesn’t “offer any government rates.”
[...]
The Caribbean trip led by Engel, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, explored the “best practices for emergency disaster relief” and energy policy, according to his office.

City of Bruised Shoulders

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:31:00 EDT

So remember the video of the off-duty Chicago SWAT officer beating the mother-grabbin' vocabulary out of a female bartender a third his size?

A second video surfaced last week, this time involving six other off-duty Chicago cops slamming some heads in a bar brawl.

One alleged victim of the Jefferson Tap beating required reconstructive surgery on his face and another suffered four broken ribs, a lawyer for the men has said. During the incident, patrons at the downtown bar called 911. When patrol officers responded, the off-duty officers involved allegedly spoke to them and the patrol officers left without intervening, sources have said.

That was in December. Police officials saw the video of the fight five days after it happened. Yet the brawling cops kept their jobs, positions, and patrols until late last week, when the bartender beatdown video got the media sniffing, leading to the discovery of the video of the December brawl. Four months later, only after another one of his men was caught on tape beating a civilian, Chicago Police Superintendent Philip Cline decided to suspend the six officers involved in the December brawl, noting that he probably "mishandled" their discipline.

"Mishandled" is one way of putting it. "Covered up" is probably more accurate.

This week was also the hearing for Officer Anthony Abbate, the aforementioned officer who beat down the bartender. As if the department hadn't shamed itself enough already...

The hearing was held at a branch courtroom at the Grand Central Area police headquarters, and several on-duty officers used their squad cars to block media access to the facility, Cline said. Officers also issued parking tickets to media vehicles parked in the headquarters lot.

Cline said he had already decided to demote the watch commander—a captain—who he said told the officers to harass reporters and camera crews covering the Abbate hearing.

Demoted? Shouldn't the watch commander be fired? Come to think of it, it's probably time for Sup. Cline to look for other work, too. New evidence also emerged this week in yet another case, this time casting doubt on police accounts of a 2005 fatal police shooting of an unarmed immigrant in the city. Incredibly, Sup. Cline was at the scene of that shooting. A forensics expert is now alleging a police cover-up there, too.

I'll include the obligatory "only a small percentage of cops are bad" disclaimer here. But when the entire department—right up to the chief of police—continues to cover up for the bad seeds, you really can't blame the public for starting to believe that they're all crooked.

Bush OK with Earmarks?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:20:00 EDT

While the prez has fulminated against "earmarks," in his State of the Union address and elsewhere, the D.C. Examiner's Mark Tapscott thinks that Bush is going to let the whole earmarks "anonymous spending unrelated to a bill's ostensible purpose slipped in behind closed doors" thing ride when it comes to his Iraq supplemental bill.

Why It Is More Blessed to Give: Campaign Contributions

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:10:00 EDT

Michael Brush at MSN's "Money Central" reports on an academic paper that tries to quantify the benefits businesses get from giving to government. Some of the findings, as he reports them:

Corporations that give the most have beaten the market by 2.5 percentage points a year over the past 25 years.......
What is surprising is how much companies get for so little money. The public companies that do give money, on average, fork out just $1,700 to $2,000 per campaign and support an average of 56 federal candidates in each two-year cycle.
......The best approach to giving, for instance, isn't to buy a single lawmaker. Rather, companies that contribute to the largest number of political campaigns get the biggest benefit.
"Much like a venture capital portfolio of many startups, a few of the supported candidates will 'pay off big' and result in increases in firm shareholder wealth," says the study, which tracked the impact of more than 1 million corporate campaign contributions by about 2,000 companies from 1979 to 2004.

The study is called "Corporate Political Contributions and Stock Returns," issued in October 2006 by Michael J. Cooper at the University of Utah and Huseyin Gulen and Alexei Ovtchinnikov, both of Virginia Tech. It finds the best-leveraged investments in politicians are to more powerful ones (such as committee heads), to home-state candidates, and to House candidates generally--who are in charge of launching tax and budget law. Also:

Though companies support Republicans more than Democrats ($43,000 per election cycle compared with $31,000, on average), they get a bigger payoff by supporting Democrats. Companies that tilt their contributions to the left, and to home-state candidates, outperform the market by 3 percentage points a year, on average.

Brush's full story here .

Full study about which Brush was reporting here .