Death Row Inmate Freed After Bullshit Bite Mark Evidence Determined To Be Bullshit

Legal Issues

from the better-late-than-never,-I-guess dept

The end of a crooked and corrupt era in Mississippi is still paying long-belated dividends to wrongly convicted criminals in Mississippi. The state that has defined “backwater” for so many years is slowly crawling out of its self-created gutter.

Eddie Lee Howard has been freed. And it took “only” 26 years. Howard was convicted of murdering Georgia Kemp back in 1995. He was 38 at the time he was arrested. He is now 67. And he is being freed.

The case was built on the testimony of two supposed experts, an overworked (and underqualified) coroner (Dr. Steven Hayne) and Dr. Michael West, a self-avowed “bite mark expert.” In reality, state medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne was just another cog in the conviction wheel — a coroner who somehow managed to perform more than six autopsies a day.

Radley Balko — a longtime police accountability advocate — has written a book about both of these men: “The Cadaver King and the County Dentist.” Hayne only got his position because no one else stepped up to fill it. He certainly didn’t have the credentials.

Hayne had wanted that job but was barred by his lack of certification. Instead, Mississippi officials simply left the office vacant, allowing Hayne to become the state’s de facto medical examiner, even though he wasn’t qualified to hold the title.

His long and prolific reign as the processor of corpses and provider of “expert” testimony led to an eventual denouement — one in which a prosecutor specifically called him out for his willingness to generate autopsy reports that coincided with whatever law enforcement theory seemed likely to close a case.

During the State’s cross-examination of Dr. Hayne, the prosecutor asked Dr. Hayne: “You told me during lunch the reason you have to carry around that big notebook with you is you have to defend yourself nowadays for all the reversals you’ve had in the Mississippi Supreme Court; is that correct?” Rayner objected to the relevancy and improper questioning of Dr. Hayne; however, the trial court overruled the objection, finding that the question related to Dr. Hayne’s credibility, and allowed the prosecutor to proceed with his line of cross-examination questioning.

After presenting his case to the jury, Rayner renewed all of his previous motions, especially for a directed verdict/judgment of acquittal. The trial court overruled Rayner’s motions. During closing arguments, the State, on rebuttal, made the following comment: “Then you go to Dr. Hayne, a discredited doctor in the State of Mississippi.”

That’s one half of this deadly equation. The other is Dr. Michael West. West testified that Howard was the most likely suspect because of evidence only he could see.

West examined the body, using ultraviolet light and “special glasses” to discover bite marks deemed invisible to the naked human eye, and therefore missed on the autopsy report, on three parts of the victim’s body.

Somehow, this guy and his mail order x-ray specs were able to see what idiot commoners couldn’t: bites that led to a murder conviction because so many murderers take time out of their murdering to bite people.

This was pretty much the state’s only evidence against Howard. Let’s take another look at Dr. Michael West and his “expertise:”

Two men [were] convicted of raping and killing two 3-year-old girls in separate Mississippi crimes in 1992 and 1995. Marks on their bodies were later determined to have come from crawfish and insects.

Those glasses are special alright. How someone could mistake — on the record and under oath — damage from bottom feeders for that created by human suspects with human teeth is best left to the fevered imagination of whoever is ghostwriting James Patterson novels these days.

DNA testing later showed Howard’s DNA wasn’t in the supposed bite marks Dr. West spied with his faulty special eye.

Howard is now the seventh person on death row in Mississippi to have been exonerated following examination of “evidence” produced by these two men. And these exonerations have only further damaged Dr. West’s already questionable reputation.

“Dr. West’s credibility also has been destroyed since Howard’s trial. In the intervening years, West and his methodology have plunged to overwhelming rejection by the forensics community to the point that today his methodology is not at all supported by mainstream forensic odontologists,” Associate Justice David Ishee wrote in a concurring option for the court.

Bite mark “science” is no longer considered science. It’s considered junk, no more worthy of discussion than the earth’s alleged flatness. And yet, it cost this man 29 years of his life because anyone in a lab coat is considered more trustworthy than anyone law enforcement wishes to pin a crime on.

Filed Under: bite mark, death row, eddie lee howard, evidence