STORY: "Bite mark analysis on death row inmate defended," by reporter Alex Holloway, published by The Dispatch on May 7, 2016.
GIST: "Michael West took to the witness stand Friday to defend his record on bite mark analysis. West, a forensic odontologist, is at the center of an ongoing post-conviction relief hearing for death row inmate Eddie Lee Howard. Howard, 62, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2000 for the 1992 rape and murder of 84-year-old Georgia Kemp in her Columbus home. Howard was previously convicted for the crime in 1994, but the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 1997. In both trials, West testified that bite marks on Kemp's body matched an impression of Howard's teeth. The bite marks on Kemp's body, according to court documents, were not noted during the initial autopsy performed on Feb. 3, 1992, by medical examiner Steven Hayne. West requested additional study on Feb. 6, 1992, and Kemp was exhumed the next day. Documents say bite marks were found on Kemp's neck, arm and breast. The bite marks were the only piece of physical evidence linking Howard to the crime. On Thursday, two witnesses for the defense said male DNA on a butcher knife used to kill Kemp did not match a DNA sample from Howard. The butcher knife was the only item recovered from the scene that tested positive for male DNA. m The Mississippi Innocence Project, which is representing Howard, called several witnesses on Wednesday and Thursday to testify against using bite mark analysis to identify suspects. West, on Wednesday, said he still believes in bite mark analysis. However, he said the "politics" around it and constant pressures from defenses have pushed him away from it. "If a technique is valuable in court and the defense cannot overcome it, they will have their agents change the rule so you can not present a fact or image and say 'give me your opinion,'" West said. "They don't want that. They can't stand it. They can't talk it away." West pushed back against defense testimony that bite marks were unreliable. He said a test he conducted in 1984 on living subjects showed that he could get a better image 21 days after the bite than an hour or so after the bite. During sometimes-heated exchanges with Innocence Project director of strategic litigation Chris Fabricant, West seemed to walk back previous statements dismissing his faith in bite mark analysis. "No, I no longer believe in bite mark analysis," Fabricant said, reading West's testimony from a deposition. "I don't think it should be used in court. I think you should use DNA. Throw the bite marks out." But West said he believes in analysis. Rather, he blamed the Innocence Project and other groups for requiring what he called an impossible standard -- going so far at one point to tell Fabricant "Y'all make life unbearable. "Y'all keep telling me I have to be 100 percent perfect," West said. "I cannot be 100 percent perfect, so I withdraw. If the court requires me to be 100 perfect, I have failed. I cannot reach that level of perfection. I'm sorry." West did admit, however, that wrongful convictions stemming from the analysis of other forensic odontologists shook his faith. "That bothered me, that there were so many other odontologists making errors in their analysis and opinions," West said. "Men that I respected and felt had a firm grasp of this could be wrong. If they could be wrong, I could be wrong." Howard's hearing will have to finish at a later date. The Innocence Project could not finish cross-examining West by the end of the day, and the state must still finish cross examination of Iain Pretty, a professor of dentistry from the University of Manchester, who had to leave early Wednesday to catch a flight back to the United Kingdom.
http://www.cdispatch.com/news/article.asp?aid=50044
See Daily Mail story at the link below: "Quack dentist puts wrong men on death row."..."The unwavering Brewer finally faced trial nearly three years after the murder. The use of DNA evidence in criminal trials was still in its infancy, and Allgood claimed semen samples from the victim’s body did not rule out Brewer. So he leaned on West, the Hattiesburg tooth doctor, for foolproof evidence. The squishy science of “forensic odontology” got its first star turn in the 1979 Florida trial of serial killer Ted Bundy, who was convicted and executed based in part on bite marks on victims’ bodies that were compared to molds of his choppers. Soon, a growing clique of dentists was buying boats and vacation homes with windfall income from their expert courtroom testimony. In Mississippi, the corpulent, disheveled West became the go-to hired drill for bite-mark testimony. Prosecutors loved his self-assurance on the witness stand, even as his peers were saying that West’s dental sleuthing amounted to sketchy guesswork.
Undaunted, West told a Mississippi jury that Brewer “indeed and without a doubt” had fanged little Christine’s body.The jury convicted Brewer, favoring West’s judgment over a defense expert who said Christine might have been bitten in the creek by fish, turtles or “God knows what.”
The defendant was condemned to die.
In 2000, after appeals had failed, Brewer asked the Innocence Project for help. Writing from Death Row at Parchman prison, Brewer said, “If I can get someone to look into my case carefully I know they will easily see that they have the wrong person locked up.”
Three dental experts brought in by the prisoner advocacy group
repudiated West’s conclusions about the fang-like bites. Tests by a bug
expert suggested the marks were caused by the abundant crayfish in the
creek. The Innocence Project also retested semen DNA evidence, which
ruled out Brewer as the girl’s sexual assailant. DA Allgood yawned at the new evidence — even after he learned that West
had been suspended at the time of Brewer’s trial by a national dental
forensics board for egregiously reckless testimony in other cases. But Mississippi officials could no longer look away when it came to
light that West had given similar fang-mark testimony in a nearly
identical toddler rape and strangulation prosecution in Noxubee County
in 1990. In that case, defendant Levon Brooks was sent to prison for
life for killing Courtney Smith, 3, after the Hattiesburg dentist
declared, “It could be no one else but Levon Brooks that bit this girl’s
arm.” Innocence Project investigators discovered that Justin Johnson, who
lived near both child victims and had a record of sexual assault, had
been an early suspect in each case. In 2007, six years after he was cleared by DNA evidence, Brewer was
finally released from Death Row, although the stubborn Allgood vowed to
prosecute him again for murder. A year later, Johnson confessed that he
alone had killed Christine and Courtney. (He is now in prison for life.)
