PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "There’s little doubt that the two men were guilty of the crimes they were accused of committing after their escape. There was ample evidence against them. But the prosecutors apparently wanted more, so they brought in Hayne and West to perform some of their voodoo forensics."
GIST: "As I explained in a post last week, I have a new book out, which I co-wrote with Tucker Carrington. The book is about Steven Hayne and Michael West, two forensic experts who dominated the autopsy system in Mississippi for nearly 20 years. In researching the book, my co-author and I found far too many examples of forensic malfeasance by these two than we could fit into a 400-page book. So I’ll be posting a few cases from the “director’s cut” manuscript here at The Watch. Today’s case begins in June of 1991, after Ken Strickland and David Duplantis escaped from a cell in the Lauderdale County, Miss., jail. The two men embarked on a murderous, multiday crime spree that ultimately earned them both death sentences. There’s little doubt that the two men were guilty of the crimes they were accused of committing after their escape. There was ample evidence against them. But the prosecutors apparently wanted more, so they brought in Hayne and West to perform some of their voodoo forensics. Hayne and West had in fact been advertising their ability to match wound patterns using infrared light. ........The evidence against the two men was overwhelming.........Still, despite all of that, prosecutors turned to Hayne and West. According to testimony West would later give at trial, he and Hayne suspected the bolt cutters had left some sort of impression on the hands of whoever had used them to kill Thrash. To test their hypothesis, they recruited a volunteer who worked at the morgue. West would later say that the morgue assistant walked outside with bolt cutters in hand, “rear[ed] back like a baseball bat,” swung, and hit either a “pine tree or a telephone pole” — West could’t remember which.The two forensic analysts then examined the volunteer’s hands, where they claimed to see some indentations made by the bolt cutters. They recorded the indentations, then shined an infrared light on the hands of Duplantis and Strickland to look for the same imprint. (West claimed to have invented this technique. He called it the West Phenomenon.) Sure enough, West said he found the same pattern on Strickland’s hand that he found on the hand of his volunteer. Common sense says this is garbage forensics. Even accepting the dubious proposition that a pair of bolt cutters could leave a unique, identifiable pattern on human hands, in order for the patterns to match, the morgue assistant would had to have swung the bolt cutters at the same precise angle as Strickland in order affect the same points of contact between the bolt cutters and his hand. The assistant would also have needed to strike the tree from the same distance Strickland stood from Thrash, and make contact at the same height from which Strickland struck Thrash’s head. The assistant would also probably have needed to swing the bolt cutters at about the same velocity as the killer. And to leave the same impression, we also would have to assume that when hit with a pair of bolt cutters, a tree (or possibly a telephone poll) would provide the same amount of resistance to those bolt cutters — resistance that would then transfer to the hands that are swinging them — as a human head. Strickland’s hands were also examined more than a day after the crime, so they would have had some time to heal and his skin more time to spring back from any indentations than the assistant’s hands and skin. Nevertheless, Hayne and West were permitted to put all of this in front of a jury. At his trial, Duplantis asked the court for funds to hire his own expert to counter Hayne. The trial judge refused, finding an independent expert unnecessary. In 1994, Duplantis asked for a new trial based on that decision (and other claims). The Mississippi Supreme Court shot him down. Duplantis tried again a few years later, arguing that Hayne was not a credible witness and should not have been permitted to testify about the bolt cutters in particular. In 1998, the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected those claim, too, ruling that “Dr. Hayne is unquestionably qualified to testify in our courts as a forensic pathologist. He has done so many times in the past. As such, he is well equipped to give an expert opinion that the wounds suffered by Gary Thrash were inflicted by an object similar to the bolt cutters recovered from Mr. Thrash’s truck.” But whether Hayne had testified in the past says little about whether his testimony in this particular case was scientific and reliable. Alas, this tends to be how courts evaluate expert testimony. The bulk of their analysis of the scientific merit of such testimony tends to be to see whether other courts have already allowed it. In this case, it was merely whether other courts had allowed any testimony from this particular expert. Obviously, Strickland and Duplantis aren’t the most sympathetic figures. When it comes to injustice, this case isn’t on par with cases in which there’s real doubt about the defendant’s guilt. But if it does demonstrate just how much the courts let Hayne and West get away with. West in particular would go on to testify in other cases about finding impressions on a suspect’s hands that he claimed were a match to or were consistent with gripping a knife, a gun, a screwdriver, and the strap of a purse, respectively. In most cases, West claimed to have found these impressions days or even more than a week after the alleged crime. And he found most after using the West Phenomenon — again, a technique he invented."
The entire post can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
