PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In a statement after the court’s ruling, the Mississippi Innocence Project said that Howard was “the fourth Mississippian tried and convicted for capital murder based on the forensic work and testimony of Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West.” In 2008, inmates Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were exonerated in the killings of two toddlers in separate cases. Both were convicted mostly on the testimony of Hayne and odontologist Dr. Michael West. Hayne had identified bite marks on the body of the children. West claimed the bite marks were made by the two front teeth of the suspects. A panel of experts later successfully refuted the theory. Hayne’s contract with the state ended in 2008."
COMMENTARY: "High court right to reject egregious evidence," by syndicated columnist Sid Salter, published by The Daily Leader on September 2, 2020.
GIST: (This is but a taste): read on for Columnist Salter analysis of where Mississippi went wrong - and what it must do to avoid further miscarriages of justice based on this type of egregious evidence. HL): "A decade ago, I was writing about what I saw as a crisis in Mississippi’s death investigation system. Last week, the state Supreme Court took an essential step toward facing up to a system that remained broken for decades in the case of Death Row inmate Eddie Lee Howard Jr.
During my years writing about Mississippi’s Death Row inmates and the state’s flawed death investigation system, I became familiar with Howard and the 1992 murder of 82-year-old Georgia Kemp. Mrs. Kemp died of two stab wounds to the chest, and what appeared to have been a brutal beating and choking from her assailant as she struggled for her life on the floor of her trailer.
Medical Examiner Dr. Steven Hayne on autopsy ruled that Mrs. Kemp died of the stab wounds, but said he found signs of rape. Rape and the fact that a fire had been set at the murder scene produced the elements necessary for Howard to face a capital murder indictment under Mississippi law.
Three days after Mrs. Kemp’s burial, Hayne told prosecutors he recalled seeing what might have been bite marks on the victim’s body. Officials exhumed the woman’s body and transported the remains to Hattiesburg for an examination by odontologist Dr. Michael West, who would ultimately testify that there were indeed bite marks on the body and that, after investigation, the bite marks definitely belonged to Howard.
Yet Hayne’s initial autopsy report did not reference bite marks. Howard spent some 26 years on Death Row — and Mississippi’s version of that is as hard a time as hard time gets for prisoners. "
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://www.dailyleader.com/2020/09/01/high-court-right-to-reject-egregious-evidence
