A very dubious police medical examiner

Last week the Mississippi Supreme Court granted a new trial to Cory Maye, who is serving a life sentence for shooting and killing Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer Ron Jones during a botched drug raid on Maye's apartment. One of the key prosecution witnesses in Maye's case was Steven Hayne, an overworked, ethically dubious medical examiner who performed the overwhelming majority of criminal autopsies in Mississippi for two decades, from the late 1980s until 2008. Although last week's ruling did not address Hayne's work, it presents an opportunity to consider recent developments in Mississippi's slow evolution toward a more competent death investigation system.

It was through Maye's case that I began reporting on Hayne, which resulted in a 2007 feature story in Reason. I found that he was performing a staggering 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies a year and had given dubious pro-prosecution testimony in several cases. Hayne (who over the years has never responded to my requests for an interview) had also given questionable testimony in civil cases, usually testifying for plaintiffs in medical malpractice and consumer lawsuits. In April 2009 I wrote another feature for Reason about the work Hayne and his sidekick, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, dentist Michael West, did in the Louisiana murder trial of Jimmie Duncan, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to death for sexually assaulting and murdering 2-year-old Haley Oliveaux, the daughter of his then-girlfriend. A video showed West repeatedly pushing a dental mold of Duncan's teeth into Oliveaux's skin, a practice other forensic experts say is at minimum malpractice and may amount to criminal evidence tampering.

In August 2008, Mississippi finally barred Hayne from doing any more autopsies in the state, although he still testifies in court, due to the massive backlog of cases in his care when he was terminated. Several of the state's coroners and prosecutors, along with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, mounted a brief campaign last year to reinstate Hayne, but that effort was defeated by the Mississippi legislature earlier this year. Hayne is pursuing a defamation suit against the Innocence Project based on claims the organization made about his workload and testimony in a complaint seeking to revoke his medical license. He is being sued himself by three people he helped convict who were later acquitted or exonerated.

Last month, in another step away from the period when Hayne dominated the state's criminal autopsy system, Mississippi moved closer to hiring its first official state medical examiner since 1995. The last two people to hold the position, Emily Ward and Lloyd White, were chased out of office by Hayne and his allies in Mississippi's county coroner and district attorney offices after they tried to impose some standards on the state's death investigation system. Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson offered the job to Douglas Posey, a medical examiner who currently works for the Georgia State Bureau of Investigation. When I interviewed Posey about Hayne in 2007, he said he had tried to set up a forensic pathology practice in Mississippi in the early 1990s but was told by the Washington County coroner that no one was allowed to perform autopsies in Mississippi without first getting permission from Hayne. Hayne held no official position at the time but by then had essentially monopolized the state's autopsy referrals.

Simpson told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger he would ultimately like to hire five full-time medical examiners and eight to 10 assistants. That would represent a huge improvement in the quality of the state's death investigations. Unfortunately, Simpson will now have to begin his search again. Posey backed out of the job late last week, citing health issues. When Simpson does finally fill the position, the ultimate test will be how the new state medical examiner and his staff hold up—and whether Simpson and the Mississippi legislature support them—when they inevitably clash with county coroners and prosecutors who are more interested in foregone conclusions than in independent scientific assessments.

While Simpson tries to raise the professionalism of Mississippi's death investigations, the legal system is still dealing with fallout from the Hayne era. Hayne failed to appear at a post-conviction hearing last May in the Jimmie Duncan case, despite a subpoena instructing him to come. The hearing did not specifically address the video I wrote about in April 2009, but it did address two other portions of Hayne's trial testimony. First, Hayne testified that he found pickles, onions, and ketchup in Haley Oliveaux's stomach. It was an odd assortment of items to find in a child who died in mid-morning. More important, it contradicted Duncan's timeline for the day Oliveaux died. Duncan testified that he had fed her oatmeal for breakfast. Duncan's attorneys suspect Hayne may have mixed Oliveaux's stomach contents up with those of someone else he autopsied that day, a not-unreasonable suspicion, given the huge volume of autopsies Hayne was churning out at the time. I've spoken to toxicology and crime lab technicians who say they frequently received test tubes from Hayne with the wrong names printed on them. So Duncan's attorneys asked Hayne for reports on other autopsies he conducted that day. Hayne first told them he doesn't honor such requests from out of state, a strange response given that he went out of state to testify in the case in the first place. He then told them he had sent all of those reports to the crime lab in Jackson. When the crime lab told Duncan's attorneys that wasn't true, Hayne finally said reports on any other autopsies he did that day had been destroyed.

The other issue addressed at the hearing concerns tissue slides of Oliveaux's rectum. Hayne testified at trial that the slides showed Oliveaux had been sexually abused shortly before her death. But Hayne was the only one to see the slides. When Duncan's attorneys asked him to send the slides for evaluation by their own specialist, Hayne said he no longer had them. He said he had sent them to George McCormick, a Louisiana medical examiner retained by Duncan during his appeal who has since died. But even if the slides are gone, Hayne should still have retained the paraffin blocks from which duplicate slides could be made. Those blocks are a critical piece of evidence in a homicide case. Hayne says he no longer has those either. Kathy Kelly, head of Louisiana's Capital Post Conviction Office, which is representing Duncan in his bid for a new trial, says she will seek a contempt order if Hayne fails to show up for the next hearing in the case.

Meanwhile, now that Hayne can no longer do autopsies for prosecutors in Mississippi, he is entertaining offers to testify for defendants. Earlier this year he sent a letter (PDF) to Mississippi criminal defense attorneys announcing his availability as an expert witness. The letter states that Hayne is "board-certified" in forensic pathology—an assertion that, as I've reported before, is not true, at least not as nearly every other forensic pathologist understands the term. When a local TV station asked Hayne in 2007 to name the organization that certified him, he said he couldn't remember.

Another Hayne credential, his membership in the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME), is no longer operative, since he resigned from the group last year. According to a source who asked not to be named because NAME investigations are not public information, Hayne was given the option to resign instead of standing for an ethics inquiry. NAME Chairman John Howard confirms that Hayne resigned in 2009 but declines to discuss the circumstances or precise timing of the resignation.

More here



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here