DOUBT
ty courthouse.
The reason they felt compelled to act
is part of a larger scandal currently unfolding in Mississippi. The original police investigation into Mabry’s murder
hinged on the forensic analysis of Steven
Hayne, a longtime Mississippi medical
examiner, and Michael West, a dentist
and self-proclaimed bite-mark expert.
Hayne was a doctor in private practice
who performed nearly all of the state’s
autopsies. West was one of his frequent
collaborators. The two men have been at
the heart of the Mississippi death investigation system for two decades. West
has testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in
thousands, including a number of death
penalty cases.
Media investigations over the years,
however, including my own for The Huffington Post and Reason magazine, have
revealed that both Hayne and West have
contributed critical evidence that led to
the convictions of people who were later
exonerated, and routinely and flagrantly
flouted the ethical and professional standards of their respective fields. West, for
example, once claimed he could match
the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna
sandwich found at a murder scene to the
the teeth of the prime suspect. Hayne
claimed the bullet wounds in a murder
victim showed that two people held the
gun when it was fired, not one. In this
case, West identified an innocent man
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
for Kathy Mabry’s murder. That man
spent nearly a year in jail. But the Kathy
Mabry story also shows that there are
victims in this mess beyond just the
wrongly convicted.
Mississippi officials have thus far resisted calls for a thorough review of
Hayne and West’s cases. In particular, the
Mississippi Supreme Court has shown
little concern over the possibility that
Hayne and West may have put an untold
number of innocents behind the razor
wire at Parchman Penitentiary. Neither
has Attorney General Jim Hood, whose
office continues to defend convictions
won primarily on the testimony the two
men have given on the witness stand.
To concede there’s a problem would implicate many state officials who used
the two men themselves in their days as
prosecutors. It would also open hundreds,
perhaps thousands of cases to review.
Tucker Carrington, the director of the
Mississippi Innocence Project, says he
and his colleague Will McIntosh decided
to pursue Mabry’s killer themselves after
they attempted to bring the case to the
attention of the prosecutor in Humphreys
County, and then to Hood’s office, and
received no response from either one.
“When you take on a case and it reveals a glaring injustice like this, something that could easily be taken care of
if someone would just give it some attention — you can’t just turn a blind eye
to that,” Carrington says. “In the end, I
guess we saw this through because no
one else would.”