RADLEY BALKO
DOUBT
Since then, the evidence against Hayne
and West has continued to pile up. In
2009, I reported on the case of Jimmie
Duncan, who was convicted in Louisiana
in 1993 of sexually abusing and murdering the daughter of his girlfriend. That
case produced video of West performing
one of his bite-mark examinations. The
video shows him repeatedly jamming a
plaster mold he’d made of the suspect’s
teeth into the skin of the alleged victim,
18-month-old Haley Oliveaux.
A similar video surfaced in the case
of Leigh Stubbs, which The Huffington
Post reported on last year. Stubbs was
convicted in Mississippi in 2001 of assaulting Janet Kimberly Williams, in
what prosecutors hinted may have been
a quarrel between lovers. West claimed
that he had matched bite marks on the
victim’s hip to Stubbs’ teeth, and also
testified, bizarrely, that lesbians were
more likely to bite one another during
domestic disputes.
The videotaped examinations in the
Duncan and Stubbs cases show that, at
best, West was committing malpractice,
tampering with evidence, and desecrating a corpse. (In the Stubbs case, West
may have committed assault, since he
performed his analysis on the alleged
victim while she was comatose.) At
worst, West was using dental molds of
the defendants in these cases to create
bite marks.
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
Julie Mae Wilson in her home in December 2012.
In response to the Stubbs video, Attorney General Jim Hood told a local TV
station that he had assigned Assistant
Attorney General Marvin Sanders to
“investigate” a number of cases involving Michael West — the first time state
officials appear to have opened any such
inquiry into his work. But it appears to
have been little more than talk. When
asked about that investigation at a subsequent hearing in the Stubbs case,
Sanders said his investigation had consisted of “a Westlaw search,” basically
the legal equivalent of a Google search.
The litigation in the Stubbs case also
unleashed another bombshell. “I no
longer believe in bite mark analysis,”
West confessed in a deposition last year.
Hayne made a similar pronouncement.
Stubbs had been convicted largely
based on West’s analysis. Incredibly,