HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
DOUBT
Had Hayne and West not been
so eager to affirm the hunches
of law enforcement, Christine
Jackson could well be alive today.
however, after the court threw out
Stubbs’ conviction last year, due to the
fact that prosecutors failed to turn over
an FBI report contradicting West’s testimony, Jim Hood’s office announced that
it would still seek to retry Leigh Stubbs.
The total number of convictions
tainted by Hayne and West’s testimony
could number in the hundreds, or even
higher. Additionally, there are likely
cases in which a suspicious death that
should have been ruled a homicide was
dismissed by Hayne as a suicide or death
by natural causes. Civil rights groups
have long had suspicions about Hayne’s
autopsies on people who have died in
police custody, for example. Hayne and
West have also testified in numerous
civil cases, and West has brought his
bite-mark voodoo to custody disputes.
Jimmie Duncan is still on death row
in Louisiana.
FINDING KATHY MABRY’S KILLER
In 2007, Tucker Carrington moved from
Washington, D.C. to Oxford, Miss., to
open the Mississippi Innocence Project,
started in part with funding from bestselling author John Grisham.
A couple years later, as Carrington began to learn about the central role Hayne
and West played in the state’s criminal
justice system, his office started assembling dossiers on the two men and filing relief petitions in the cases in which
their testimony may have had an impact
on a guilty verdict. So far, the office of
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood
has opposed Carrington’s office in every
one of these cases.
Innocence Project attorney Will McIntosh first heard about Mabry in January
2011, from the former prosecutor on the
case, James Powell, who had since retired
and was working in private practice as a
defense attorney. McIntosh contacted the
Humphreys County clerk’s office, which
faxed him a copy of the docket — a list of
the Mabry case’s procedural history.
That wasn’t much to go on. Because
the Mississippi Innocence Project’s small
team was busy at the time with other
cases and the broader investigation into
Hayne and West, they didn’t follow up.
But the following August, at the
Lowndes County courtroom in Columbus, Miss., Powell was again chatting