DOUBT
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
RADLEY BALKO
A view of
Belzoni’s
downtown area.
about Hayne and West and the latest in
the Stubbs case, this time with Andre de
Gruy, who heads up Mississippi’s Office of
Capital Defense Counsel. In that conversation, Powell again casually mentioned
the Mabry case. A few days later, de Grey
mentioned Powell’s comments in passing
during a conversation with Carrington.
West had testified in numerous other
cases over the years — including the
Stubbs case — that his method of bitemark analysis had never been wrong. Yet
it had clearly been wrong in the Mabry
investigation, in which West had pointed
the finger at an innocent man, James
Earl Gates. To Carrington, the Mabry
case was yet more evidence that West
had knowingly lied on the witness stand.
“I think that’s when we really put two
and two together,” Carrington says. “We
realized that not only had West again
identified the wrong person, but that
this case was still open, and that if there
had been primitive DNA testing to clear
Gates, there was at least some chance
that the biological evidence was still
around, and could be retested with more
modern technology.”
Carrington first spoke with Powell,
who couldn’t remember the name of the
victim. He reached out to the office of
the new district attorney, Akellie Oliver,
but never heard back. He finally reached