In February, I wrote about a Fifth Circuit decision rejecting the claims of a defendant who was convicted based on improbable testimony from the controversial medical examiner Steven Hayne. Over the course of about two decades, Hayne nearly monopolized Mississippi’s criminal autopsy referrals, performing 1,500-1,800 autopsies per year all by himself. Most of these were done for the state’s prosecutors. Hayne’s testimony was responsible for several convictions that later resulted in acquittals after a new trial, dismissed charges, or DNA exonorations.
I’ve been covering this scandal for the better part of a decade now. Hayne has been found to have given testimony completely unsupported by science, regularly worked with known charlatans like the discredited “bite mark expert” Michael West, and has been sharply criticized by colleagues for his improbable workload, sloppy practices, and dubious testimony. He has also been shown to have perjured himself about his qualifications. Despite all of this, and despite the fact that there are literally thousands of people in prison due in part or mostly to Hayne’s autopsies and testimony, neither state nor federal courts have shown any interest in determining just how much damage Hayne may have done to the criminal justice system of Mississippi (and to a lesser extent Louisiana). The Mississippi legislature hasn’t shown much interest. And state attorney general Jim Hood continues to defend Hayne. (Hood often used Hayne during his time as a district attorney.)
In past cases, Hayne has included in his autopsy report the weight of a man’s spleen, and made comments about its appearance, even though the man’s spleen had been removed four years prior to his death. In an autopsy on a drowned infant, Hayne wrote down the weight of each of the child’s kidneys, even though one of them had previously been removed. In one murder case, Hayne documented removing and examining the victim’s ovaries and uterus even though the victim was male. Read the entire story.