Willing Ears – And A Wide Divide
Recall the two “experts,” Michael West and Steven Hayne. As I explained before, Jimmie’s case has become a hot gathering spot for wrongful conviction advocates primarily because of its connection to two of the most well-known names in forensic misconduct.
These discredited forensic figures have been linked to many wrongful convictions, many of which have been overturned, and of the overturned, 4 are death row veterans. Yet, in spite of mounting evidence that Duncan was convicted based on junk science, Louisiana continued to push onward with the tortuous path towards his execution.
Michael West first: the evidence analysis provided by Dr. Michael West, a so-called “bite mark expert,” has led to the wrongful conviction of almost a dozen people.
I chose one particular case of Dr. West’s to highlight out of the myriad of cases where he sold his soul and honed his craft. He operated his own little cottage industry where he delivered on demand the testimony most desired by prosecutors: something to tie the case together and point the finger directly at the defendant However, his aim was often way off target.
Dr. West’s bite mark testimony directly contributed to the murder convictions of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer. Brooks and Brewer were accused of killing two young girls in the early 1990’s, and while there wasn’t much evidence tying either man to the crime, West concluded that the bite marks seen on the two girls came from Brooks and Brewer, respectively.
As Oxygen reports, West even went so far as to say that the marks seen on one of the victims were “indeed and without a doubt inflected [sic] by Kennedy Brewer.”
….
He had even been discredited before Brewer’s trial, the first member ever to be suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology.
Levon Brooks: Levon Brooks spent 16 years in prison for the rape and murder of a three-year-old girl that he did not commit. Forensic dentist Dr. Michael West claimed that the marks on the victim’s body were human bite marks and he testified at Brooks’ trial that, of 13 suspects whose dentitions he had compared to the wounds on the victim’s body, Brooks’ teeth “matched” the marks on the victim. As he explained, “it could be no one but Levon Brooks that bit this girl’s arm.“
Based on this testimony, Brooks was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 2001, DNA testing and a subsequent confession revealed that Justin Albert Johnson committed the murder. Johnson had been one of the 12 other suspects whose dental impressions Dr. West had determined did not match the bite marks on the victim’s body. Following Johnson’s confession, Brooks was freed on February 15, 2008.
Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.
Remember that In Jimmie’s case, he has ALWAYS proclaimed his innocence – from arrest to arraignment to trial to conviction and on through appeals to post-conviction relief applications – he has never wavered, and his story has never wavered. In the face of death, he has remained steadfast in declaring his innocence. It seems that the only way that the prosecutors could come up with a theory of the case that they could then sell to a jury, was to do a little buying of their own. So they bought three separate things that jurors would eat up: the physical “evidence” testimony of Dr. West, pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, whose longtime partnership as state experts fell under legal scrutiny after questions emerged about the validity of their techniques.and the testimony of Michael Cluse (whom we’ll see in greater detail in Part 3), a rewarded jailhouse informant (snitch).
Now, Michael Hayne: At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana’s “industry of courtroom experts.” Hayne could flip an autopsy around quickly, and unsurprisingly his findings nearly always supported whatever the working theory of law enforcement was, implicating their primary suspect in whatever crime they were investigating.
Hayne had found an ideal and perfectly willing partner in West, one of the leading “experts” in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively newcomer science whose main claim to fame was to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.
On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies completed in Mississippi and bragged that he completed around 1,500 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed what the annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners would equal. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.
Evidently, he also performed the impossible: in one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when it had, in fact, already been removed long before the man’s death. In another, he testified that he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not even exist in young girls.
Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long and well-documented history of errors and straight-out lies. There have been numerous news reports, court records and even books written about this partnership in the years after Duncan’s conviction.
So, as I said above, they had formed the perfect little cottage industry – reliable and seemingly credible testimony that would favor the state and deliver the desired result – a conviction and sentence.
Years after Haley’s death, Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys uncovered evidence that was not presented at trial that tends to prove his innocence. This includes:
- a jailhouse informant who wrote to prosecutors offering to share Duncan’s confession to the crime in what the defense claims was an exchange for leniency (the informant later recanted his trial testimony); (covered in detail in the next part of this series)
- past head injuries Haley (who had experienced seizures) suffered that might explain her death;
- and a video in which West can be seen grinding a cast of Duncan’s teeth into Haley’s body.
“Cottage industry.” The term make you envision a cozy little gleaming kitchen with red-and-white plaid tablecloths, shiny ovens and the smell of artisan bread baking? No, this is a cold, not-quite sterile room with slide-out drawers, stainless steel tables and windowless walls – and the potential for raking in tens of thousands from willing and eager cops, top cops and frantic prosecutors searching for willing partners in stirring up a pot of criminal (in)justice stew.
They (West and Hayne) were essentially “hired guns,” willing and quite capable of putting on a very convincing show routine in any courtroom and sell any jury.
The amazing thing is that Haley’s autopsy occurred years after there were significant questions raised about West’s and Hayne’s methods and qualifications., as well as results. The wide divide here is the gap between West and Hayne growing and crumbling.
Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.
“West has routinely collaborated with Steven Hayne, a medical examiner for hire who conducts nearly every autopsy for prosecutors in Mississippi – even though he flunked his board certification. He nets nearly $1 million a year from conducting autopsies across the state, and West helped set up the system that allows Hayne to handle so many autopsies (each year, Haynes conducts six times more autopsies than the recommended standard). Hayne conducted the autopsies on the victims in the Brewer and Brooks cases – and called West in for both autopsies. At Brewer’s trial, full video footage of the victim’s autopsy was deemed inadmissible in court because it was so offensive and inappropriate; throughout the autopsy of the raped and murdered three-year-old girl, Haynes listened to loud music, so the trial judge ruled that the sound from the video could not be played in court. West held the video camera during that autopsy.” The Innocence Project
Just a booming business, right? And a business that Louisiana is heavily invested in. It is NOT the business of truth – rather, the business of fabrication, corruption and eager ears…
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