You can read more here:

http://www.theagitator.com/2011/10/17/jim-hood-and-that-other-guy/

“MISSISSIPPI INNOCENCE”

The award-winning documentary, prepared by Ole Miss filmmakers and spotlighting the success of the Law School’s Innocence Project in freeing two Noxubee County men wrongfully imprisoned after murder convictions, will be shown and discussed by principal characters in the cases.  After the screening there will be a panel discussion moderated by civil rights and defense attorney Rob McDuff — and including former Supreme Court Judge Fred Banks, Radley Balko of The Huffington Post, Campbell Robertson of The New York Times, and Joe York, director of “Mississippi Innocence.”

For more information about the film, please visit:

www.mississippiinnocencefilm.org

On Aug. 9, The Huffington Post reported on the case of Leigh Stubbs, a Mississippi woman serving a 44-year sentence for assault and drug charges. Stubbs was convicted in large part due to the testimony of Michael West, a disgraced bite mark specialist. Though West has been largely discredited, prosecutors and state officials in Mississippi (and to a lesser extent in Louisiana) continue to defend convictions won based on his testimony.

In Stubbs’ case, West presented two key pieces of evidence. The first involved the bite mark wizardry that made him famous, and then infamous: West claimed to have found bite marks on alleged victim Kim Williams that medical personnel hadn’t seen. He then used a dental mold of Stubbs’ teeth to perform an analysis on the marks, and would later testify that it was a “probability” that Stubbs had bitten Williams.

FABRICATING EVIDENCE

On Wednesday, forensic specialists Mike Bowers and David Averill posted a video recording of West’s examination of Williams on their site, Bitemarks.org. In his initial examination, West claims to have “missed” the evidence of a bite mark. He testified he found it in a a subsequent examination performed days later. That examination is depicted in the video below. Note that at the 50-second mark, a bite mark appears in Williams’ skin, seemingly out of nowhere.

WATCH the examination:

Examination Video

On their blog, Averill and Bowers explain how that mark appeared:

In his second video taken 5 days later on March 15th the area that West says “that the bitemark is no longer visible due to the nurses taking such good care of the victim and using lotion on her skin.” West then proceeds to tamper with the evidence by actually imbedding a stone cast of Leigh Stubbs teeth into the comatose victims hip resulting in a fabricated bitemark on the skin of the victim.

In a phone interview Wednesday afternoon, Bowers said the video above may depict a number of crimes. “The tampering with the evidence on the skin is likely a crime. But to create those marks on a woman who was comatose, and who hadn’t given consent, is also an assault,” Bowers said.

West, who is a dentist and not a medical doctor, also performed a vaginal exam on Williams without her consent, though he did presumably have approval from law enforcement officials.

This isn’t the first video evidence that may show West creating bite marks on an alleged victim. In 2009, this reporter examined a Louisiana case from 1993 in which a video recording shows West repeatedly jamming a suspect’s dental mold into the corpse of a young girl. In that video, bite marks also mysteriously appear on the girl’s cheek that aren’t present earlier in the video. (While bruises can appear on a body after death, bite marks are abrasions, and generally cannot.) In that case, Jimmie Duncan was convicted of killing young Haley Oliveaux, and was sentenced to death. West’s exam was the only physical evidence suggesting Duncan had murdered Oliveaux.

WARNING: Some readers may find the video below disturbing.

West\’s Examination of H.O.

West doesn’t deny any of this. In his court testimony in the Stubbs case, and in a 2009 statementto the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in response to the Duncan case, West claimed that this is simply how he identifies and matches bite marks.

“He says he’s the only one who can see these marks,” Bowers said. “And that when he pushes the cast into the skin, he says he’s just enhancing marks that are already there.” Of course, once West has altered the marks in the skin with a cast of the suspect’s teeth, he has not only made the marks conform to the cast, he has also altered them so that no other expert can then second guess him as to whether they were bite marks in the first place.

Bowers and other forensic specialists say West’s “technique” is at minimum malpractice, and that it’s likely criminal evidence tampering. Yet those methods were accepted as evidence in criminal courts for more than a decade, and have still yet to be discredited by a court in Mississippi or Louisiana.

VIDEO ENHANCEMENT

The other damning testimony West gave in the Stubbs case was his analysis of a grainy security camera video taken of a motel parking lot. Prosecutors sent the video to the FBI, which sent back a report stating there was very little the agency could discern from the video. But district attorney Dunn Lampton (who passed away earlier this month) also sent the video to West, who claimed he was able to “enhance” the video using consumer software. Averill and Bowers have also posted that video on their blog:

Security camera video from motel parking lot

From this video, West testified that he could see two separate figures entering and leaving the frame, that they were wearing different clothing (one shorts, the other blue jeans). While the FBI could only determine that someone had removed perhaps a bag or suitcase from a toolbox in the truck bed, West claimed that through enhancement, he could make out hair, legs and blue jeans, leading him to conclude that the object being removed was clearly a body. West also claimed he could read the body language of one figure in the footage. He testified that she appeared “anxious,” and was exhibiting the sort of adrenaline-fueled “fight or flight” response one shows after committing a crime.

LINGERING CONVICTIONS

Michael West’s bite mark testimony was also the main reason Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brookswere convicted in the rape and murder of two young girls in the early 1990s. Both men were exonerated by DNA testing in 2008 after serving more than a decade in prison. A third man, Albert Johnson, later confessed to both crimes.

Though West no longer testifies in court, law enforcement officials in at least two states have so far continued to defend his testimony. As HuffPost reported on Monday, Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood defended the Leigh Stubbs’ conviction to a Hattiesburgh, Miss., television station just last week. Hood’s office has also fought attempts to throw out West’s testimony in the conviction of Eddie Lee Howard, who was sentenced to death in 1994 for the rape and murder of an elderly woman. As in the Jimmie Duncan case, West’s testimony was the only physical evidence from the suspect found on the victim. Both Howard and Duncan are still on death row.

Read article on Huffington Post here.

August 29, 2011

A widening scandal involving two longtime expert witnesses may become an issue in Mississippi’s race for attorney general this fall. Incumbent Attorney General Jim Hood has long defended two prolific but controversial forensic specialists who have come under fire in recent years: medical examiner Steven Hayne and forensic dentist Michael West.

West has testified in about a hundred cases over the years, and Hayne has testified in thousands. Critics have alleged for years that the two are guns for hire, willing to say on the witness stand whatever prosecutors need in order to win a conviction.

In 2008, two men — Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks — were exonerated by DNA testing in the rapes and murders of two little girls in the early 1990s. Combined, the two served more than 30 years in prison and Brewer was nearly executed. In both cases, Hayne and West claimed to have found bite marks on the victims’ skin that no other medical personnel saw. In both cases, West then claimed to have used his now-discredited bite mark expertise to match those bite marks to the prosecution’s chief suspect. A third man, Albert Johnson, was later arrested and confessed to both crimes.

Hood’s opponent this fall is Steve Simpson, a former prosecutor and circuit court judge who served most recently as the head of Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety. It was in the latter position that Simpson effectively terminated Hayne in 2008, ending the doctor’s 20-year near-monopoly on the autopsy referrals Mississippi prosecutors and coroners send to forensic pathologists.

West has been widely considered a fraud for some time, and hasn’t testified in Mississippi courts in several years. But there are still people in prison based on his testimony, and Hood continues to defend those convictions, including the conviction of one man sitting on death row.

Earlier this month, I wrote about Leigh Stubbs, a Mississippi woman serving a 44-year prison sentence for assault and drug offenses. Stubbs was convicted based primarily on testimony from West. In Stubbs’ case, West gave the kind of bite mark testimony for which he has become infamous, but also claimed he could “enhance” a grainy security video that even the FBI crime lab said was useless.

Last week, Hood responded to the Stubbs case on a local television station, saying that there was other evidence of Stubbs’ guilt than West’s testimony, though he didn’t say what that evidence was.

Hood also told the TV station that his office is looking into 20 cases that may have been tainted by West’s testimony. That’s interesting, because it’s the first time a Mississippi state official has made any mention of a voluntary investigation into either Hood or West. In the past, they’ve waited for defense attorneys or organizations like the Innocence Project to bring challenges case by case — and then typically opposed those challenges. But when Hood’s office was asked for a list of what cases they’re investigating, or if The Huffington Post could speak to the attorney in charge of the investigation, they simply responded, “We cannot release any of the information you are requesting at this time.”

In the past, Hood has been open, a critic might even say self-promoting, about his office’s investigations. So it’s odd that he’d be secretive about this one.

“If there’s some sort of investigation or review of West cases going on, this is the first I’ve heard of it,” Simpson said. “And I don’t know why you do it in secret. I’d certainly be interested to know what cases they’re looking at, and what sorts of resources they’re using.”

Hood and Simpson butted heads last year over Hayne, the industrious contract medical examiner Simpson effectively fired the year before. According to his own court testimony, Hayne did somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 autopsies in Mississippi per year, every year, for nearly two decades. To put that number into perspective, the National Association of Medical Examiners recommends a single doctor do no more than 250 autopsies per year. Hayne also isn’t certified in forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology, which is generally recognized as the only reputable certifying agency in the field.

Hayne’s workload and the scientific validity of his testimony have been criticized by numerous peers and colleagues over the years, culminating in a 2008 Mississippi Supreme Court decision (PDF) throwing out the murder conviction of 13-year-old Tyler Edmonds, who was accused of holding a gun with his sister and simultaneously pulling the trigger, killing his sister’s husband while he slept. Hayne testified that he could tell by the victim’s bullet wounds that there were two hands on the gun that fired the fatal bullets.

Hayne has since resigned from the National Association of Medical Examiners in the face of an ethics inquiry.

In 2008, Simpson effectively terminated Hayne, and said until he could hire an official state medical examiner, Mississippi would send its autopsies to a private firm in Nashville, Tenn. The state medical examiner’s office, which is tasked with overseeing the autopsies carried out on a local level, had been vacant for 15 years until Simpson hired Dr. Adel Shaker last year.

The last two people to hold that position, Emily Ward and Lloyd White, aghast at how autopsies were being conducted in the state, had tried to implement some reforms … and were effectively chased out of the state by West, Hayne and their allies in the coroner’s and district attorney’s offices. With the office vacant, there was no one to question how post-mortem examinations were assigned and performed.

“I hired Mississippi’s first state medical examiner in more than a decade. Jim Hood fought me on that,” Simpson told The Huffington Post. “I’d be delighted for this to become a campaign issue.”

In fact, in 2009, Hood assisted the state’s coroners and prosecutors with a plan to bring Hayne back, even after Simpson had fired him. Hood issued an opinion allowing Mississippi counties to become independent districts for the purpose of conducting death investigations, essentially allowing them to ignore Simpson’s directive removing Hayne from the state’s list of medical examiners qualified to perform autopsies. Simpson then went to the state legislature, where he got a bill introduced that would require anyone performing autopsies for the state to be certified by the American Board of Pathology. Hood actively lobbied against that bill, and even sent out an email derisively referring to the bill as “an Innocence Project bill” and “potentially harmful legislation.”

“I was really pretty shocked to find out that Hood was working against me on that,” Simpson said. “All this legislation said was that anyone who performs an autopsy for a county in Mississippi must meet the minimum standard of board certification. And Hood tried to have that bill defeated.”

The bill passed, barring Hayne from doing any more autopsies in the state. Hayne is still free to testify, however, and still takes the stand regularly in Mississippi, mostly to testify in retrials of cases in which he has already testified, and the backlog of over 600 cases he had when he was terminated. He has also begun advertising his services to the state’s defense bar.

While Mississippi’s Supreme Court threw out Hayne’s testimony in the Edmonds case, it has also repeatedly ruled in subsequent cases that Hayne is still qualified and permitted to testify in the state’s courts, and that questions regarding the reliability of his testimony alone are not enough to reopen old cases.

Simpson says that if elected, he’d be open to challenges in cases involving Hayne or West. “I’m a former prosecutor and a former judge, and I know that in many of those cases, you’re going to have other incriminating evidence,” he explained. “It’s rare that guilt or innocence would turn on a medical examiner’s testimony. But it can certainly happen. And we’ve had these exonerations, which shows that it has happened. So in those cases where Hayne or West was the key part of the prosecution’s case, I’d certainly be open to reviewing them.”

But Simpson stopped short of promising a thorough investigation. “I don’t think it’s the job of an attorney general to conduct that kind of investigation. It’s great that we have groups like the Innocence Project, and it’s up to them and defense attorneys to find and bring these cases,” Simpson said.

But critics say waiting on overworked defense attorneys and advocacy groups with limited resources to bring cases one at a time misses the urgency of the problem. “We have three attorneys on staff, who also teach at the law school,” said Tucker Carrington, director of the Mississippi Innocence Project. “Other states have had these types of investigations after discovering forensics fraud or major flaws in the criminal justice system. The Mississippi Constitution gives the attorney general almost unfettered discretion to protect the public.”

Carrington points out that Attorney General Hood has used that authority to launch a number of high-profile investigations into corporate fraud. “You have to believe that decades-long forensic fraud is as important as people getting ripped off by Bell South on their cell phone contracts. And this is worse in that the fraud was abetted by the state, and that people are in prison because of it. So not only is it possible, I think the attorney general has a particular responsibility to do something about it.”

Carrington says Simpson deserves credit for what he has done already: “He completely reformulated how the state medical examiner is hired and fired. That’s all now done by an independent board. It has completely de-politicized the process, which is exactly what was needed.” But Carrington adds, ” Simpsondid recognize the scope of the problem. It’s Inconsistent to say we had this huge problem that needed to be corrected going forward, but then to play down the population of people who may have been affected by the problem — the people who may have been wrongly incarcerated.”

Paradoxically, the sheer magnitude of the problem may be what prevents even well-intentioned public officials from looking into it. Hayne testified in an estimated 70 percent of the state’s homicide cases over about a 20-year span. He also testified in hundreds of civil cases — mostly wrongful death and medical malpractice lawsuits. In a state that has seen a number scandals involving the plaintiff’s bar, those latter cases could bring more scandals — scandals that could implicate public officials. One critic, a doctor who moved to Mississippi from the East Coast, told me quite bluntly that, “in Mississippi, the cause of death is open to the highest bidder.” (That doctor incidentally, was later arrested and charged by the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi for violations of the Mann Act. U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers later dismissed the charges, calling the case “manufactured,” the attempts to railroad the doctor “blatant,” and added that, “something is going on here that is not on the surface.”)

Hayne also performed the autopsies in countless cases where someone died in police custody, invariably concluding that the deaths were accidental, suicides or from natural causes. In other cases, many times involving poor or powerless people, Hayne diagnosed natural causes or suicide where other medical examiners subsequently found evidence of homicide.

As for West, he has testified in dozens of cases, but has also consulted in child abuse or child custody investigations. There are at least two people still on death row based on questionable bite mark evidence from West and Hayne (one in Mississippi and one in Louisiana). There are at least two other men on death row due primarily to testimony from Hayne that has since been called into question by other, more credible forensic pathologists.

A thorough investigation into the damage these two and their enablers in the coroner’s and DA’s offices have done could send fissures racing to the very foundation of Mississippi’s justice system. It could cause the reopening of hundreds of criminal cases and cast a shadow on the integrity of the state’s civil justice system. It could also implicate a number of public officials and politicians. All of which is precisely why it needs to happen. And all of which is precisely why it probably never will.

 (Trenton, NJ – August 24, 2011) — Today the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a landmark decision requiring major changes in the way courts are required to evaluate identification evidence at trial and how they should instruct juries.  The new changes, designed to reduce the likelihood of wrongful convictions by taking into account more than 30 years of scientific research on eyewitness identification and memory, require courts to greatly expand the factors that courts and juries should consider in assessing the risk of misidentification.

“Today the New Jersey Supreme Court has said that the legal architecture set by the U.S. Supreme Court 30 years ago to evaluate identification evidence must be renovated. This is a decision that will ultimately affect every state and federal court in the nation,” said Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law.  “The court has recognized the tremendous fallibility of eyewitness identifications, and based on the most thorough review of scientific research undertaken by a court, has set up comprehensive and practical guidelines for how judges and juries should handle this important evidence.”

The court’s decision requires judges to more thoroughly scrutinize the police identification procedures and many other variables that affect an eyewitness identification.   The court noted that this more extensive scrutiny will require enhanced jury instructions on factors that increase the risk of misidentification.  These factors include:

• Whether the lineup procedure was administered “double blind,” meaning that the officer who administers the lineup is unaware who the suspect is and the witness is told that the officer doesn’t know.
• Whether the witness was told that the suspect may not be in the lineup and that they need not make a choice.
• Whether the police avoided providing the witness with feedback that would cause the witness to believe he or she selected the correct suspect.  Similarly, whether the police recorded the witnesses’ level of confidence at the time of the identification.
• Whether the witness had multiple opportunities to view the same person, which would make it more likely for the witness to choose this person as the suspect.
  • Whether the witness was under a high level of stress.
  • Whether a weapon was used, especially if the crime was of short duration.
  • How much time the witness had to observe the event.
  • How far the witness was from the perpetrator and what the lighting conditions were.
  • Whether the witness possessed characteristics that would make it harder to make an identification, such as age of the witness and influence of alcohol or drugs.
  • Whether the perpetrator possessed characteristics that would make it harder to make an identification.  Was he or she wearing a disguise?  Did the suspect have different facial features at the time of the identification?
  • The length of time between the crime and identification.
  • Whether the case involved cross-racial identification.

To provide courts with these more enhanced jury instructions, the court gave the Criminal Practice Committee and the Committee on Model Criminal Jury Charges 90 days to submit proposed revisions to the current jury instructions on eyewitness identification, specifically directing them to consider the model jury instructions submitted by the Innocence Project.

The court’s decision stems from the 2004 conviction of Larry Henderson, a Camden man who received an 11-year prison sentence for reckless manslaughter and weapons possession related to a fatal shooting in January 2003. He appealed the photo lineup procedure because officers failed to follow the New Jersey Attorney General’s Guidelines, issued in 2001, for conducting identification procedures. The appeals court agreed and ordered a new hearing on the admissibility of the photographic identification of Henderson.  Before that could occur, the state appealed, and the New Jersey Supreme Court decided that an extensive inquiry into witness identification procedures currently used by law enforcement was necessary.

The New Jersey Supreme Court appointed a Special Master to review the legal standard for the admissibility of eyewitness testimony known as the “Manson test,” established by the United States Supreme Court in 1977 and fully embraced by 48 out of 50 states, including New Jersey in 1988 in State v. Madison.  In addition to the parties to the litigation, the court invited the Innocence Project and the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey to participate in an inquiry by the Special Master who considered over 200 scientific studies and heard from some of the nation’s most respected experts on eyewitness identification before issuing findings to the court in June 2010.

The court remanded the Henderson case back to the trial court for further review in accordance with the decision.  The decision will apply to all future cases, but will not be applied retroactively with the exception of the companion case, State v. Chen, in which the court held that suggestive identification procedures that resulted from private actors would also be subject to court scrutiny to ensure the reliability of the identification.

A copy of today’s decision is available at

http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/opinions/supreme/A808StatevLarryHenderson.pdf .   A copy of the legal findings that the Innocence Project submitted to the court, which includes the model jury instructions, is available at http://www.innocenceproject.org/docs/Henderson_Proposed_Legal_Findings_Innocence-Project.pdf

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of the 273 convictions overturned through DNA testing.  Additional information about eyewitness misidentification is available at http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php.

Contact:  Paul Cates, 212-364-5346, cell 917-566-1294, pcates@innocenceproject.org

By ADAM LIPTAK

‘West Memphis Three’ freed after nearly 20 years in prison

The Washington Post

By Elizabeth Flock

The West Memphis Three: from left, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley Jr. (CBS)

Three men convicted as teenagers of killing three Arkansas boys will be allowed to leave prison for the first time in nearly 20 years after a judge accepted a plea to set them free.

Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, collectively known as the “West Memphis Three,” have always maintained their innocence. Now, they will be allowed to maintain their innocence while entering a guilty plea and acknowledging that prosecutors have the evidence to convict them, according to the Associated Press.

Echols was sentenced to death and Misskelley and Baldwin to life in prison in the May 1993 murders of three Cub Scouts in West Memphis. The boys’ naked bodies were mutilated and left in a ditch, hog-tied with their shoelaces.

Prosecutors argued that the men had been driven to commit the murders by satanic ritual, and that Echols had been the ringleader.

The trial was a sensational one: An alternate suspect came to be known as “Mr. Bojangles”; errors were found at the police scene; a witness recanted testimony; and a debate ensued over whether there were tooth imprints on the boys’ heads.

But sympathizers, from legal scholars to celebrities, later came to believe that the West Memphis Three were innocent, including actor Johnny Depp and singer Eddie Vedder, who have tried to rally support for the men’s release.

DNA testing that was not available at the time now shows no links from the men to the crime.

In November, the state Supreme Court ruled that all three could present new evidence to the trial court in an effort to clear themselves.

The Arkansas Times has archival coverage of the West Memphis Three from 1994 to present.

The 1996 documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” chronicles the case. Watch the trailer:

http://www.wdam.com/video?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=6167095

The Innocence Project takes on Pine Belt woman’s case

By Sheri Falk, Reporter

http://www.wdam.com/story/15294104/the-innocence-project-takes-on-pine-belt-womans-case

COLLINS, MS (WDAM) – After years of trying to clear their daughter’s name, Pete and Sheila Stubbs see a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

The Innocence Project, a national organization that has helped overturn hundreds of wrongful convictions has joined the Stubbs’ fight.

Sheila Stubbs said, “I understand now, that just because you are arrested and you are convicted doesn’t mean you are necessarily guilty.”

That’s what the Stubbs have been trying to prove for 10 years in the case of their daughter Leigh, 31, who was convicted of conspiracy to steal morphine and commit grand larceny, as well as possession of morphine and aggravated assault, with the help of testimony from a discredited Hattiesburg Doctor.

Leigh was charged after a trip home from a North Mississippi rehab center with 2 other girls ended up leaving one in the hospital recovering from a drug overdose and sexual assault wounds.

Coxwell said The Innocence Project has worked on at least four cases in Mississippi where they helped clear the names of people wrongfully imprisoned for more than a decade.

“They were proven completely not guilty, 2 or 3 are in Hattiesburg, 2 in North Mississippi,” according to Coxwell. “They were completely cleared by DNA. Not all of the cases involve DNA but many of them do, one man was on death row.”

In at least one of those cases, the same discredited witness who testified for the state, Dr. Michael West, testified in the Stubbs case as an expert in bite mark identification, wound patterns and video enhancement.

“There are studies by Psychologists and Sociologists all over the country about mistaken identification, because in everyone of the cases where people have been convicted and sent to prison and later cleared by DNA, there was positive eyewitness identification saying that’s the person that did it,” said Coxwell. “So when they get cleared, what do we know? They were wrong, and what is so disturbing in this case is, you have Dr. West manufacture a vision that he told the jury. He says, you can’t really see this but this is what I see.”

Copyright 2011 WDAM. All rights reserved.

by: Radley Balko

August 9, 2011

Leigh Stubbs, Mississippi Dept. of Corrections photo.

Prosecutors in the U.S. often decry what is sometimes called the “CSI Effect.” Movies and TV crime dramas like the popular “CSI” franchise on CBS can fill jurors’ heads with unrealistic expectations about forensic science. But there’s also a flip side to the CSI Effect: Because jurors are ready to believe the fantastical feats preformed by the wondrous forensics computers they see on screen, an unscrupulous prosecutor armed with an expert willing to offer otherwise dubious forensics on the witness stand can cause a lot of damage.

Witness Michael West. In the early 1990s, West, a dentist in Hattiesburg, Miss., was one of country’s most prolific forensic odontologists, or bite mark specialists. West claimed to have perfected a new method of identifying bite marks on human skin, saying he could then match them to the teeth of a criminal suspect. Conveniently, West often testified that only he could perform this new analysis, which he called the “West Phenomenon.”

Over the years, West broadened his areas of claimed expertise, testifying in at least 10 states as a wound pattern expert, a trace metals expert, a gun shot residue expert, a gunshot reconstruction expert, a crime scene investigator, a blood spatter expert, a “tool mark” expert, a fingernail scratch expert and an expert in “liquid splash patterns.” He also got himself elected coroner of Forrest County, Miss. Though West was discredited in a number of national media reports beginning in the mid-1990s, he continued to testify in Mississippi courtrooms until just a few years ago.

Mississippi prosecutors no longer use West as a witness, but state Attorney General Jim Hood continues to defend convictions won because of his testimony. And Mississippi’s appeals courts continue to uphold them. There are still dozens of people still in prison thanks either to West’s testimony or his forensics reports, and Mississippi officials don’t seem particularly concerned about them. One of those people is Leigh Stubbs, now 10 years into a 44-year prison sentence.

LEIGH STUBBS

Stubbs may not be the most sympathetic of West’s victims. She’s a former drug addict, who on the night of her alleged crimes wasn’t in the best of company. But witness accounts say Stubbs remained sober that night (she passed a drug test), and the evidence suggests she was the group’s caretaker.

Stubbs’ story begins in March 2000, just after she successfully completed treatment at a rehab center in Columbus, Miss. Stubbs checked out with Tammy Vance, a friend she met in rehab, and Kim Williams, the woman Vance and Stubbs would later be accused of assaulting.

After checking out, the three women drove to the home of Dickie Ervin, whom Williams had been dating. Vance and Stubbs then left Ervin’s house. They were joined later by Williams, who had stolen some of Ervin’s Oxycontin. Vance and Williams began drinking and taking the Oxycontin, while Stubbs drove and remained sober. The three eventually ended up at a Comfort Inn in Brookhaven, Miss. By that time, Vance and Williams had passed out. Stubbs checked the three of them in to the hotel. According to the clerk’s testimony, Stubbs didn’t appear drunk or high, only tired.

By Stubbs’ account, she then helped the other two women into the room, and the three went to sleep. The next day, Stubbs and Vance went to get some food, leaving Williams in the room, still sleeping. Later the same afternoon, Stubbs and Vance noticed that Williams still hadn’t woken up, and was having trouble breathing. They called an ambulance, and Williams was admitted and treated for a drug overdose. She fell into a coma. At the hospital, doctors found a number of injuries on Williams, including swollen breasts, a swollen and bruised vagina, and marks across her buttocks. The attending physician believed the injuries appeared to be two to four days old. A rape kit was inconclusive. Another doctor later also found an injury to Williams’ head. A few days later, the office of then-District Attorney Dunn Lampton called in Michael West to examine Williams’ injuries. (Williams, who has since recovered, says she doesn’t remember who attacked her.)

Lampton chose to bring in Michael West as a witness even though West’s credibility problems were already well-known. West had previously claimed to be able to trace the bite marks in the bread of a half-eaten bologna sandwich to the prosecution’s chief suspect; he had compared his own genius to the musical genius of Itzhak Perlman; and he once testified in court that his own error rate was merely “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.” West had been exposed in articles in both the American Bar Association Law Journal and the National Law Review, and he was suspended and later resigned from the American Board of Forensic Odontologists. But Lampton ignored West’s history and called in his expertise in yet another criminal case.

In a routine he had by then repeated dozens of times with law enforcement officials across Mississippi and Louisiana, West claimed to find human bite marks on Williams that other doctors had overlooked. He then ordered dental impressions taken from Stubbs, Vance and two other suspects. But by the time the plaster impressions arrived, Williams’ alleged wounds had faded. So West performed his analysis based on photographs he had taken of his findings days earlier. He would later testify that it was a “probability” that a bite mark he claimed to have found on William’s thigh was made by Stubbs. (In a rare display of humility, West did concede that he wasn’t “100 percent” certain of the match — only that it was likely.)

MICHAEL WEST, ‘VIDEO ENHANCEMENT EXPERT’

From there, the case against Leigh Stubbs only grew more bizarre. On the night of the alleged attack, the Comfort Inn had a security camera camera trained on its parking lot. Lampton sent the grainy VHS tape, which was taken after nightfall, to the FBI for analysis. The agency’s report found nothing incriminating in the footage. It repeatedly points out that the quality of the recording is insufficient to tell for certain how many people are depicted in the video, much less determine their identities or what sort of clothing they’re wearing. The report also makes no mention of anyone moving a “body.”

Though he was obligated by law to do so, Lampton never turned that FBI report over to Stubbs’ defense attorney. But he sent the video to Michael West, who, now donning his “video enhancement expert” cap, claimed he was able to enhance the video and capture still photos from those enhancements incriminating Stubbs and Vance for Williams’ injuries.

The ability to “enhance” security camera footage beyond its resolution is a Hollywood-perpetuated myth so common that mocking it has become a running pop culture meme. Yet West testified in court that he could do exactly that. West and Lampton both knew that the FBI itself was unable to glean anything useful from the video, according to this correspondence, in which West references the FBI’s examination of the tape. They kept that correspondence from the defense and the jury.

West did refer to the FBI in his testimony about the tape when explaining to the jury that they were about to see some of the video “in its original form and then with it blown up and with some computer enhancement.” He elaborated on that enhancement, saying: “Ten years ago, I would have to send photographs off to the FBI … [and it would] cost us $20,000 to get them back and enhanced. Now, you can sit at home, with your own computer, with $1000 software and do enhancements that used to only NASA could do. … And that’s what we did in this case.”

West then testified that using his enhancement software, he was able to determine that the figures entering and leaving the frame in the video were wearing different clothing (one wearing shorts, the other wearing blue jeans) and were two different women, thus incriminating both Stubbs and Vance. Where the FBI could only determine that someone had removed an object — possibly a bag or suitcase — from the toolbox in the truck bed, West claimed repeatedly that he could make out hair, legs, and blue jeans, leading him to conclude that the object was clearly a body. “She takes a body out of this toolbox,” West conclusively told the jury. “That’s what I see.”

West also claimed he could actually read the body language of one figure in the footage, that she appeared “anxious,” and was exhibiting the sort of adrenaline-fueled “fight or flight” response one shows after committing a crime.

West also claimed to have found marks on Williams’ head and thigh that he said matched the shape of the latches on the tool box. He added, “those two latches are 37 inches apart. And if you look at Kimberly [Williams], from the head injuries to the thigh injury is 37 inches.” West elided the fact that the distance between a person’s head and thigh varies depending on the positioning of that person’s body. Even if Williams had been put into the tool box, there’s simply no way West could have known exactly how her body was positioned, much less have then replicated that positioning, to the inch, while she lay on a hospital bed.

West donned the cap of a sociologist for his final act on the witness stand. After hinting that Stubbs may have been a lesbian, Lampton asked West if one might be especially likely to find bite marks in an assault perpetrated by a homosexual. West replied that “it wouldn’t be unusual.” The prosecutor pushed on, asking West if bite marks in such cases “would almost be expected.” West replied, “Almost.”

In 2001, Stubbs was convicted of assault, and also of stealing Oxycontin and methadone. The only evidence against Stubbs for the drug thefts was that she was with Williams and Vance when the drugs were stolen. Stubbs, who had no prior criminal record, was sentenced to 44 years in prison.

Lampton went on to become a U.S. Attorney under President George W. Bush. Two of his notable acts in that position were a pair of corruption indictments he brought against sitting Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz, who fought both indictments while continuing to serve on the court. Both trials resulted in acquittals.

A LACK OF SHAME

The Mississippi Innocence Project is representing Stubbs in her post-conviction petition. “The use of Michael West as an expert at any point in time was inexcusable,” the organization’s director, Tucker Carrington, says. “There was never any basis for his work to be considered valid as a forensic science. But using him in this case in 2001, after his work had been discredited, and after the FBI’s experts had reported that they could not see anything in that videotape, that’s really a new low.”

Since Stubbs’ conviction in 2001, more evidence has come to light about Michael West and his corruption of the forensic system. In 2007, two men convicted of murder based on West’s testimony — Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks — were exonerated by DNA testing and freed. In both cases, West and his longtime collaborator, the controversial Mississippi medical examiner Steven Hayne, found bite marks on the victims no other doctor had seen, obtained dental impressions of the prosecution’s main suspect, then claimed to be able to match the bite marks to the suspect. A DNA check against the state database pointed to one man, Albert Johnson, for both crimes. Johnson would later confess. Combined, Brooks and Brewer had already served more than 30 years in prison.

In 2009, I broke the story about an astonishing video recording of West’s examination of a young Louisiana girl during a 1993 murder investigation. In the video, West takes a dental mold of the prosecution’s chief suspect and mashes it into the dead child’s skin. He does this dozens of times over the course of the video. Forensic specialists said that at minimum the video depicts gross medical malpractice, and that it likely shows criminal evidence tampering. Jimmie Duncan, the man convicted in part because of the bite mark evidence West “generated” in the video, is still on death row in Louisiana. (West also mashed Stubbs’ dental mold into Williams’ skin, but the trial judge accepted it as a legitimate method of analysis.)

Also in 2009, another video featuring West surfaced, this time the product of a sting operation orchestrated by a defense attorney. The attorney had his private investigator send West bite mark photos from a decade-old crime scene along with a dental mold of the private investigator’s own teeth. The investigator also sent West a check, along with a letter explaining that he was working for the family of the victim of an unsolved murder. The dental mold, the letter said, was from the man the family believed committed the crime. West not only said he could match the investigator’s own teeth to the crime scene photos, he sent back a video in which he meticulously went through his methodology.

Mississippi’s courts — many of which are presided over by judges and justices who were formerly prosecutors — are well aware of West’s history. Yet they demonstrate a notable lack of outrage or sense of urgency about convictions obtained based on his testimony. As recently as 2006, the Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed the the post-conviction petition of death row inmate Eddie Lee Howard, who was also convicted thanks mostly to bite-mark testimony from West. The court found that, “Just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot, does not mean, without something more, that he was wrong here.”

The office of Attorney General Jim Hood continues to defend convictions that were won on the basis of West’s testimony, including those of Howard and Stubbs. Notably though, Hood’s office no longer spends much time arguing the actual merits of West’s testimony. Rather, the state’s briefs tend to focus on the fact that defendants like Howard and Stubbs already challenged West’s credibility at trial or in their appeals, and those challenges had already been found lacking by Mississippi’s appeals courts. Therefore, they say, defendants are procedurally barred from challenging West again.

Whether or not that argument has legal merit, Hood is not obligated to defend bad convictions. Still, he seems content to hide behind procedural rules to preserve prison terms — and even death sentences — won on West’s testimony.

“Michael West was presenting bogus evidence,” Carrington says. “Prosecutors ought to be racing to identify and re-investigate cases where West was involved, not waiting for defense attorneys to discover them — much less defend his testimony or work in those cases.”

Dunn Lampton and the office of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood did not respond to my requests for comment. I last spoke to Michael West three years ago, when I called his office to request comment for an article I was writing at the time. He said at that time that he had no comment, then added, “And don’t ever call me again.”

Click here to read this article on www.huffingtonpost.com

The University of Mississippi Media and Documentary Projects and the Mississippi Innocence Project announce the screening of their documentary film  Mississippi Innocence, at The Newseum in Washington, D.C., October 3, 2011. The screening will include a panel discussion and reception hosted by the University of Mississippi.  This is a free event, however there are limited tickets. Please contact carol@ms-ip.org for more information.

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