'Expert Witness' manufactured evidence?

[Puppycow]

Radley Balko reports

The nude, lifeless body of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux lies awkwardly across a metal autopsy table in a Mississippi morgue. A red block propped under the little girl’s shoulders elevates her chest, causing her head to tilt backward and her arms to spill off to the side. The toddler’s head hangs at an angle that causes her fine blonde hair to fall away from her face, exposing her right cheek, the right side of her forehead, and her hairline. There is light bruising around her ear and right eye, but there are no visible scrapes, cuts, or abrasions on the right side of her face. Most notably, the skin of her right cheek is smooth and unblemished. In a heavy drawl, Michael West, a dentist employed by prosecutors and coroners to conduct post-mortem examinations, announces the date and time: December 18, 1993, 9:35 p.m.

Oliveaux drowned in a bathtub that morning in West Monroe, Louisiana, while in the care of her mother’s boyfriend, Jimmie Duncan. Duncan said he was washing dishes at the time. In an unusual decision, her body was transported 120 miles east to Rankin County, Mississippi, for examination. Although the state of Louisiana had its own medical examiners, the district attorney and police chief of West Monroe wanted the autopsy to be performed by Steven Hayne, a controversial physician who was able to dominate Mississippi’s autopsy referrals, critics say, by drawing conclusions prosecutors wanted to hear. Duncan already faced charges of negligent homicide for leaving the girl alone in the tub. In Hayne’s initial examination he claimed to find bite marks that hospital doctors failed to notice. He then called for further analysis from West, his frequent collaborator.

West, a dentist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is a specialist in bite mark evidence. During the previous three years, he and Hayne had helped produce murder convictions in two strikingly similar cases, finding previously undetected bite marks on dead little girls and linking them back to the boyfriends of the girls’ mothers. No one knew at the time that the convicted killers—one of whom, Kennedy Brewer, lived on death row for 14 years—would be exonerated and freed in 2008 when DNA tests showed a third man was responsible for both deaths. Nor could many have known at the time that West and Hayne eventually would be discredited by their own professions, and barred from conducting new examinations in their home state.

But the Oliveaux case continues to have repercussions today because the research and testimony West and Hayne produced helped put yet another man on death row, where he remains to this day.
. . .

This is madness.

 

[Bikewer]

I recall reading an article about the origins of forensic ballistics in the 1800s. At the time, any number of self-appointed "expert witnesses" would be brought in to examine crime evidence and would make pronouncements that would result in imprisonment or execution for the accused.
All this with no training or oversight whatever. The author had reviewed some of the still-archived cases and found egregious errors...

Seems the practice continues today. Some areas still use an elected Coroner...

Just within the last couple of months, local funeral homes have returned two bodies to the city morgue; both had been ruled "natural causes" and were found to actually have been homicide victims.

 

[Beerina]

The problems that discredited them, which is to say later scientific tests contradicted theirs, and unarguably, was something I tried to point out, in vain, to OJ Simpson supporters at the time of his trial.

Apparently in vicious, bloody fight scenes with struggles (the Goldman part apparently went on for over a minute as estimated), it's very common for the attacker to be injured and thus leave blood and DNA somewhere in the big red sea. It would take weeks for that to get sorted out by test, or days at least even at the quick step.

Yet we were to believe cops, who certainly know all this, were going to start planting evidence at OJ's house mere hours later? And, as is very likely, end up being caught as these DNA tests started coming back? As it turned out, OJ blood evidence at the scene was scant to nonexistent, but the cops had no way whatsoever of knowing that when they supposedly started planting stuff.