Libertarian freedom activist forcibly hospitalized and drugged

Veteran libertarian civil rights activist Julian Heicklen calls it “an out-and-out kidnapping” when Homeland Security Police forcibly transported him to a hospital where he was injected with Thorazine against his will.

November 4, 11:07 AM Libertarian News Examiner Garry Reed

When faced with arrest, Heicklen goes limp and silent as he did on
October 26 during his previous attempt to exercise his free speech rights
on public property. (Screen capture from YouTube video shot by Derek
DeMarco)

Veteran libertarian civil rights activist Julian Heicklen calls it “an out-and-out kidnapping” when Homeland Security Police forcibly transported him to a hospital where he was injected with Thorazine against his will.

It began shortly after Heicklen arrived at the US District Courthouse in New York City for the third Monday in a row to pass out pamphlets to prospective jurors.

The pamphlet, produced by the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) entitled “A Primer for Prospective Jurors” informs jurors of their right to judge the law and its application as well as the facts in a case, regardless of the judge’s instructions to the contrary.

As in the past, (Jury activist arrested for exercising First Amendment rights) Homeland Security police told him he couldn’t do that on federal property and ordered him to leave. As in the past, Heicklen explained that the First Amendment recognized his right to do what he was doing.

Then, as Heicklen tells it in his email report to supporters, “One of them said that I was under arrest, get his hands behind his back and handcuff him.”

As Heicklen always does when faced with arrest, he dropped to the ground and went limp and silent.

In the past, he was arrested, handcuffed, placed on a gurney and transported to a hospital where he was examined and eventually released in time to be home later the same day.

(Full accounts of this and his first two trips to Manhattan can be read on the New Jersey Libertarian Party website.)

But this time something different happened. “I remained in that position for over an hour,” Heicklen says, “before I was lifted onto a gurney and strapped securely. I was never handcuffed nor received a citation or summons. It was an out-and-out kidnapping.”

At Bellevue Psychiaytric Hospital he remained nonresponsive to questions.

Around 3:00 PM, radio reporter Chris Goldstein called to say that he would start the publicity rolling.

After 4:00 PM or so, Heicklen continues, “I made a fuss to see someone in charge, so that I could either be released or brought in front of a magistrate. My requests were ignored, and became more persistent. Against my wishes four attendants grabbed me and gave me a shot of Thorazine to calm me down. It worked, I got an excellent night’s sleep.”

Heicklen asserts that Dr. Lowe, head psychiatrist for the Bellevue unit, made it a point to see that he was not interviewed the first day.

On Tuesday morning, after being interviewed by two people he identifies as psychiatrist Dr. Striker and social worker Kari Wolf, Heicklen was released at 11:55 AM, just over 24 hours after arriving at the courthouse.

Ever upbeat, Heicklen reports his release this way: “I signed all documents ‘John Galt.’ I was released at 11:55 AM and voted for Ken Kaplan for Governor of New Jersey on my way home.

Ken Kaplan, of course, was the Libertarian Party candidate.

Unfortunately, Heicklen’s report ends on this ominous note:

Warning: You should know that The Federal Protective Service is intercepting my e-mails. Another violation of our civil liberties.

EDITORIAL COMMENT
If it’s true that the government is reading all of the emails that pass between Julian and his supporters and well-wishers, let’s force them to violate everyone’s rights. EVERYONE who reads this article should get on Julian’s email list. Make them spy on the entire American freedom movement. Maybe they’ll even join us! Send your email address to jph13@psu.edu and ask Julian to add you to the “Do Not Spy On Me” list. It will be one small way you can show your support for Julian and for freedom.

This YouTube video shot by Derek DeMarco is from October 26, 2009

New York Times Parrots Debunked Poplawski Smear

Says Pittsburgh shooter left comments on Infowars, yet fails to mention that Poplawski criticized Alex Jones’ anti-racist viewpoint

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The New York Times has thrown its weight behind the smear attack attempting to assign blame to Alex Jones for being an influence in the tragic shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers on Saturday, despite the fact that the killer, Richard Poplawski, openly criticized Jones’ anti-racist political viewpoint.

As we reported yesterday, a major smear attack on Alex Jones and his websites launched by the ADL in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh police shootings which attempted to classify Infowars as an outlet for “hate speech” has been discredited after the ADL’s own website admitted that Richard Poplawski held views that opposed those of the Texas radio talk show host.

Stories claiming that Poplawski was influenced by Alex Jones, Infowars and Prison Planet originally appeared Sunday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Raw Story. Neither of these news organizations attempted to speak with us before claiming the link and Raw Story later issued a retraction and removed us from their original piece altogether after we questioned the sloppy nature of their writer Muriel Kane’s hit piece.

In an article entitled Man Accused in Pittsburgh Killings Voiced Racist Views Online, the New York Times today reports that Poplawski made postings on “Infowars, a Web site affiliated with a radio talk show host, Alex Jones, beginning in late 2007 and continuing until two days before the shootings.”

However, the Times fails to explain the nature of what Poplawski actually said on the Infowars comment boards. In his comments, the cop killer was actually expressing opposition to Alex Jones’ anti-racist political viewpoint and encouraging others to be suspicious of Jones’ motives in bringing people of all races together to stand up to tyranny and corruption.

The fact that the Times makes the connection between Poplawski and Jones, while failing to point out that Poplawski disagreed with Jones’ political viewpoint, underscores the fact that this is a baseless smear intended to take what was a tragic domestic dispute completely out of context in order to demonize anti-establishment media outlets and chill free speech.

As the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports today, in his postings, “Mr. Poplawski also appears to agree with another poster who criticized Alex Jones, host of a conspiracy theorist radio program and author of an Internet site to which Mr. Poplawski’s friends said he sometimes turned for news.

The fact that Poplawski occasionally visited Infowars (and left a total of 3 comments, hardly the “regular” fan that the media made him out to be), makes Infowars no more guilty for the murder of three police officers than ESPN would be if Poplawski had gone there to check the football results.

There is not a shred of evidence that Poplawski was inspired to kill three cops because he thought he was kick-starting some kind of political revolution. Indeed, it was Poplawski’s own mother that called the police to the house as a result of a domestic dispute because of Poplawski’s dog urinating on the floor. Poplawski did not go out tooled up on a radical political mission to kill cops on the back of reading Infowars, and to imply that there is any causative connection is a defamatory smear.

“If blame is to be laid for the Stanton Heights shootings, Mr. Jones said, it should be placed on the Marine Corps, which Mr. Poplawski’s friends and mother said he had joined only to be thrown out,” reports the Gazette.

“If anybody should be blamed for this it’s the Marines — they’re the ones who trained him to kill,” Mr. Jones said.”

The fact that the ADL and the New York Times ganged up to propagate this smear really shows us that we are hurting the establishment with our message of non-violent, non-racist civil disobedience and urging people of all colors and creeds to come together and resist the new world order.

The desperation of the smear attempt is self-evident and this will only backfire once again to reveal the agenda-driven hatred that the ADL and the decaying establishment media have for the growing liberty movement in America.

Police reject candidates for being too intelligent

Ananova

A US man has been rejected in his bid to become a police officer for scoring too high on an intelligence test.

Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took an exam to join the New London police, in Connecticut, in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125.

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Mr Jordan launched a federal lawsuit against the city, but lost.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Mr Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

He said: “This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class. I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action and has worked as a prison guard since he took the test.

The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

Secret State Police Report: Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin, Libertarians are Terrorists

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 12, 2009

Alex Jones has received a secret report distributed by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” and dated February 20, 2009. A footer on the document indicates it is “unclassified” but “law enforcement sensitive,” in other words not for public consumption. A copy of the report was sent to Jones by an anonymous Missouri police officer.

Click here to download a PDF of the report

Click on above thumbnails to see larger images.

The MIAC report specifically describes supporters of presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr as “militia” influenced terrorists and instructs the Missouri police to be on the lookout for supporters displaying bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with the Constitutional, Campaign for Liberty, and Libertarian parties.

“Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) provides a public safety partnership consisting of local, state and federal agencies, as well as the public sector and private entities that will collect, evaluate, analyze, and disseminate information and intelligence to the agencies tasked with Homeland Security responsibilities in a timely, effective, and secure manner,” explains the MIAC website. “MIAC is the mechanism to collect incident reports of suspicious activities to be evaluated and analyzed in an effort to identify potential trends or patterns of terrorist or criminal operations within the state of Missouri. MIAC will also function as a vehicle for two-way communication between federal, state and local law enforcement community within our region.”

MIAC is part of the federal “fusion” effort now underway around the country. “As of February 2009, there were 58 fusion centers around the country. The Department has deployed 31 officers as of December 2008 and plans to have 70 professionals deployed by the end of 2009. The Department has provided more than $254 million from FY 2004-2007 to state and local governments to support the centers,” explains the Department of Homeland Security on its website. Missouri is mentioned as a participant in this federal “intelligence” effort.

Last month, the ACLU issued a news release highlighting the activity of a fusion center in Texas as the “latest example of inappropriate police intelligence operations targeting political, religious and social activists for investigation,” in particular “Muslim civil rights organizations and anti-war protest groups.”

The MIAC report does not concentrate on Muslim terrorists, but rather on the so-called “militia movement” and conflates it with supporters of Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr, the so-called patriot movement and other political activist organizations opposed to the North American Union and the New World Order. The MIAC document is a classic guilt by association effort designed to demonize legitimate political activity that stands in opposition to the New World Order and its newly enshrined front man, Barack Obama.

In September of 2008, Missouri sheriffs and prosecutors organized truth squads to intimidate people opposed to Obama and threatened to arrest and prosecute anybody who ran “misleading television ads.” Missouri governor Matt Blunt eventually denounced the use of “police state tactics” on the part of the Obama-Biden campaign.

MIAC claims members of a “rightwing” militia movement organized in the 1990s — generally in response to the Oklahoma City bombing and the events at Waco — “continuously exploit world events in order to increase participation in their movements. Due to the current economical and political situation, a lush environment for militia activity has been created” and supposedly exploited by “constitutionalists” and “white supremacists,” the latter an oft-employed canard used to demonize activists as dangerous and potentially violent lunatics.

MIAC notes many of the political issues cited by the so-called patriot movement — the Ammunition Accountability Act, the impending economic collapse of the government, the possibility of a constitutional convention, the North American Union, Obama’s “Universal Service Program,” and the implementation of RFID, issues that are not limited to the patriot movement but are shared by a wide array of political activists.

The MIAC document includes a map of the North American Union not dissimilar from one released by NASCO, the North America SuperCorridor Coalition (see the NASCO map here).

The MIAC report is similar to one created by the Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Joint Terrorism Task Force during the Clinton administration (see page one and page two of the document). The FBI document explicitly designates “defenders” of the Constitution as “right-wing extremists.” The MIAC report expands significantly on the earlier document.

In order to artificially heighten the perceived threat threshold, MIAC rolls in Christian Identity, white nationalism, “militant” anti-abortion activists, opposition to illegal immigration, and income tax resistance. MIAC deceptively blurs the lines between these disparate political ideologies and underscores the possibility for violence in a summary of the organizational structure of the militia movement and a section describing how members strive to train in “combat readiness.”

The MIAC effort to characterize Libertarians and Constitutionalists as racists is reminiscent of an attempt by the corporate media in early 2008 to portray Ron Paul as a racist by attempting to link him to a series of vaguely racist newsletters produced in the 1980s. Paul did not exercise editorial control over the newsletters and went so far as to apologize for them, but this did not prevent the corporate media from characterizing him as a racist.

According to MIAC, opposition to world government, NAFTA, federalization of the states, and restrictive gun laws are a threat to the police. “The militia subscribes to an anti-government and NWO mindset, which creates a threat to law enforcement officers. They view the military, National Guard, and law enforcement as a force that will confiscate their firearms and place them in FEMA concentration camps,” the document claims in a section entitled “You are the Enemy.”

In regard to supposed militia movement literature and media, the MIAC report mentions Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism and William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries — the latter was penned by the former leader of the white nationalist organization National Alliance and the former by a Libertarian filmmaker. In order to underscore the absurdity of the MIAC attempt to link Pierce’s novel and Russo’s anti-tax documentary, it should be noted that the late Aaron Russo was Jewish and The Turner Dairies posits a Zionist government in America (or ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government) run by Jews.

The award-winning film Zeitgeist, featuring Alex Jones, is also mentioned as terrorist material.

The MIAC report is particularly pernicious because it indoctrinates Missouri law enforcement in the belief that people who oppose confiscatory taxation, believe in the well-documented existence of a New World Order and world government (a Google search of this phrase will pull up numerous references made by scores of establishment political leaders), and are opposed to the obvious expansion of the federal government at the expense of the states as violent extremists who are gunning for the police. It specifically targets supporters of mainstream political candidates and encourages police officers to consider them dangerous terrorists.

MIAC is attempting to radicalize the police against political activity guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If Missouri police indoctrinated by MIAC propaganda overreact to political activists and supporters of Ron Paul in their state and injure or kill people involved in entirely legal and legitimate political activity, MIAC, the governor of Missouri (his name appears on the MIAC document), and the DHS and federal government should be held directly responsible and prosecuted the fullest extent of the law.

More medical examiners caught framing suspects

Manufacturing Guilt?

Experts say this exclusive video shows a dental examiner creating the bite marks that put a man on death row.

Via ReasonOnline
Radley Balko | February 19, 2009

Editor’s Note: The following article contains graphic and disturbing photographs and video excerpts of an examination conducted on the body of a 23-month-old girl. The images are the basis of claims that forensic experts fabricated evidence in a case that put a man on death row, where he awaits exoneration or execution.

For most of the last 20 years, doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West have served as expert forensic witnesses for the state of Mississippi. Until 2008, Hayne served as the de facto state medical examiner, dominating a criminal autopsy market in which prosecutors contract out examinations to favored private doctors. West, a dentist, served one term as the elected coroner in Forest County, Mississippi in the 1990s and partly through his work with Hayne became a popular bite-mark examiner among prosecutors. Both men have come under intense scrutiny for questionable working procedures and dubious testimony—West off and on for 15 years, Hayne mostly in the last two. Reason has been following Hayne’s deteriorating career since an October 2006 article that detailed his role in putting a possibly innocent man named Cory Maye on death row (see an archive of our Hayne-related reporting at: www.reason.com/hayne).

Last year, two men that Hayne and West helped convict of murder in the early 1990s, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, were exonerated and freed from prison through DNA testing after serving more than 30 years combined behind bars. Both men had been accused of raping and murdering the daughters of their respective girlfriends. In what has come to be a pattern with the two doctors, in each case Hayne claimed to have found in an initial autopsy what other examiners missed: bite marks on the victim’s body. He then called in West, a forensic odontologist (dental examiner), who definitively matched bite marks to the defendants. Partly because of the testimony from Hayne and West, Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, and Brewer to death (he spent 14 years on death row). DNA testing in 2008 determined that the semen found on both girls belonged to a third man, 51-year-old Albert Johnson. As Brooks and Brewer were freed, Johnson confessed to both crimes.

The Brooks and Brewer cases form their own forensics riddle: How could West and Hayne have definitively linked previously undetected bite marks on the victims to two men who didn’t commit the murders?

Reason recently obtained shocking video from another Hayne and West collaboration that may shed light on the question. In 1993, the two conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video shows bite marks mysteriously appearing on the toddler’s face during the time she was in the custody of Hayne and West. It then shows West repeatedly and methodically pressing and scraping a dental mold of a man’s teeth on the dead girl’s skin. Forensic scientists who have viewed the footage say the video reveals not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering.

How Jimmie Duncan Landed on Death Row

Haley Oliveaux did not have a happy young life. Her mother was divorced. Her father was in prison. In November 1993, she was twice taken to the hospital after suffering seizures. On November 29 of that year, she was again admitted to the hospital, this time after allegedly pulling a chest of drawers down on top of herself while climbing to reach for a piggy bank. She suffered multiple skull fractures in the incident and, notably, some bruising on her left elbow. An investigation by the West Monroe Police Department and Ouachita Parish Child Protective Services found no evidence of abuse and no reason to doubt the piggy bank story.

Three weeks later, on December 18, Allison Oliveaux went to work at 8:45 a.m., leaving Haley in Jimmie Duncan’s care. According to Duncan, he gave Haley a bath later that morning, and left her in the bathtub while he washed some dishes. At around 10:30 a.m., Duncan said, he returned to the bathroom to find her lying motionless in the tub. Duncan said he rushed Haley to the house next door, where neighbor Floyd Bennett tried to administer CPR while his son called an ambulance. The ambulance crew described Duncan as hysterical and weeping. Haley was taken to the hospital, and pronounced dead shortly thereafter. After admitting to the police that he’d left Haley alone in the tub, Jimmie Duncan was arrested and charged with negligent homicide, or criminal inaction leading to another person’s death.

But after the autopsy and examination by Hayne and West, prosecutors raised the charges. Citing the bite-mark analysis, along with other evidence, prosecutors charged Duncan with capital murder, alleging that he raped Haley Oliveaux in the bathtub, forced her head underwater, bit her, and drowned her. Five years later, even though the only physical evidence directly linking him to the girl was the bite-mark analysis, Jimmie Duncan was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He has been on death row in Louisiana for 10 years.

Louisiana had its own medical examiners at the time who were closer to the scene of the crime. Nonetheless, Haley Oliveaux’s body was taken from Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, 120 miles east to Jackson, Mississippi, so it could be autopsied by Hayne. At the time, Hayne, who has never been certified in forensic pathology, was performing the majority of autopsies in Mississippi, some 1,200-1,500 per year. That’s an output other forensic pathologists describe as impossible (he was also holding down two hospital jobs and testifying regularly in court).

Despite his heavy workload in Mississippi, Hayne, with West by his side, began looking for business in Louisiana, too. In October 1993, the Baton Rouge Advocate reported that officials in Ouachita Parish (where West Monroe is located) were considering sending criminal autopsies to Hayne, despite concerns expressed by other medical examiners about the quality of his work. Oliveaux was one of Hayne’s first autopsies for Ouachita Parish, according to testimony from Duncan’s trial. Among those who traveled 120 miles to observe the examination were the West Monroe police chief, a police detective and captain, plus two assistant district attorneys. Though it isn’t particularly unusual for a district attorney or police officer to witness an autopsy, it is unusual for them to travel two hours and cross state lines to do so. The National Association of Medical Examiners discourages doctors from speaking to law enforcement officials before conducting exams because because doing so can bias a doctor’s conclusions. At Duncan’s trial five years later, one of his attorneys likened the Oliveaux autopsy to a job evaluation. If it was, Hayne passed. By that time Hayne was performing the bulk of Ouachita Parish’s criminal autopsies, 30 to 40 per year.

Hayne testified that during an initial examination of Oliveaux’s body, he was able to find bite marks that at the time no other medical professional had noticed—just as he’d done in the Brewer and Brooks cases before. And just as it happened in the Brewer and Brooks cases, Hayne’s discovery of potential bite marks gave local authorities probable cause to obtain a plaster dental mold of the defendant’s teeth, in this case Jimmie Duncan. Hayne then called in West to perform his unique brand of “analysis.” West concluded that the marks were made by human teeth belonging to the man police and prosecutors suspected of killing the child.

The Video

Hayne and West videotaped many of their autopsies and forensic examinations over the years. For whatever reason, the video of West’s examination of Haley Oliveaux was preserved, and Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys found it in the district attorney’s file last year. They were shocked at what they saw. The full video is 24 minutes long. The brief excerpts that follow show Oliveaux’s face on successive days. At the start of the videotaped examination from December 18, 1993, her right cheek appears free of any noticeable marks. Yet after the tape cuts to December 19, 1993, the cheek shows prominent signs of abrasions, which are then exacerbated by West’s handiwork.

Warning: These video excerpts, approximately 30 seconds long, contain disturbing images.

The full 24-minute video opens with Michael West’s initial examination of Haley Oliveaux’s body on the night of December 18, 1993. He notes several injuries, but at no time does he mention the presence of possible bite marks on Oliveaux’s right cheek. The video itself shows no sign of bite marks, scrapes, or abrasions on the cheek.

At the 4:55 mark, there’s a cut in the original video, representing the break between West’s initial exam on December 18, and a follow-up bite-mark analysis on December 19. After the break, West stands over Oliveaux’s body, which now contains a striking red abrasion on her right cheek—an abrasion that wasn’t there before. West then takes the plaster cast of Jimmie Duncan’s teeth and pushes it into the scrape on Oliveaux’s jaw. Over the next few minutes he jams, drags, and scrapes the dental mold across Oliveaux’s cheek 17 times. For the entire 24-minute video, West uses Duncan’s teeth mold on Oliveaux’s skin more than 50 times.

Expert Opinion on the Video

Reason first asked Michael Bowers to comment on the video. Bowers, a practicing dentist, is a deputy medical examiner for Ventura County, California and a past chairman of the American Board of Forensic Odontology’s Exam and Credentialing Committee. He worked with the Innocence Project to help free Kennedy Brewer.

“This is the best documentation I’ve ever seen of Dr. West’s junk bite-mark comparisons,” Bowers said in a phone interview last month.

When asked how abrasions on Oliveaux’s cheek not present when the video begins could later appear, Bowers answered, “Because Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He’s creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he’s tampering with the evidence. It’s criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods.” Bowers added, “You never jam a plaster cast into a possible bite mark like that. It distorts the evidence. You take a photograph, or if there are indentations, you take an impression. But you don’t jam plaster teeth into them.” After viewing the video, Bowers submitted an affidavit for Jimmie Duncan’s defense.

Reason also showed the video to David Averill, a dentist and a former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology. “The video is troubling. I don’t know how you can explain where those marks come from. And there’s just no justification for him to push the cast into the skin like that,” Averill said. “That isn’t an acceptable way to perform a bite mark analysis.”

Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys hired San Diego forensic pathologist Harry Bonnell to review Hayne and West’s testimony in the case. Bonnell, who has been highly critical of Hayne in the past, sits on the board of trustees for Parents of Murdered Children, Inc., a victim advocacy group. He has worked for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and formerly served on the ethics committee of the National Association of Medical Examiners. By email, Bonnell told Reason, “If what I am seeing on the video is accurate, someone is using the mold of Duncan’s teeth to create an apparent bite mark; this, in my mind, is criminal tampering with evidence.”

In his affidavit for Jimmie Duncan’s defense, Bonnell elaborated:

The injury to the cheek of Haley Oliveaux is not seen in hospital photos…and was generated by using a mold of Duncan’s teeth to create a bitemark. The injuries on the child’s face are abrasions, which form almost immediately, unlike bruises, therefore the fact that the marks are not present in hospital photos and in the beginning of the West Video makes it medically impossible that Jimmie Duncan could have inflicted any of these injuries. Nor is it possible that witnesses could have seen these marks in the emergency room, as abrasions cannot appear, then disappear, and then reappear at the morgue…stating that the bites (which they are not) were inflicted within 30 minutes of death is rubbish, and supported by no scientific fact or literature.

The above image of Haley Oliveaux comes from the start of the autopsy video of Haley Oliveaux on December 18, 1993. The image below comes from December 19, 1993, when the video of the examination continued.

The Tainted Dr. West

West himself never testified at Jimmie Duncan’s trial. Between his examination of Oliveaux in 1993 and Duncan’s trial in 1998, the bite-mark analyst came under fire for his working methods and credulity-stretching testimony. In 1994, an ethics committee from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences unanimously recommended that West be expelled from the organization. West resigned instead. His work was criticized in such national media outlets as Newsweek, the ABA Journal, and National Law Journal. By 1998, Duncan’s prosecutors recognized the baggage West carried and dropped him from the case. Still, West continued to both work with Hayne and testify in Mississippi until well into the 2000s.

Duncan’s prosecutors then turned to Dr. Neal Reisner, a forensic odontolgist from Scarsdale, New York. Relying only on photos West took after the examination depicted in the video, Reisner testified that the marks on Oliveaux’s cheek were indeed bite marks, and that “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty,” he could determine that they came from Jimmie Duncan.

The video above was never shown at Jimmie Duncan’s trial. It wasn’t even shown to the expert witnesses from either side. Trial Judge Charles Joiner did view the tape, and inexplicably concluded that it contained “no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant,” a conclusion that the forensics specialists Reason spoke with strongly dispute.

Prosecutors initially refused to turn the video over to Duncan’s attorneys. In one brief filed during pre-trial motions in 1995, they noted the controversy surrounding West, and argued that “the defense is somehow hoping to drag Dr. West into this case in order to create ancillary issues for the jury.” A year later, they relented and finally turned over the tape. For whatever reason, Duncan’s trial attorneys never used the video; they never even showed it to their own expert, forensic odontologist Richard Souviron. (Duncan’s trial attorneys declined to speak with Reason, because his case is still active.)

Souviron recently had the opportunity to view the video for the first time. In a new affidavit submitted to Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys, Souviron describes the video as showing “Dr. West, violently and repeatedly, forcing a mold of Jimmie Duncan’s teeth into Ms. Oliveaux’s right cheek. In doing so, Dr. West creates a mark that was not previously present. Dr. West’s behavior and methods are absolutely not supported by any scientific standards or protocol.” Souviron added in the affidavit that hospital photographs show that “none of the marks were present when Ms. Oliveaux was at the hospital,” and that the abrasions that Reisner testified about for the prosecution “were created by the flagrant misconduct of Dr. Michael West.”

The Hayne-West Legacy

West was still testifying in Mississippi courtrooms until at least the year 2000, long after he’d resigned from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. As late as 2007, prosecutors were still relying primarily on West’s testimony to keep Kennedy Brewer in prison. And despite the Brooks and Brewer exonerations, the state has refused to conduct a review of the hundreds of cases in which West has testified.

Tucker Carrington, director of the Mississippi chapter of the Innocence Project, argues that West’s influence may run even deeper. “You also have to consider all the cases where someone may have falsely confessed, or accepted plea bargain for a crime they didn’t commit after being presented with West’s findings. Those cases aren’t going to show up in legal searches,” he says. “West was also widely used by the state’s social services agencies. His testimony has helped the state take who knows how many children away from their parents.”

The story with Hayne is even grimmer. In August of last year, Mississippi announced that it finally would no longer include Hayne on its list of medical examiners cleared to perform criminal autopsies. The move effectively ended Hayne’s reign as Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner.

But as with West, Mississippi officials still refuse to acknowledge that there was ever a significant problem with Hayne, and have no intention of investigating just how much damage he may have done to the state’s criminal justice system. Given that Hayne performed approximately 80 percent to 90 percent of the state’s autopsies for close to 20 years, the number of cases in which he has testified is likely in the tens of thousands. Worse yet, even in terminating Hayne, the state agreed to allow him to complete a backlog of approximately 600 autopsies. As of this article’s posting, he’s still testifying in Mississippi courts.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.