Hayne’s efficient operation and reliable court appearances have allowed him to dominate the forensic autopsy business in Mississippi. A 1992 internal memo from the state’s Department of Public Safety estimated that Hayne performed 80 percent of all forensic autopsies performed in the state. Sources interviewed for this article say Hayne continues to do the vast majority of forensic autopsies in Mississippi.
“It’s a racket,” says Sanders, the former Columbus police chief. “Most states pay a [state] medical examiner $100,000, maybe $200,000 per year. Do the math. Fifteen hundred autopsies per year at $500 to $1,500 a pop. Hayne’s making millions.…Prosecutors love him because he’ll testify to whatever they need him to. Meanwhile, the state legislature saves money by not having to fund a full-time state medical examiner, office, and staff.”
Hayne’s relationship with Mississippi’s district attorneys is another cause for concern. As noted above, NAME standards call for forensic experts to be independent seekers of fact. But that doesn’t appear to be the case in Mississippi, where district attorneys expect medical examiners to be part of the prosecution team. In 1994, for example, John T. Kitchens, the district attorney for Rankin and Madison counties, wrote a letter to the state commissioner of public safety complaining that the state medical examiner at the time, Emily Ward, had “unnecessarily rendered aid to the defense of criminal defendants.” Kitchens warned that “public officials surrounding the criminal justice system must remain mindful of who they work for”; that prosecutors shouldn’t have to “bear the extra burden of wondering for which side the State Medical examiner [sic] is then employed”; and that the state examiner should never confer with defense counsel without the consent of the district attorney involved in the case. Defendants, Kitchens argued, can hire their own experts with private or public funding. In response, the Department of Public Safety sent Ward a memo that essentially agreed with Kitchens’ interpretation of the state medical examiner’s proper loyalties.
At several points during the last 30 years, Mississippi’s coroners and prosecutors have attempted to make the state medical examiner report directly to the state’s attorney general. George Washington University’s Starrs says the sentiment that experts work for the prosecution, though common, is inconsistent with a medical examiner’s duty to impartially investigate a death.
Contrary to Kitchens’ apparent assumption, most criminal defendants can’t hire their own experts, and public defenders and criminal defense attorneys with heavy caseloads don’t always have time to examine the credentials of every expert witness for the prosecution. In the case of Hayne, who has been certified as an expert by Mississippi’s courts thousands of times over the years, such an exercise seems futile. Moreover, trial courts aren’t always willing to allocate public funds for independent defense experts. With a few exceptions, the most vigorous examinations of Hayne have come during depositions in civil cases—medical malpractice suits, for example—where the opposing side could afford adequate representation and could hire independent experts to review his work.
“The Mississippi medical examiner system doesn’t exist, except in name only,” concludes DiMaio, the forensic expert and textbook author. “This man provides a service—and at a discount. You’re not going to get any change in a system where all the people in power are happy.”
Frustrated Reformers
Those who have tried
to effect changes anyway have met considerable resistance. Lloyd
White served as state medical examiner from 1989 to 1993, under
Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus. He is now a state medical examiner in
Tarrant County, Texas. (He performed the autopsy on the slain
Tejano pop star Selena.) Among other changes, White tried to
require minimal competence tests and continuing training for
Mississippi’s county coroners. Most of his suggestions are
officially still part of the state’s regulations, but they’re
ignored.
White was especially concerned about the cozy relationships between coroners, district attorneys, and private medical examiners like Hayne, relationships that the ad hoc autopsy system seemed to encourage. “There’s a tendency to slant things to favor the people you’re working for,” White says. “The politics and power could sometimes run roughshod over people’s civil rights.”
Julia James, now retired, worked for 27 years in the state’s crime lab and served as the lab’s interim director from 2004 to 2005. “A prosecutor would sometimes come back to us on a case and say something like ‘Can’t you go further?’ or ‘Are you sure it didn’t happen this way?’ Of course, the analysts I worked with always tried to maintain their neutrality.”
White left his position in 1992 with the election of a new governor. But he went out with a bang. Before leaving, he wrote a blistering public letter to Charles Tisdale, editor and publisher of the Jackson Advocate, a hard-hitting black paper sometimes called “the most firebombed newspaper in America.” Tisdale’s paper had been doggedly pursuing a series of suspicious suicides in Mississippi’s jails that many civil rights leaders believed to be homicides.
White himself suspected the deaths really were suicides. But he didn’t believe they were being properly investigated. In particular, he was troubled that the bodies were being sent to examiners like Hayne, who, experience taught him, couldn’t be trusted to give an unbiased conclusion. White’s letter called Hayne out by name, noting that despite his lack of credentials and poor practices, “Hayne continues to autopsy jail and prison deaths, as well as persons killed by police or sheriff’s deputies, and to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal income as a result of his extremely cozy relations with…state employees and officials.”
White also cited a case in which he had performed an autopsy on a woman who’d been found dead in her bathtub. White concluded it wasn’t immediately possible to determine a cause of death; he needed to wait for the results of toxicology and microscopic tests. According to White’s letter, he soon received a phone call from Hayne, who told him the body had been taken to Hayne’s office for a second examination at the request of Forrest Allgood, the district attorney for Clay, Lowndes, Noxubee, and Oktibbeha counties. Although White was the state medical examiner at the time, he said the second autopsy was performed “surreptitiously, without my knowledge or permission.” Allgood already had a suspect he wanted to charge with the crime, White said, and “he was afraid my autopsy wouldn’t provide him with the evidence he needed.” (Allgood’s office did not respond to requests for an interview.)
According to White, Hayne told him he had concluded that the woman was strangled. White said Hayne then suggested it would be in White’s “best interest” to issue a report agreeing with him.
White’s successor, the last person to fill the job of Mississippi’s state medical examiner, was Emily Ward, appointed in 1993 by Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice. Her tenure was even more raucous than White’s. One of Ward’s first goals was to get the state medical examiner’s office accredited by NAME. She also proposed that the state office, which handled less than 10 percent of the forensic autopsies performed in Mississippi, take on more of the burden. It was a sensible move: The fees the counties were paying to private practitioners like Hayne could instead go to the state medical examiner’s general fund, making the office less dependent on the inadequate budget provided by the state legislature. It would also mean more autopsies would be performed by independent, board-certified forensic pathologists.
This proposal rankled Hayne and the county coroners, who stood to lose both power and income under the plan. “Dr. Ward came in here and tried to clean up the system,” says Andre de Gruy, who directs Mississippi’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel, the public defender office for death penalty cases. “Hayne and the coroners got together and chased her out.”
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ftyert
|7.1.11 @ 5:56PM|#
This is unbelievable. How can they let Hayne get away with this? I blame the District Attorney's Office in Mississippi.
|7.1.11 @ 11:54PM|#
I blame the whole goddamned state of Mississippi. Honestly, that entire area is a mess, crooked politicians, crooked cops, promoted segregation, resisted the civil-rights act, one of the worst slave states, one of the most regressive tax systems next to Alabama, lowest educational standards, highest percentage of minimum-wage jobs per capita, I could go on and on. The whole state needs to be taken over by the federal government, all of its citizens forcibly educated into the 21st Century, mostly the white cracker dipshits to get rid of the racists, fundies, crooks, good-ole-boys, rednecks, and other idiots.
Cynthia Henley|8.10.11 @ 11:46PM|#
It is this kind of crap that leads to the imposition of the death penalty against innocent people, and allows guilty people to continue to remain free. This man should be prosecuted and put in prison for life. Not only did he affect the people in whose cases he testified or provided opinions, but he has caused a negative effect on the entire criminal "justice" system - creating more suspicion and fear among people. People need to also understand that he didn't bamboozle the prosecutors who used him - they knew what he was all about but they did not care. As with many prosecutors, these people were at the "win at all costs" time of their lives - caring more about themselves and their stats than truth, justice, and the protection of the community. THEY should be prosecuted, too. As a criminal defense lawyer, I can tell you that this type of crap, and these people, are not isolated. It happens everywhere. And, unless the defendant is filthy rich, the defense does NOT have access to good experts who can help reveal these imposters. This crap and this jerk cost tons - not only in money but in lives. PROSECUTE HIM!!!
قبلة الوداع|8.12.11 @ 11:15PM|#
thank u man
Air Jordan Ol School|8.14.11 @ 9:27PM|#
That's cool!
|8.21.11 @ 3:08AM|#
ditto stentor. it kills me to live in the same country as this...