Trouble With State Medical Examiners
Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko has an exposé (a shorter version has been published in the Wall Street Journal) on the broken medical examiner system in Mississippi, and, in particular, the troubling case of Dr. Stephen Hayne, an “entrepreneurial” pathologist who gives all forensic pathologists a bad name. Hayne is the de facto state medical examiner for Mississippi and appears, according to the article, to be in the pockets of the state’s prosecutors. Notably, he has:
- Testified on the stand in a murder trail that the nature of a wound was consitent with two people pulling the trigger (the conviction has been overturned by the state Supreme Court in no small part due to this testimony).
- Testified to performing in excess of 1,500(!) forensic autopsies in a year, in addition to his job has medial director of a two other facilities, and, or course, testifying a trial mutliple times per week.
- Claimed to be certified in forensic patholgy, but is not known to have ever passed an exam for the American Board of Pathology.
It should be noted that Hayne and Mississippi are the centerpiece for the article, but similar problems have been noted in other states and with other MEs.
Read the whole thing. Additonal info from Balko’s blog here and here. A Jackson, Mississippi’s TV report on the story is here.
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