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photos by Lara Shipley

Doctoring Evidence

February 20th, 2009 · 2 Comments

Radley Balko has been doing absolutely heroic work exposing the professional malfeasance of forensic examiners Steven Hayne and Michael West, whose willingness to dance to the prosecutor’s tune over—in Hayne’s case—some two decades has probably tainted thousands of trials in Mississippi and Louisiana. Thanks in no small part to his reporting, Hayne was finally dropped from the state’s list of approved medical examiners last year. Now, though, he’s got a dramatic smoking gun: Video showing West apparently using a mold of a suspect’s teeth to manufacture bite marks on the body of a dead toddler—marks that clearly weren’t present in earlier shots.  The suspect is on death row—which by my lights makes this an act of attempted murder as well as fraud and evidence tampering. In a just universe, they’d already be drawing up indictments for these bastards—and the Pulitzer committee would be sending Radley’s name to the engravers.

Tags: Journalism & the Media


       

 

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Kevin B. O'Reilly // Feb 20, 2009 at 7:33 pm

    I’m sure you were just being (understandably) boosterish, but magazines are not eligible for Pulitzers. See, in PDF: http://tinyurl.com/apz73d.

  • 2 Day seventeen « Train Wreck: The Wrath of Mom // Nov 20, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    […] a little consulting for them once, a corruption matter involving a local legislator.”  He’d sharpened up a rather grainy low-light picture to show certain details that were originally vague and shadowed, […]