 Trevor Burrus Joining me today is Radley Balco, an investigative journalist and reporter at The Washington Post. He currently writes and edits The Watch, and he's the author of 2013's Rise of the Warrior Cop, The Militization of America's Police Forces, and Tucker Carrington, the director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi Law School. He worked as a criminal defense lawyer his entire legal career, most of it as a public defender in Washington. Welcome to Free Thoughts, gentlemen. Trevor Burrus Thank you very much. Trevor Burrus Good to be here. Your new book has the interesting title of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, a True Story of Injustice in the American South. So we'll start with The Cadaver King. Who is the Cadaver King? Radley Balco So the Cadaver King is Stephen Hain, who for about 20 years did about 75 to 80% of the autopsies in the state of Mississippi. Trevor Burrus How many would that be? Radley Balco That's somewhere between 1500 and a couple years. He topped 2000, and this is all by himself from a morgue, a private morgue, while holding down two full-time jobs and testifying in court three to five times a week. The professional guidelines say you should do more than 250 in a year. If you do more than 325, you can't get certified. So this is way beyond what anyone has ever done before. And so there's just, with this gather, just some quality issues and there's just no possible way you can do that many autopsies and do them in a way that they ought to be done. On top of that, then there were lots of other problems with testimony that he gave in court. Basically it was a system that was set up for someone to dominate who could appease the prosecutors, sheriffs, the elected coroners, police chiefs. And so the cadaver king is Dr. Hain, and he was basically dominated the autopsy and death investigation system down there in Mississippi and parts of Louisiana for the better part of two decades. Trevor Burrus And the country dentist. The country dentist is a colleague of Dr. Hain by the name of Michael West, who was a clinical dentist in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, South Mississippi and also a coroner for Forest County, which is the county of which Hattiesburg is the county seat. And at some point in the late 80s, early 90s, he and Dr. Hain crossed paths and became friends. And Dr. West had had an interest in and some professional experience in the discipline of bite mark matching, specifically matching alleged bite marks often on victims with the dentition of a suspect in a assault or generally a murder case. They started working together and essentially solving cases, difficult cases, often as I said, homicide cases. Over that period of time that Riley mentioned this two decade period roughly, Dr. West not only sort of pushed that particular discipline to its outermost limits, he invented aspects of the discipline that he named after himself. But he also became an expert in other disciplines, toolmark matching disciplines, video enhancement, fingernail scratch matching, the list goes on. But they were colleagues, they worked together both in the morgue and then they frequently testified together in trials in Mississippi. Now I've seen my fair share of CSI and if it's at all accurate, then this stuff is real science. This is actual, I mean it's true that your teeth are unique, right? So it wouldn't a bite mark be unique and at least in theory it doesn't sound totally ridiculous or maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's totally ridiculous. Yeah, so bite mark matching in particular, so it rests on two underlying premises. The first is that all of our, we all have unique intention, our bite, the pattern we make when we bite something is unique to us and to no one else. And that's, there's just no science to back that up and the fact of science that has been done, the actual scientific research has been done suggests that it isn't true. The second is that human skin is capable of recording that uniqueness in a way and preserving it in a way that's useful, that's useful for identifying people. Well, the first premise isn't even true, but if it were, human skin, the second premise is even less true, our skin is fungible, it's malleable, it's rubbery, depending on how you're bitten, whether it's an overbite or an underbite, whether the victim is sort of pulling away so the teeth are dragging through the skin instead of into it. What happens to the body afterward, in the case that we write about in the book, in one of the two cases, two main cases, the little girl who was murdered, her body was submerged in water for hours and then it was embalmed. So Dr. West and other bite mark experts claim that they can find these really minute intricate details in your, in a bite and scan, including what West calls bunching, which is this idea that when you bite down into human scan, these tiny little crevices in the back of your teeth sort of collect skin and push it down, that somehow that can be preserved by human skin. Not only can that be preserved by human skin, but he can then take an impression of your teeth and find the crevices that match to the bunching in the bite mark. It's all absurd, there's nothing about it that suggests that you can record and match details down to that level. The CSI thing is interesting because a lot of the people who complain about what they call the CSI effect are usually prosecutors more than defense attorneys. And what prosecutors complain about is that shows like CSI conditioned jurors to want experts to give them sort of matter of fact conclusions. And when you have an actual scientist on the witness stand, they tend to speak in probabilities, they tend to kind of hedge what they say. They don't say this person did it, as Dr. West would often say, indeed and without a doubt, they speak much more, with a lot more caution. And jurors don't like that, jurors like certainty. And so when you get somebody like Dr. West who is willing to speak with that kind of certainty, they can do a lot of damage. How is the relationship? You kind of mentioned it with the prosecutor and the police and we could talk about even the Levon Brooks case or the Kennedy Brewer case that you write about, but why are the forensic investigators like Dr. West or their coroners, medical examiners like Dr. Hain, how do they get pushed toward the suspects that are identified by the cops? Because there were a bunch of suspects in these cases, but suddenly they got pushed to the ones that they were focusing on. That's a good question. And I think it's a difficult one to answer with a single answer because it depends on the individual facts of the cases. But in many, if not most of the cases that I've been dealing with and that we write about in the book, the main suspect in one way or another was clearly made known to either Dr. West or Dr. Hain. I mean, there was no effort to disguise, to sort of keep Dr. West blind or Dr. Hain blind to who it was. You can see it in reports. They often knew who the main suspect was. And so Dr. West frequently said, well, he said, I've exonerated many more people than I've ever included. And if you go back and actually unpack that statement in the Levon Brooks case, for example, there were a number of suspects, 12 or 13, 14, something like that, but he knew who the main suspect was, Levon Brooks. And so his quote, unquote, exonerating the other 12 or 13 really sort of didn't amount to much because he knew who the main suspect was. And that was who he matched the teeth to. One case we write about in the book, which I think is illustrative, is this serial murder case in Florida that early on in Dr. West's career, he went over to Tallahassee. Is that right, Riley? Is that where it was? Gainesville, sorry. And was asked to sort of work his magic there. And he ended up coming out empty handed. And in the book, I think what we say, what we believe is that the reason he came out empty handed is because that was a case where they hadn't arrested anybody and they really didn't have any idea who this ended up being a serial murder was. So there was no way either inadvertently or inadvertently for the police to give West a name. They didn't have anybody. And so he after a week or so of investigation and his work and his forensics, he had nothing to offer. But I think it stands in sort of counterpoint to these other cases where he did know the main suspect and sure enough, ratified the police's hunches. Yeah, I would just add in the LeVon Brooks case, one of the people that West exonerated was the person who actually committed the crime. He was one of the original suspects. And but, you know, by the time he was sent to West to take dental molds of his teeth, the police had already focused on Brooks. And so West was able to clear this guy. And he actually probably would have clear it should have cleared him anyway, because the might the bites on the little girl weren't actually human bite marks. They were most likely insect bites. Yeah, that's the thing that stalks me in a lot of these cases is I'm a little surprised at how often apparently people bite who they're assaulting. Right. I mean, especially at East Mississippi, that's a disproportionate amount of people biting. That's that's actually one in one of the earlier versions of the book, one of our one of the chapter titles was something like an epidemic of biting criminals. Yeah, aggravated biting. Yeah, because suddenly West appears in Mississippi and now everybody's biting each other. It's a miraculous sort of coincidence. You write in the book that the entire system that helped convict Brooks and Brewer and other untold people is part of a structural racism built into the criminal justice system. Now, a lot of people, especially conservatives, bulk at that, even the term structural racism, because they don't I think it seems almost too conspiratorial that there's just a bunch of bull conners walking around and being like, let's get those guys. But you mean something a little bit more longstanding and almost in city is in its own way. Right. You know, I think the thing about structural, I think it's a misunderstood term. I there was a couple there are a couple conservative criminologists with aren't aren't aren't many of wrote a law review article a while back that said, you know, that they don't buy structural racism because it implies that everybody in the criminal justice system is racist. And that's just not not believable. Well, that's actually not what structural racism is. Structural racism is the idea that the system itself, that the architecture of the system, the structure of the system was is racist. And, you know, if you think about when a lot of our institutions were built and when they were honed and when they were refined, starting to Jim Crow era and they were built specific for a very specific purpose, which was it's a very popular term now, but it was certainly true then to to uphold white supremacy. And that's, you know, certainly the case with the death investigation system. And so in the book, we go back into the civil rights era and Jim Crow era, and we talked about how the death investigation system was used to cover up lynchings to sweep them out of the table. It was used to basically facilitate the inability to prosecute people for civil rights assassinations. And so the context for structural racism is that you can actually have a system that is structurally racist, even if none of the people in that system are personally bigoted or personally racist. It's that, it's that architecture, that, that lingering architecture that that caused the problem. That was one of the things that was really fascinating to me when, when these cases first happened, my office came in late. We, we had just opened, basically. The Innocence Project in New York had done not only all the groundwork, but basically all the legal work to, to get these folks exonerated. And, you know, I was, I was very interested in the cases, even after the exonerations. And I won't go into the weeds too far. But one of the things I looked into was the jury composition. And the jurors were a mix of blacks and white folks. And that, and this is a part of Mississippi, which was, which was super isolated. It, it doesn't get a lot of publicity, you know, when you talk about the civil rights era, but it was, it was rough. It was rough on black folks down there. And there was a, I remember there was a, if memory serves, there was a 90 year old African American woman on, I think it was Kennedy Brewer's jury. She's deceased by the time I got involved in the case. But I assume, I could be wrong, but I assume that her journey to get on that jury was an extraordinary journey for, for an African American. Absolutely, yeah. And, and I can't imagine that she was racist. I mean, I'm making some assumptions, but I think they're, they're safe. And likewise, there were some white folks on there, a couple of whom we know who are not racist at all. And, and yet the verdict in that case within the criminal justice system was as bad, one could argue, or as we sort of sometimes say worse even because it was condoned by, I said, this wasn't a lynching that took place outside in the dead of night. All of this took place inside of a courtroom with judges, African American lawyers, African American jurors, African American law enforcement. And you end up, however, with, with the same sort of baseline injustice. I think that's what Bradley. And let's talk about, too, the, I mean, the victims in this case weren't just LeVon and Kennedy. I mean, if they had, the system had gotten the right person the first time around, we probably could have prevented the rape and murder of the second little girl who, you know, was also black. And, and so this is, you know, the system that was the problem of the system is, is it's pliable. It's, it's malleable to those, to the people who are in power. It serves them and it serves them, whether it's a backwater, sheriff, racist sheriff, like, you know, a bull conner type or serves them. If it's just a, an aggressive prosecutor who wants his hunches confirmed or just doesn't really want to do the groundwork or has tunnel vision either way. But the victims, again, you know, tend to be low income people, tend, and tend to be disproportionately black. It seems that Mississippi's death investigation system was particularly problematic for a very long time. I think it was until 1986, I think as the year, coroners still had to round up livestock, which says something about the history of that office, but there weren't many requirements for coroners. And you have a stat that in 1977 nearly half of reported deaths were attributed to unknown causes, which seems like a bad way of discovering murder. But cops might like it because it seems like your murder rate is pretty low, which it kind of goes into the feedback mechanisms there. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. It was, it was an antiquated system. And again, it was designed to keep the people in power happy. Now, whether that means you keep your unsolved case rate low by just not finding as many murders, so there are few murders to solve. Or if it means, you know, finding murders and getting, you know, the people that they immediately sort of suspect. A closure rate, the closure rate, right? Again, none of those outcomes are about justice. None of those outcomes are about promoting and protecting public safety. They're about making sure that the people who hold the right offices are sort of content with the system. Now, as you alluded to at the beginning, Radley, the vacuum, essentially, that was created by the inadequate death investigation system in Mississippi was filled by Stephen Hain, it seemingly. But he had a bunch of fans in the judicial, prosecutorial and police worlds because he got their man. Is that a fair assessment? Or wouldn't get their man. I mean, there's a case that didn't make the book that I talk about quite frequently, it seems, but this is in Sunflower County and an elderly woman who was found a poor, you know, low-income black elderly woman was found in her home with blood all over the walls and the neighbor had seen somebody running from the house with a bloody t-shirt and Hain determined that she died of a stroke and, you know, her family sent the body to a coroner, a medical examiner in Alabama who basically determined that she'd been murdered. You know, it's about getting the right guy, but in some cases it's about if the person isn't deemed all that important and the prosecutor, local sheriff, police department doesn't want to deal with it. You know, sometimes that the system could make cases go away as well. But, you know, we're talking about this in the book. If it wasn't Hain, it would have been somebody else. I mean, the system was designed and I'll, you know, it's what we're, this is the Libertarian podcast. I'll point out, I think, you know, this is basically a privatized system. It was just a privatized system where the incentives were misaligned, deliberately so, but they were aligned in a way that the incentive was for the medical examiner to tell prosecutors and police what they wanted to hear instead of telling them, you know, what they needed to hear. Yeah, I think one other quick point is, is that he was the only game in town, you know, the medical examiner's office was vacant, separate and apart from, from whatever the motivation may have been for prosecutors, say, you know, if they had a homicide in their, in their district that they needed to prosecute, Dr. Hain was the person they needed. He was the, he was the only person that was during the autopsies. He was the pathologist and I've had prosecutors say to me, you know, look, I understand what you're saying, there were these cases, but you have to understand my position too, which was, I had to prosecute these cases and that was the only option I had, because the state had not fulfilled its, its obligation to, to staff up the medical examiner's office for two decades. And again, this is about making everybody in power happy. So by not funding the office, the legislature's happy because they can use that money for other things. They, they don't have to, you know, budget for a state medical examiner, which, you know, should have been making $100 to $150,000 a year plus had a couple of assistance in a fully, you know, staffed office. Legislature doesn't have to fund that. And instead, what was happening is the counties were paying for each individual autopsy, which, you know, it ended, ended up costing the state more as a whole. But because it was being done in this kind of localized way that costs were more sort of diffused across the state, it was harder to tell exactly how much the state of Mississippi was paying. Dr. Hain and Dr. West are doctors. I mean, they do have training. Certification, I would assume. They, they're, there are forensic boards and there are forensic societies. And then did they get certified by this, these associations? Well, I'll talk about Dr. West first. Yes. He was certified by the American Board of Forensic Adontology. In fact, he was a diplomat. So he was sort of in the upper echelon, as it were, of this organization. One of the fascinating, and he was for years, he ultimately got sanctioned and, and resigned from, from that organization. But one of the interesting things that happened in the early 2000s, this is a long story that I'll make short, is that he was retained to look into a case and to see whether or not he could match a, a dentition to a photograph from an actual, it was an actual bite mark. From that, that just seems absurd on the face. All the time matching it to a photograph, it, it even compounds everything you said about skin. Now, now match a dent, teeth to a photograph of skin. But you continue. Well, what was interesting about it was, he, he in fact, made the match. And two things. One is the, the dentition was from a complete, it was from a random person, had nothing whatsoever to do with the bite mark in the photograph. It was a sting operation basically. Yeah. It was a, and, and so he was wrong. It's about a 22 minute he videotaped. It's about a 22 minute videotape. And it's, it's impressive. And he followed the then existing best practices that were set out by the American Board of Forens that go down ontology. So strictly speaking, he did nothing sort of scientifically. And I'm making quotation air quotes on the radio, but he followed procedures and ended up being, he couldn't have been more wrong. That's fascinating. I think it's, it's such a window into the unsound aspects of the discipline. People knew about this. And yet, you know, he continued, he did too, obviously. He continued to testify for years afterwards, even after, you know, making that kind of mistake. I'll talk about Dr. Hain. Dr. Hain was, did have his medical license and was, was properly board certified in clinical and anatomical pathology. And so that's, that's when you are looking at a patient, a dead patient to see sort of what illness killed them, you know, whether it was, you know, cancer or disease or bacterial infection or whatever. He was not ever properly certified in forensic pathology, which is basically the, the examining of bodies after death when there's a crime or some sort of suspicious death, you know, due to negligence or, or homicide. He took the exam by the American Board of Pathology in forensic pathology, which is what you would do to get properly certified in late 80s and failed it. He claimed for 20 years that he didn't really fail it so much as walked out in protest because there are questions that he found offensive. One of the questions was, he said, he could only come out with one when asked, you know, what questions did you find offensive? And he said it was this question that I'd asked him to rank colors in their, in order of their association with death. And he just furious and just stormed out. There are always problems that story won as he had, I think it cost like $1500 to take the test. He had flown to Chicago to take it. The idea that you could walk out over one question is sort of absurd. But we've, the business project in New York, I believe, eventually got a copy of the test itself. And that question actually never appeared on it. What he did do though is over the years he would repeatedly claim in court that he was board certified in forensic pathology. And he would cite two organizations, one of which no longer exists. The other is, and both of them actually meet this, this definition or this description, which is they're sort of certification mills. You give them a resume and a check and they send you your certification. One of them is sort of notoriously clownish, I guess it's a good word for it. There was a woman who sort of got her cat certified to this group. There was a convicted murderer who attempted murder, I guess, who got himself certified from prison. There was a journalism student who got herself certified in forensic, I think it's called forensic medicine at the time. This is a group that has thousands and thousands of members. But it was started by a guy, kind of a careful, colorful guy who, Robert O Block, actually recently died, but who was a polypside professor, had been fired for plagiarism and then sort of started his own handwriting analysis group, which then expanded and sort of became this massive organization. But the problem is it sounded it sounded very much like the official organization. So when Hain would say I'm certified by this group in court, for judges and jurors and prosecutors and even defense lawyers a lot of the time, they didn't really bother to check to make sure that it's the right organization. And even when they did, even when the defense attorney did bring it up, judges usually just went ahead and set out. It's fine because we've certified him so many other times before. That's the weird thing here. So what are judges doing? I mean, aren't they supposed to keep unscientific evidence out of the court? And it seems like none of this stuff would meet science because they're all matching. So you mentioned like fingernail and bite mark and blood splatter and it's all subjective. It's like I use the term feng shui because it's kind of like that. We're just like, oh, this is really good feng shui. And then the next feng shui artist is like, this is horrible feng shui. And there's no actual test for that. But what are judges doing in this situation to determine that this is not science? It's just a guy's opinion about this mark on the body or worse. But at least that, you know, that's a good question too. But there and I think my answer would be there's a host of things that judges are and aren't doing. One, just to go back to the certification. I mean, certification in my view is is sort of the bare minimum. I mean, you need to be certified, presumably by some governing board. But, you know, whether it's a certification mill or whether it's even a legitimate sort of gold standard only means so much. You know, you have something you can put on your wall. What you're what you're testifying to and the basis for that is the critical question, not whether you're certified. Right. I mean, there's there's plenty of terrific physicians out there. Some are far better than others. They may have gone to the same school. So ultimately it comes down to sort of what is the expert saying and what is the basis for that, the basis for that. So my first answer is sometimes the certification seem to be the entree or not for the testimony. If you're certified, you can testify. The other thing is that and we discuss this at some length in the book, but I think it's it's really interesting. Judges tend often to look at precedent. So rather than engaging in a sort of granular observation of what this particular expert plans to say in the bases for it, which, by the way, is often the job of the advocates, the prosecutor and the defense attorney to sort of educate the court about, you know, this this material, the court will just look at the discipline, bite mark, for instance, and say, I don't know why we're having this argument. The state of California has admitted bite mark evidence since the late 1970s. And there are 25 other jurisdictions around the country that have admitted it. Therefore, we're just wasting our time here. This is admissible, which some level, I think for late people sounds correct. Right. Why are we wasting our judicial resources and etc. arguing over something that's been argued in a bunch of jurisdictions before and they've come to this same conclusion? Well, it's not a waste of time because again, it depends on who the expert is and what the expert is saying. And it all just because, you know, West Virginia or California may have admitted a certain expert to say a certain thing doesn't necessarily follow that the state of Mississippi, for example, in this district should allow Dr. West to testify to whatever he's testifying to. But nonetheless, judges feel safe because they have this precedent that they can rely on. That's another issue. I think you used the term judicial echo chamber in the book that they just when did it start? I mean, was a bite mark, is there a sort of point zero? You talk about Salem Woods trials in the book, but in terms of modern bite mark analysis, they're like a point zero and then everything just you can follow it like a game of telephone all the way back to it. Yeah. So Tucker mentioned this California case and ironically, it's called Marks, M.A.R.X. And that case is kind of jumping off point and you see, you know, the interesting thing about that case is that the California appeals court in that case actually ruled that it wasn't scientific, the bite mark analysis wasn't a scientific discipline, but they said it just seemed right. You know, it just it's just common sense. I think Tucker in a law review article called it the eyeball test. And so that said the precedent. And then what's crazy, though, is you look at these subsequent appeals court decisions all over the country and they refer back to Marks and a good percentage of them refer back to Marks as having established the scientific legitimacy of bite mark evidence. And it didn't. It did the opposite. It said there was no science here. And so they've just judges have just done a really bad job at this. And you know what? It's not at all surprising because judges aren't trained to do scientific analysis. They're trained to do illegal analysis and they're doing illegal analysis exactly how you expect them to, which is by looking at precedent and looking at the control in case law. That's how you do illegal analysis. The idea that judges, you know, are bad at scientific analysis shouldn't surprise us any more than, you know, the judges are probably bad at coming up with a game plan for an NFL game, right, for an NFL team. We're asking to do something that's well outside their job description and they're doing predictably poorly at it. The problem is that the consequences are pretty dire. If you let me just add one thing. If you do legal research, you know, if you're a law clerk and a judge's chambers and the judge says, hey, is bite mark testimony admissible? So you get on Westlaw or Lexis as the clerk and you look up is bite mark testimony admissible, you know, a host of cases will come up. And if the judge says, give me the jurisdictions and if you went to Mississippi, LeVon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer's cases will come up and they both still to this day stand for the proposition that bite mark testimony is admissible. There's nothing in the affirmances, right? They were prior to the exonerations. There's nothing in the infirmances which say that later in 2008, Brooks and Brewer were exonerated. They never bit anybody. They weren't involved. In fact, no one was bitten. And so, you know, you would you would think that those cases were good presidential value. They're not. They should be highlighted as as the exact opposite. In fact, in three states, at least three states, I think it may be for now the the controlling case law for whether or not bite mark evidence is admissible was a case where an appeals court upheld a conviction in the process of ruling that bite mark evidence is admissible. And that person was later exonerated by DNA testing, you know, completely exonerated, found to be innocent. And yet it's still the controlling case law when we look at whether or not bite mark evidence should be admitted in future cases. It seems that there's an epidemic. I mean, I will use the word epidemic and you can tell me I'm a forensic malfeasance that kind of across the country. And some people have been pointing this out. It seemed about 2009, you started having National Academy of Sciences saying this is not science. And then the President Obama had a report that said it's not it's not science. We're talking about the matching stuff, not the DNAs so much, but the matching subjective stuff. And is this having any effect? I mean, is the growing awareness, at least for people like us and people who do these commissions, that this is not science and so many bad convictions are caused by this. Is it having an effect on courts? Not not to the extent that you think it you would think it would, you know, DNA evidence is exposed a lot of these fields for being sort of a lot more subjective and error prone than we then then a lot of people thought they were in the courts have still been really reluctant to address that. And again, this is because courts are system values precedent and it values sort of the past and it values the finality of verdicts, you know, to protect the integrity of the system or at least the appearance of the integrity of the system. It might be a better way. Right. But, you know, you talk about an epidemic of forensic malfeasance. There is a lot of malfeasance in the form of bad actors. There's Annie Dukin in Massachusetts, the who was faking drug test results and 10 thousands of cases were returned. There's West and Hain who, you know, at some point, I don't think even they believed their own testimony. There are lots of examples of forensic analysts who are clearly faking it, who are clearly frauds. But there's also just a lot of examples of just bias creeping in the system. And part of the problem is that we just done a really poor job of structuring these systems in a way that incentivizes just outcomes. You know, Roger Cople, the political scientist, did a study a few years ago that was jaw dropping. I mean, it should have been a national scandal. He found that in I can't remember how many states, but I think a dozen or more, the crime labs are paid per conviction. So if you're a crime lab analyst and your analysis basically, you know, exonerates the suspect, you don't get any money. Your lab doesn't get any money. If you, on the other hand, find evidence that, you know, ends up with a conviction, the suspect is in charge a crime lab fee that goes back to the lab. I mean, that is not a system that, you know, puts a value on a just outcome as opposed to a particular outcome, which is a guilty verdict. You know, other crime labs report to prosecutors, other reports to state police. In North Carolina several years ago, there was a newspaper reported, you know, the handbook for the lab talked about, you know, referring to defense witnesses as horrors and talking about how you can please prosecutors and prosecutors did their year end reviews and decided whether they got raises and promotions and there was a security video that the paper found in these two blood spatter analysts, blood spatters is another very questionable field. Wait, Dexter is not true? It's right. It's okay. Where the two analysts, though, they continue to do the experiment over and over again until they get the result that the prosecutor wants, at which point they high-five one another on the video. So, you know, I don't think you need people who are deliberately sort of faking results to get to where we are right now. I think it's a system that we've just put the incentives in the wrong place and we've valued the wrongs or principles. I think one thing that's interesting that I've seen this phenomenon is in Mississippi, you would be hard pressed to get bite mark evidence into a trial court in Mississippi now. I think, you know, the story about Dr. West, there's been enough cases where prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges wouldn't let that happen. That said, I'm on a list of defenders and I see this frequently. Someone will say the prosecution has a blood spatter expert and then the reflexive question asked is, does anyone know of a good blood spatter expert for me? Which endorses the entire thing. Exactly, exactly. Where the question really should be, you know, if anyone's been reading the reports that you mentioned, should be, I wonder if blood spatter is like bite marks. You know, is this stuff all it's cracked up to be? Maybe what I need is not a blood spatter expert, right, but someone who can come in and explain why blood spatter is not a sound forensic science to begin with. But so to your question, yes, it has made some difference in certain cases where we know that the discipline is nonsense. On the other hand, there is still this sort of default reflexive attitude, you know, reaction by folks, which, well, I mean, blood spatters come in and for the last 25 years, 30 years, 40 years, whatever, I've had blood spatter cases. There's no way I'm going to convince this judge, right, that this stuff is nonsense now. I mean, what's this judge going to say? I was wrong for all these years. I need my own expert. I will say this, too. You know, if you're a defense attorney, sometimes you're in a hell of a predicament here, because if you, you know, let's say it's a bite mark case, if you hire your own bite mark expert who then testifies in court, I mean, I've seen the opinions later when you try to challenge the legitimacy of bite marks in your appeal or in your post-conviction petition, appeals court will say, hey, you put your on your own expert, you bought into it. You know, you can't challenge the legitimacy of it now. I think you should be able to. But I've seen opinions where they've told them they can't. And so you're in this difficult choice where it's like, do a sort of right thing and the rational thing and the sort of enlightened thing. And actually the professionally ethical thing, arguably. Yeah, which is, yeah, and which is to go after this just as a legitimate field of forensics in the first place. Or do I just hire my own expert and hope that, you know, my expert is more charismatic and persuasive than Dr. West. I wanted to get back to your thing. You said how the courts are handling this. So in some areas of forensics like shaken baby syndrome, the courts have have started looking at old convictions, even without DNA. But I think in the vast majority, particularly the pattern matching fields, these more subjective areas of forensics, the courts just have not responded to the scientific community at all. And in fact, to this day, every time someone has challenged by Mark evidence in court, they've lost. So not a single court in the country has said the bike mark evidence is illegitimate at this point. Where are Dr. Hain and Dr. West now? Dr. Hain, they're both still in Mississippi. Dr. Hain is no longer performing autopsies for the state of Mississippi, which he did on a contractual basis for a couple of decades, but he does work privately. And a few years ago, not too long after the state didn't re-up his contract, he started doing private autopsy, excuse me, private testifying and autopsy work and testifies not infrequently for defense attorneys in criminal cases now. Dr. West, last time I checked, last time I was with him in a deposition, is a still practicing clinical dentist, but he practices in a prison, he's a prison clinical dentist in South Mississippi. And as far as I know, has not testified to bike mark matching. Says he wouldn't, by the way. He no longer believes in it. He hasn't testified for some years. We'll say, though, that the state of Mississippi is still defending convictions. One, certainly on West testimony, but in several cases, they're still defending, excuse me, Haines' testimony. But in several cases, also West testimony. Which I think underscores the point you made about that the inputs into the system and the incentives involved that they just keep defending what they did in the past. Yeah, and we said this in the book. I mean, it would be a huge thing for a Mississippi judge, particularly somebody who's been in the Mississippi all his professional life, to say, you know what, Dr. Haines is an incredible witness, and we need to like face up to this. In some cases, the judge may have been a former prosecutor who used Haines, so it would be calling his own prior career into question, but also would just be calling into question the integrity of the very system that this person has worked in their entire life and presumably believes it. And that's a lot. I mean, I hope one of them does it at some point. I think when a judge does it, that judge will be a hero. But it's a hell of a lot to ask of a judge. I think we definitely need to admit to that. Thanks for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, please rate and review us on iTunes. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.