Last year, NPR looked at two dozen cases in which adults had been convicted of killing infants or young children, then later exonerated or given commutations. The investigation found a number of common themes in those cases. One of them was that prosecutors often relied on the subjective opinions of a medical examiner. Another was the understandable sorrow and anger a community feels when a child dies, which can nudge law enforcement officials and forensic specialists to see crimes in what may have only been accidental deaths.
Jeffrey Havard, 34, has been on death row in Parchman Penitentiary since 2002. He was convicted of murdering Chloe Britt, the 6-month-old daughter of his girlfriend at the time. Havard claims he was giving the child a bath when, as he was lifting her from the tub, she slipped from his hands and fell, hitting her head on the toilet on the way down. By the time paramedics arrived with her at the hospital, Britt's eyes were fixed and dilated, and she had turned blue. She died a short time later.
Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi medical examiner in private practice, performed an autopsy on the infant. He claimed to have found the symptoms of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), a diagnosis that comes with the implication that the last person to be alone with the child was the one who killed her. Because the symptoms can only be produced by violent shaking, the diagnosis also comes with a built-in indictment of the suspect's state of mind. It's a diagnosis that does much of the prosecutor's work for him.
But SBS has come under fire in recent years. A number of experts have begun to question the validity of the diagnosis and how it's used in court, pointing out, for example, that a number of other factors could cause the symptoms that experts have been telling juries could be caused only by shaking. But even if one were to accept SBS as a sound and legitimate diagnosis, other forensic pathologists say Hayne shouldn't have found it in this case.
Shaken baby convictions rarely result in the death penalty, which requires premeditation or other aggravating circumstances. But in Chloe Britt's case, Hayne concluded that she likely had been sexually abused. In his autopsy, he found that her anus had dilated to about the size of a quarter, and there was also a small contusion on her rectum. The sexual assault component allowed prosecutors to seek the death penalty. They advanced the theory that Havard had abused the girl, then shaken her to death.
From the early 1990s until 2007, Hayne performed 80-90 percent of the autopsies in Mississippi. By his own testimony in depositions and criminal trials, that amounted to between 1,200 and 1,800 per year. (The National Association of Medical Examiners suggests that MEs perform a maximum of 325 autopsies per year.) For much of this time, he shouldered this workload while also holding down one, sometimes two full-time jobs at a local hospital and a kidney research center.
Hayne's testimony helped put thousands of people in prison, mostly in Mississippi, but also in Louisiana and Alabama. Critics say he was able to monopolize autopsy referrals from the state's prosecutors because he told them what they needed to hear in order to ring up convictions. He also testified in numerous lawsuits for medical malpractice and wrongful death.
Source: Huffington Post, Radley Balko, November 29, 2012
