On February second, neighbors noticed smoke emanating from the Columbus, Mississippi home of eighty four year old Georgia Kemp and called one firefighters found her body brutally stabbed to death with a butcher knife. During the autopsy, doctor Stephen Hayne observed vaginal injuries, but a rape kit yielded no seminal or blood evidence. When the investigation struggled, a local man with a record, Eddie Lee Howard was identified as a
potential suspect. The body had already been thoroughly autopsy dan buried without embalming fluid when doctor Hayne had a sudden realization that bite marks may have been present, prompting the body to be zoomed and sent for examination by now infamous and discredited bite mark evidence Charlottan Michael West. In the meantime, molds were made of Eddie Lee Howard's dentures
for comparison. This notorious fraudster had developed a process that he called, to quote the West phenomenon, which involved special glasses and ultra violet lights that allowed him and only him to see injuries that were totally invisible to the naked eye. Injuries that he ruled were bite marks that he could then match to the dental molds of the accused. No photographic evidence of these alleged bite marks ever existed, yet his testimony was enough to sentence Eddie Lee Howard
to death. Countless innocent men and women are currently wrongfully imprisoned based on this same junk science, while courts across our country continue to admit it as evidence to this very day. This is wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. Welcome
back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. That's me, of course, I'm your host, and today's episode each is a man who's been in prison since Lyndon Johnson was president, a corrupt d A, a corrupt medical examiner, and incompetent Charlotte and who passed himself off as a forensic dentist, a man who was basically compelled to service his own attorney, and more than one trial. I mean, and I haven't
even scratched the surface yet. But before we go any further, we have as good of a panel of guests today as I could ever dream up. First of all, we have someone who you recognize, Chris Fabricat. Chris has been a frequent guest, not only on this show, but also on the recent episode of Junk Science. Chris is the Joseph flam Special Counsel to the Innocence Project, also known
as the Strategic Litigation Director. So he's got a lot of fancy titles, but none of them are fancy enough to describe the amazing work that he does day in and day out. So Chris, welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. A pleasure Jason. With him, we have for the first time a gentleman who's known to basically everyone in this field, Executive director of the Mississippi Innocence Project, Tucker Carrington. So great to have you here, Welcome to the show. Thanks you,
it's nice to be here. And another name our listeners will recognize is, if not from his writing, then from having been on our show before. John Chrisham, Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Hello, Jason, happy to be here. And for those in the audience who don't know this, and a lot of people don't, John was a defense attorney before he even began his writing career, and he goes way back with not only the Mississippi Innocance Project, but
also with Tucker and this particular case. My involvement goes back to Tucker. About fifteen years ago. We started the Innocence Project at the Old Miss Law School where I went to school, and we hired Tucker to be our executive director. And oddly enough, my son went to Ole Miss Law School in two thousand seven and he got into Tucker's clinical program, and Tucker assigned him Eddie Lee's case.
Back in two thousand and eight, and my son went to Parchment to death Row, a place I've been too many times, and he met Mr Howard interviewed him several times. And that's when I first learned of Eddie Lee's case and the facts surrounding it. And and by the end though, we were just sort of accustomed to reading another crazy case involving Dr Hanging, Dr West and Eddie Lee Howard was imprisoned from sixty eight, almost every day of his
life until late two thousand twenty. And I want to go back in time to how the system failed Eddie Lee Howard from the very beginning. I'll get us up to the bid nine nineties, just on the cusp of the incident that we're gonna end up talking about here, but in essence, you're correct, Jason Mr. Howard was incarcerated for most of his adult life. He was out off and on. He came from difficult circumstances in east central Mississippi. He was really never out of prison for any appreciable
amount of time until the early nine nineties. He also has an outside personality. He's notwithstanding the fact that he didn't receive much of an education, obviously, he's a very very smart person, worldly sort of in his own way, and talks a lot. He's a presence. So he was, you know, by virtue of having been incarcerated for most of his life, was at best on the periphery of any sort of law enforcement radar. Had something gone wrong in his neighborhood, Chris, take us back to February second.
This is when four year old Georgia Kemp was murdered in her home. You know, it really began with a fire that was spotted by a young girl passing by miss Kemp's house that evening, and she went back home and they called the fire department, who came between eight and nine o'clock and went into the house and found smoldering fire and Miss Kemp laying faced down in a state of undressed that suggests that she'd been sexually assaulted
and stabbed to death. There was a phone cord that had been cut from the wall, and there was nothing missing from the house. There was really no puntable items of much value. She had no known enemies. It seemed all evidence pointed to essentially a random attack. No fingerprints, there was no eyewitnesses, nobody had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything. Miss Kemp did not have many friends or family,
and there were really no suspects. And when the miss Kemp remains were taken to the morgue and examined, the entire body was mapped by photographs and diagrams, and every cut, every scrape was noted, both in photographs and in the autopsy reports. After all that was documented, the victims remains
were thoroughly autopsied. Ther rib cage was removed, all of her internal organs were removed, her neck was dissected, her brain removed from her skull, All the internal organs were weighed and measured, and then the remains were interred without embalming fluid, so they would have been rapidly decomposing, particularly with an elderly woman who had been so thoroughly atop seed and then during the courts of the investigation, you know, and as Tucker was saying, you know, what police did
was beginning rounding up their usual suspects, you know, in a place like Mississippi, particularly at that time. But I would hasten to say probably today too, a vulnerable white woman rabbished by a black male with a criminal record is a familiar narrative in that part of the state. And that's exactly why they alighted on Mr Howard, not because there was any particular evidence pointing toward him, but because he had said a couple of vaguely incriminating things
to police officers that were investigating the case. But what was interesting too is that there were also statements that really never became part of the trial at work sculptory that it pointed toward an alibi that Mr Howard had, and these were essentially ignored, And what became the chief item of evidence, at least in terms of the investigation, was these kind of vague statements that Mr Howard had made. One was that you know that I had a temper
and that's why this had happened. And he had also said to police that the cases solved, and went on to say that they should continue investigating and that it had been committed by you know, multiple people, and that they were still out there. So these were the best confusing, vague, mildly suspicious statements, but it was enough for Columbus police
to focus in on Natie Lee Howard. And the problem really was that they didn't have any evidence, and so they went back to the mortuary where ms Kemp's remains had been autop seed and I didn't know at that time, apparently, but that the victims remains had already been buried, and
they decided at that point to disinter the remains. And what was interest sting, you know, is that at trial, the pathologists had testified that they were disinterred because there was some indication that there was injury made by teeth marks. But there was nowhere anywhere in the autopsy report, or in the photograph or anything else that ever suggested that any teeth marks had been left on the victim's body.
And moreover, the victim's body had been autopsy within hours of her death, so any kind of bite marks that have been inflicted at the time of the crime plainly would have been visible at the time of the autopsy, and yet they were not. Nonetheless, the victims remains were
disinterred and brought back to the ranking county Morgue. And this happened in It was a period of time in Mississippi where Dr Haines the pathologist, and Dr West, the small town dentist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi who decided to become
an expert in many fields. These gangs were sort of tag teaming away through the criminal justice system in Mississippi and putting together an amazing string of convictions for prosecutors who realized that these guys would say pretty much whatever they wanted them to say to conform to their theory of guilt. And they did this time and time again. Haine would get the autopsy because at the time the
state did not have a state medical examiner. That's been a problem there for forty years, and Haine was one of the few doctors who would agree to do autopsies. He once boasted of performing two thousand autopsies a year, and he would run through the autopsy real quick, and if it was a murder case, and he would get with the prosecutor and they would concoct some theory of guilt and and put the case together. And that's what
happened here. As Chris said that, you know, after the autopsy there were there were no visible signs of bite marks, but suddenly there were, or maybe there were. So they dug up the body and they looked at it again and called him Dr West the dentist, as he so
often did. West had this theory that during the type of sexual assault, there was a lot of biting going on, so thus the teeth marks, and West had the special ultra violet light that only he could operate, and he examined the body of Mrs Kemp and Low and behold, he found some teeth marks. So Haim calls in West, as he had done in other cases, to work his particular form of bullshit, something that he referred to as the West phenomenon. And Chris, can you explain what that is?
The West phenomenon? Essentially, it's ultra violet lights using you know, fancy yellow goggles. Ultra Violet light penetrates beneath the skin, and that you can get images that are invisible to naked eye on skin. So that piece in and of itself is not utter nonsense. But what you can see that's invisible is a healing wound because on the surface level it appears to have been healed, but there's still injuries so that you can be viewed using UV light.
So if you use ultra violet light on dead body, particularly post autopsy body or something like that, you're going to find all kinds of artifacts from all kinds of instruments that may have created injuries or bruises or what have you, and there's really no way to interpret them. There's no way to say when they were inflicted, or how they were inflicted, or how much they've changed from
the first time that they were inflicted. And so when Dr West testified in this case and in virtually all those cases, that he would claim that the bite marks not only were they inflicted by the defendant, indeed and without doubt to the exclusion of everybody else on the planet, but he would say that it was done at the time of the murder. Right, so you have the defendant in violent contact with the decedent at the time of the crime, which is essentially a directed verdict if you
buy the testimony. So here the use of UV light was particularly outrageous because this wound would have plainly been visible at the time, right because al Gayson was that had been created only a few hours earlier. Right, So that doesn't become invisible and start healing, it disappear in time to find you know this in the UV light, it certainly doesn't happen and in a post autopsy, post
disinterment scenario. So the UV light was very useful because it allowed the surfacing of images that could really be anything and allowed Dr West and he's not alone and using this technique in terms of bite mark experts. But at the bottom is that you just you surface artifacts and then you can interpret them using your quote unquote training and experience, having seen so many of these cases to say that, yeah, that was a bite mark, and I was able to match this to the defendant, to
Susan everybody else. And so you got Mr Howard and they talked him into yielding an implant from his teeth and said there's a there's a match. But then it's even weirder than that because Mr Howard had fucking dentures. This could be a punch line and at but there's nothing funny about it. I appreciate you're saying it's tragic, because it these cases really are. I mean, there's you know, Eddie Lee Howard's trial did not happen in a vacuum.
Bite mark matching testimony was sort of in its infancy stages nationally, but one of its leading proponents was Mike West, and he was really beginning to make a name for himself both nationally but particularly within Mississippi and in certain pockets of Mississippi, and this jurisdiction that included Mounds County,
where Mr. Howard's trial was was one of them. Because this happened in another case, another wrongful conviction from the very same area of the country that the Innocence Project in New York to people who want on this podcast but who were deeply involved in this case, Vanessa Potkin and Peter Neufeld in two thousand, seventy thousand and eight exonerated two gentlemen, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, also convicted on the same bogus bite mark testimony. There was another case,
Sherwood Brown, where Mike West had just finished testifying. Dr West had just finished testifying in a case where he matched bite marks to a Bologny Sandwich to help convict somebody. So these cases are sort of all of a piece, and the prosecutor forest allgood in this particular case. But prosecutors who were using West were having real success. They were getting convictions, they were getting death sentences, and so dr wests involvement in Mr Howard's investigation and trial at
this point is not an anomaly. It's sort of a well known, time tested recipe. The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode of Ronval Conviction with Jason Flam and of the Last Mild organization, which provides business and tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re enter the workforce. The Pacers Foundation is committed to improving the lives of Hoosiers across Indiana, supporting organizations that
are dedicated primarily to helping young people and students. For more information on the work of the Pacers Foundation or the Last Mile Program, please visit Pacers Foundation dot org or the Last Mile dot org. Mr Howard's innocent. He wants to go to trial. He's had a series of lawyers that one of them had come in he had quit, another had come in hadn't filed any emotions on the eve of trial except for emotion to continue, hadn't challenged the bite mark evidence. And Mr Howard is, you know,
we've mentioned a couple times already. It's a smart guy, he's a late person, but he knows they're not ready for trial. And so the judge says, essentially, well, if you really want another lawyer, I can do that. But you know it's going to take another lawyer who knows how long to get up to speed on the case. And so Mr Howard says, I'll represent myself then, and that goes about as well as most people who represent themselves,
pro say, particularly complicated cases. And he gets convicted slash sentenced as well to death and his first trial representing himself. So the trial is may of the case that the state put on was what exactly because they had basically nothing. Can you give us an overview of that trial? In some the state's case was that the victim's body MS Kim's body was found as a result of an arson or what looked to be an arson that was supposed to cover up the murder, and Eddie Lee Howard lived
in the neighborhood. He had made some odd statement Chris talked about earlier. The state's almost exclusive evidence against Mr Howard was Dr Hayne talking about the autopsy, and then Dr West by far and away. At one point I knew I'd counted up the transcript pages, but the vast bulk of the transcript pages from both of Mr Howard's trials are Mike West testimony. Yeah, and I would say the overwhelming majority of Mike West testimony is really about
his credentials. You know, all the boards he sat on, all the honors he had gotten every time the American Academy of Forensic Sciences sent him to China as an ambassador, the discovery of the West phenomenon, the literature, the research grants, that he had been given the FBI training, that he had done, that he had been to Scotland Yard and lectured them about bite marks. The credentials themselves are so persuasive.
Coupled with West's folksy charm and kind of you know, a local kid made good, all that is potent sneak oil. Let's not leave about the fact that the bite mark quote unquote evidence didn't actually exist anywhere except for in West's twisted brain. Right, because there were no photographs ever taken or presented of these alleged mysterious bite marks that only turned up four days after she was dead and disinterred.
You know, he testified without an exhibit at all. Right, He just got on the witness stand with his folksy charm and persuaded twelve jurors that he saw three different bite marks, all of them he matched to Eddie Lee Howard. The one on the victim's neck in particular, and the one on the victim's breast were Eddie Lee Howard, to
the exclusion of all of the potential sources. And the neck where Dr West claimed to have found this bite mark that he matched to Eddie Lee Howard's dentures had been dissected during the autopsy, right, and he claimed to be able to manipulate the neck during his examination to show the exact way that had been flexing when Eddie Lee Howard allegedly bit down on it. West was never even asked how is that even possible? Right, he was
never even asked to see a photograph. It's really an astonishing lack of evidence and just astonishing claims that were allowed in without objection. Yeah, I mean, not to be gross, but she really wouldn't have even had a neck at this point in time, after all the things that her body had gone through during the examination post mortem, just for the edification of our audience. Courts just rely on precedence.
So if something was allowed in a court, doesn't matter how long ago, then a judge will say, well, it was allowed another time, so allow it now. There's no objective analysis of the validity of the science. It's just well, somebody else said it was okay, so it's okay with me too. It's just something everyone should be aware of because it is absolutely asked backwards. And so May twelve a day that will an infamy. Eddie Lee Howard was convicted and sentenced to death, so he appealed because he
was in fact unfit to represent himself in court. And John the Mississippi Supreme Court gets involved, right, which is not a common thing. Right that they actually saw fit in nineties seven, to overturn his original conviction, right or to order a new trial. Well, he tell him, the
Mississippi Supremes reverse a conviction. You know, it's we all stop and take a hard look because it doesn't have very often and The new trial happened in two thousand and the state now presented a new witness, Eddie's ex girlfriend, Cafe and Folgum, where they sort of dragged her into this, who testified that Eddie bit her occasionally during sex and that he smelled like smoke the day after the murder. By the way, she had not previously reported that alleged
smell during her initial interview. So this, this doesn't smell good, so to speak, and all good get ready for this. He's quote unquote the progress of mankind has been carried forward on the backs of people like Michael West. That's not enough. He goes on to say, back to quote, the Church threatened to burn Copernicus because he dared to say that the planets didn't revolve around the Earth. So
it was with Michael West end quote. So I forget the fact that he confused Copernicus and Galileo, because that's far from the most ridiculous portion of this outburst. But Eddie was again convicted and sentenced to death. Kind of astonishing. I mean, it's an astonishing claim to make at that point in time, especially because they're already was plenty of evidence that, in fact, Dr West was not anything approaching what all Good was arguing, you know, because he had
been already creating problems for himself. He was going to be suspended from the American border, Forensico to ontology had to be reinstated. Their national article was about him already, I think, in Newsweek, National Law Journal. So if you were paying attention, this was a bold claim to begin with, and it was also one that was really starting to swim upstream against empirical data that was starting to creep in.
Even then, there's developments in two thousand one, two thousand six, two thousand eight, Eddie was ultimately excluded from every piece of evidence that was tested for his DNA, including the male DNA and blood found on the butcher knife, and the testing also undermined West's theory if it was even a theory that camp had been bitten. No male DNA or saliva was proven to be found on the nightgown in the areas that would have common contact with the
teeth in the areas that had allegedly been bitten. So basically all of it was a combination of lies, nonsense, and junk science. And two thousand fifteen, the Lounge County Circuit Court ruled the DNA evidence wouldn't change the outcome of trial, which I find too crazy for even me. You know, this same judge presided over all of the evidence that we've been discussing around the Eddie Lee Howard case over the course of two years in Lownes County, Mississippi,
same place where Eddie Lee Howard was convicted. There was evidence about the National Academy of Sciences findings on bite mark evidence. There was testimony about Michael West's dramatic fall from grace and the forensic science community. There was a new scientific research based on bite marks that were created in condaver skin that showed that skin cannot record a bite mark no matter what, you can't associate it with the teeth that known to have made these bite marks.
There was testimony by now a judge in California who was a defense attorney at the time, who burned Michael West in a blind sting and West match teeth to a bite mark that were known not to have made it very persuasively. Moreover, videotape of that was played in open court. All that was presented before the court, none
of it was sufficiently persuasive. To overturn the conviction. It's unfun and really, you know, and the blind the blind test, I'd read about that it's an investigators submitted his own teeth marks as a potential culprit in this particular case, and the genius Dr West concluded without any doubt whatsoever that this was in fact the perfect match. And so, yeah, he's been exposed, re exposed, and yet you know, here
we are, and is he still practicing? By the way, you know, the really repulsive irony Dr West's career is
that he's wound up as a prison dentist. One of the things about the Ellingly Howard case, which is fascinating is it kind of offers a snapshot of some of the friends that reformed that Chris and the Innocence Project had been working on, because in two thousand nine, two thousand ten, when we first filed for post conviction relief in Annie the Howard's case, there were really only a handful of exonerations involving bite marks, you know that that
we were just sort of beginning to realize that this was junk. Two of them, of course, we're Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer's case, which the Innocence Project had done just a couple of years prior, and in the span of the years between two thousand nine or ten up until two thousand twenty, thanks to Chris and the folks in the forensic unit at the Innocence Project and others, we were looking at two dozen exonerations based on fraudulent
bite mark evidence. So the landscape had really changed significantly. But by the time we filed our final sort of petition in the Mississippi Supreme Court in twenty nineteen, I guess so much water had passed under the bridge that
it was just manifestly obvious in our minds. And of course we prevailed that this was a conviction that could not stand, and the Mississippi Supreme Court went even a bit further in their opinion, reversing and vacating the conviction by saying, look, there's really no there's really no evidence here.
There's really no evidence to retry Mr Howard. August thirty one, just a short time ago, when the Mississippi Supreme Court finally vacated the murder conviction and death sentence, Justice Kitchens ruled that Mississippi shouldn't uphold the conviction at death sentence based on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, of course Dr West's we're talking about, and the d A had to decide whether or not he would pursue a
new trial. So we finally got the news we had all been waiting for and you guys have been working for, and he was finally free. But where is the case now, because the state still has the option to retry, and right, yes, the conviction and sentence have been vacated, So it's back in the Circuit court in a what I think is a nod to the Supreme Court's opinion to some of the things that Supreme Court said in addition to vacating the conviction in the sentence is the paucity basically there's
no evidence to really retry this case. The Court, upon motion really of both parties, the defense and the prosecutor, release Mr Howard on bond while the state makes an ultimate determination about whether it's going to proceed with this matter or not. Add that, Eddielee Howard will certainly have competent counsel if there's ever another trial, right so amen
to that, And so Eddie Lee Howard is free. And that brings us to closing arguments, where first I thank each of you for joining me and us here today, and then I simply kick back in my chair, turn off my microphone, leave my headphones on, and just listen and learn from whatever you have to say. And if you have a memory of Eddie's freedom that you'd like to share, No pressure, but that would be extra great.
So let's start with Chris Tucker and then John. One thing that Tucker and I talked about before Mr Howard was released is changes that we had seen in clients that had been incarcerated for many, many years wrongfully, and that we meet clients like that in prison, and like, because we're human, we we make judgments about intellectual capacity, about who they are as people, about their ability to survive on the outside should we get the exoneration, and
the change that will overcome a person upon being exonerated and released is one of the most profound things that I've experienced that I've been fortunate to experience. At the Innocence Project. We had formed a picture of a deeply damaged, institutionalized person that was going to have real trouble navigating just data a life outside. But what's remarkable is just how cogent, how happy, how on point Mr Howard is today.
It's overwhelming the difference, and it just shows how deeply damaging wrongful incarceration, or any incarceration, particularly for long periods of time in a place like Parchment is to a human being, to their soul, to their ability to relate to their fellow man. And to watch that cloud lifted and the shackles, you know, literally come off, it's just incredible. Tucker,
go ahead. I've really been amazed and thankful to witness the kindness is that so many people have done for us and Mr Howard upon his release, trying their level best to make his transition successful. And these are people, by the way, some of whom you know are on our team social workers for instance, but many of whom are not. They owe us no obligation whatsoever. Helping find housing,
people have donated clothing, furniture. It's it's just remarkable, this community that has all of a sudden popped up and built itself around him and tried to hold him up as he begins. What Chris said, you know, it is going to be a very very difficult transition after all this time, John, when you when you read these cases, case after case after case of just the bad junk science. It's not just bite mark, it's arson bootmark, it's tire print, it's blood spatters. I wrote a book about that one.
You know, it's just this ridiculous areas of so called science where people become experts like Dr West. He became was a small town dentist who became somehow qualified to testify all sorts of scientific theories of guilt. One thing that we do, Jason, as you know, with the Innocence Project, we advocate in all few the states policies and new laws to tighten up the forensics. We have no national standard. Any Lee was convicted because of junk science, bad science.
And you know, again there are a lot of people that falled here, the prosecutors who who have no evidence. Every wrongful conviction case should start off with the fact that there was no physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime. Think about that. No fiscal evice, no blood, no seemen, no DNA, no fingernails, scratches, no eyewitness nothing. There's nothing there for the police. So they have to get desperate, and that's how they get false confessions, they
get jail. How snitches, they hire bogus scientists. That's after they arrest the guy. After they pick out their suspect with no evidence, they have to build a case. And it happens in almost every one of these awful convictions. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. Please support your local innocence projects and go to the link in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff
Cleburne and Kevin Warns. The music on the show, as always, is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one