Mississippi fires medical examiner Steven Hayne.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Follow-Up

In our November 2007 issue, reason exposed some significant problems with Mississippi's forensic system. The article focused on Steven Hayne, the doctor who for two decades has conducted the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies. (Hayne says he performs 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies per year, an impossibly high number.) reason interviewed medical examiners across the country who reviewed Hayne's work and found it sloppy and incompetent, and who cited several examples where Hayne's trial testimony may have put innocent men in prison.

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Drawing on reason's reporting, the criminal justice advocacy organization the Innocence Project called on Mississippi to bar Hayne from doing any more autopsies in the state. On August 5, the state finally severed its ties with Hayne. Commissioner of Public Safety Stephen Simpson announced that Hayne would be removed from the state's list of approved medical examiners and that Mississippi would begin contracting its criminal autopsies to a private firm in Nashville.

The case against Hayne was strengthened by the February release of two men, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, from the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. Brewer and Brooks were both accused of raping and killing young girls in the early 1990s in similar crimes that occurred within miles of each other. Brooks was sentenced to life in...