Latest / Wrongful Conviction / #203 Jason Flom with Chris Fabricant, Tucker Carrington and John Grisham on Eddie Lee Howard

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#203 Jason Flom with Chris Fabricant, Tucker Carrington and John Grisham on Eddie Lee Howard · Wrongful Conviction

0:02
Speaker 1: On February two, nineteen ninety two, neighbors noticed smoke emanating
0:06
Speaker 1: from the Columbus, Mississippi home of eighty four year old
0:09
Speaker 1: Georgia Kemp and called nine one one Firefighters found her
0:12
Speaker 1: body brutally stabbed to death with a butcher knife. During
0:16
Speaker 1: the autopsy, doctor Stephen Hayne observed vaginal injuries, but a
0:20
Speaker 1: rape kit yielded no seminal or blood evidence. When the
0:23
Speaker 1: investigation struggled, a local man with a record, Eddie Lee
0:27
Speaker 1: Howard was identified as a potential suspect. The body had
0:31
Speaker 1: already been thoroughly autopsied and buried without embalming fluid, when
0:36
Speaker 1: doctor Hayne had a sudden realization that bite marks may
0:40
Speaker 1: have been present, prompting the body to be exhumed and
0:43
Speaker 1: set for examination by now infamous and discredited bitemark evidence
0:49
Speaker 1: Charlatan Michael West. In the meantime, molds were made of
0:53
Speaker 1: Eddie Lee Howard's dentures for comparison. This notorious fraudster had
0:58
Speaker 1: developed a process that he called, to quote the West phenomenon,
1:03
Speaker 1: which involves special glasses and ultra violet lights that allowed
1:06
Speaker 1: him and only him, to see injuries that were totally
1:10
Speaker 1: invisible to the naked eye, injuries that he ruled were
1:13
Speaker 1: bitemarks that he could then match to the dental molds
1:15
Speaker 1: of the accused. No photographic evidence of these alleged bite
1:19
Speaker 1: marks ever existed, yet his testimony was enough to sentence
1:23
Speaker 1: Eddie Lee Howard to death. Countless innocent men and women
1:26
Speaker 1: are currently wrongfully imprisoned based on this same junk science,
1:30
Speaker 1: while courts across our country continue to admit it as
1:34
Speaker 1: evidence to this very day. This is wrongful Conviction with
1:39
Speaker 1: Jason Flamm. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm.
1:56
Speaker 1: That's me, of course, I'm your host, and today's episode eat.
2:00
Speaker 1: There is a man who's been in prison since Lyndon
2:03
Speaker 1: Johnson was president, a corrupt DA, a corrupt medical examiner,
2:09
Speaker 1: an incompetent Charlotte, and who passed himself off as a
2:12
Speaker 1: forensic dentist. A man who was basically compelled to service
2:17
Speaker 1: his own attorney in more than one trial. I mean,
2:19
Speaker 1: and I haven't even scratched the surface yet. But before
2:22
Speaker 1: we go any further, we have as good of a
2:25
Speaker 1: panel of guests today as I could ever dream up.
2:29
Speaker 1: First of all, we have someone who you'll recognize Chris Fabricat.
2:32
Speaker 1: Chris has been a frequent guest, not only on this show,
2:35
Speaker 1: but also on the recent episode of Junk Science. Chris
2:38
Speaker 1: is the Joseph Flomm Special Counsel to the Innocence Project,
2:42
Speaker 1: also known as the Strategic Litigation Director. So he's got
2:44
Speaker 1: a lot of fancy titles, but none of them are
2:47
Speaker 1: fancy enough to describe the amazing work that he does
2:50
Speaker 1: day in and day out. So Chris, welcome back.
2:52
Speaker 2: To Wrongful Conviction. Oh, it's a pleasure Jason.
2:54
Speaker 1: With him, we have for the first time a gentleman
2:57
Speaker 1: who's known to basically everyone in this field, Executive director
3:02
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi Innocence Project, Tucker Carrington. So great to
3:06
Speaker 1: have you here.
3:06
Speaker 2: Welcome to the show.
3:07
Speaker 3: Thanks Jason, nice to be here.
3:09
Speaker 1: And another name our listeners will recognize is, if not
3:14
Speaker 1: from his writing, then from having been on our show before.
3:17
Speaker 1: John Grisham, Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction.
3:19
Speaker 2: Hello, Jason, happy to be here.
3:21
Speaker 1: And for those in the audience who don't know this,
3:23
Speaker 1: and a lot of people don't, John was a defense
3:26
Speaker 1: attorney before he even began his writing career, and he
3:29
Speaker 1: goes way back with not only the Mississippi Innisance Project,
3:31
Speaker 1: but also with Tucker and this particular case.
3:35
Speaker 4: My involvement goes back to Tucker. About fifteen years ago.
3:38
Speaker 4: We started the Innocence Project at the Old Miss Law
3:41
Speaker 4: School where I went to school, and we hired Tucker
3:43
Speaker 4: to be our executive director. And oddly enough, my son
3:46
Speaker 4: went to Ole Miss Law School in two thousand and
3:49
Speaker 4: seven and he got into Tucker's clinical program and Tucker
3:52
Speaker 4: assigned him Eddeley's case back in two thousand and eight,
3:56
Speaker 4: and my son went to Parchment to death Row, a
3:58
Speaker 4: place I've been too many times, and he met mister
4:01
Speaker 4: Howard interviewed him several times, and that's when I first
4:05
Speaker 4: learned of Eddie Lee's case and the facts surrounding it.
4:08
Speaker 4: And by the end, though, we were just sort of
4:10
Speaker 4: accustomed to reading another crazy case involving doctor Hanging and
4:15
Speaker 4: doctor West.
4:16
Speaker 1: And Eddie Lee Howard was in prison from nineteen sixty eight,
4:21
Speaker 1: almost every day of his life until late twenty twenty.
4:24
Speaker 1: And I want to go back in time to how
4:27
Speaker 1: the system failed Eddie Lee Howard from the very beginning.
4:31
Speaker 3: I'll get us up to the bid nineteen nineties, just
4:34
Speaker 3: on the cusp of the incident that we're going to
4:36
Speaker 3: end up talking about here, but in essence correct, Jason
4:39
Speaker 3: mister Howard was incarcerated for most of his adult life.
4:43
Speaker 3: He was out off and on. He came from difficult
4:46
Speaker 3: circumstances in east central Mississippi. He was really never out
4:52
Speaker 3: of prison for any appreciable amount of time until the
4:56
Speaker 3: early nineteen nineties. He also has an outside personality. He's
5:01
Speaker 3: notwithstanding the fact that he didn't receive much of an education, obviously,
5:05
Speaker 3: he's a very very smart person, worldly sort of in
5:08
Speaker 3: his own way, and talks a lot. He's a presence.
5:12
Speaker 3: So he was, you know, by virtue of having been
5:15
Speaker 3: incarcerated for most of his life, was at best on
5:20
Speaker 3: the periphery of any sort of law enforcement radar. Had
5:24
Speaker 3: something gone wrong in his neighborhood.
5:27
Speaker 1: Chris, take us back to February second, nineteen ninety two.
5:32
Speaker 1: This is when eighty four year old Georgia Kemp was
5:35
Speaker 1: murdered in her home.
5:37
Speaker 5: You know, it really began with a fire that was
5:39
Speaker 5: spotted by a young girl passing by Miss Kemp's house
5:43
Speaker 5: that evening, and she went back home and they called
5:47
Speaker 5: the fire department, who came between eight and nine o'clock
5:50
Speaker 5: and went into the house and found a smoldering fire
5:55
Speaker 5: and miss Kemp laying faced down in a state of
5:58
Speaker 5: undress that suggests she'd been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.
6:03
Speaker 5: There was a phone cord that had been cut from
6:05
Speaker 5: the wall, and there was nothing missing from the house.
6:08
Speaker 5: There was really no pauntable items of much value. She
6:11
Speaker 5: had no known enemies. It seemed all evidence pointed to
6:16
Speaker 5: essentially a random attack. No fingerprints, there was no eyewitnesses.
6:20
Speaker 5: Nobody had seen anything, nobody had heard anything. Miss Kemp
6:23
Speaker 5: did not have many friends or family, and there were
6:27
Speaker 5: really no suspects. And when the miss kemps remains were
6:31
Speaker 5: taken to the morgue and examined, the entire body was
6:36
Speaker 5: mapped by photographs and diagrams, and every cut, every scrape
6:42
Speaker 5: was noted, both in photographs and in the autopsy reports.
6:47
Speaker 5: After all that was documented, the victim's remains were thoroughly autopsied.
6:52
Speaker 5: Her ribcage was removed, all of her internal organs were removed,
6:56
Speaker 5: her neck was dissected, her brain was removed from her skull,
7:01
Speaker 5: All the internal organs were weighed and measured, and then
7:04
Speaker 5: the remains were interred without embalming fluid, so they would
7:10
Speaker 5: have been rapidly decomposing, particularly with an elderly woman who
7:13
Speaker 5: had been so thoroughly autop seed. And then during the
7:16
Speaker 5: course of the investigation, you know, Nas Tucker was saying,
7:19
Speaker 5: you know, what police did was beginning rounding up their
7:22
Speaker 5: usual suspects, you know, in a place like Mississippi, particularly
7:26
Speaker 5: at that time. But I would hasten to say probably
7:28
Speaker 5: today too, a vulnerable white woman ravished by a black
7:34
Speaker 5: male with a criminal record is a familiar narrative in
7:37
Speaker 5: that part of the state. And that's exactly why they
7:40
Speaker 5: alighted on mister Howard, not because there was any particular
7:43
Speaker 5: evidence pointing toward him, but because he had said a
7:47
Speaker 5: couple of vaguely incriminating things to police officers that were
7:52
Speaker 5: investigating the case. But what was interesting, too, is that
7:55
Speaker 5: there were also statements that really never became part of
7:59
Speaker 5: the trial that work sculpatory, that it pointed toward an
8:03
Speaker 5: alibi that mister Howard had, and these were essentially ignored,
8:06
Speaker 5: and what became the chief item of evidence, at least
8:10
Speaker 5: in terms of the investigation, was these kind of vague
8:12
Speaker 5: statements that mister Howard had made one was that, you
8:16
Speaker 5: know that I had a temper and that's why this
8:18
Speaker 5: had happened. And he'd also said to police that the
8:21
Speaker 5: cases solved and went on to say that they should
8:24
Speaker 5: continue investigating and that it had been committed by you know,
8:27
Speaker 5: multiple people, and that they were still out there. So
8:29
Speaker 5: these were at best confusing, vague, mildly suspicious statements, but
8:35
Speaker 5: it was enough for Columbus police to focus in on
8:38
Speaker 5: Eddielee Howard. And the problem really was that they didn't
8:40
Speaker 5: have any evidence, and so they went back to the
8:44
Speaker 5: mortuary where miss Kemp's remains had been autop seed and
8:50
Speaker 5: didn't know at that time, apparently, but that the victim's
8:53
Speaker 5: remains had already been buried, and they decided at that
8:56
Speaker 5: point to disinter the remains. And what was interesting, you know,
9:01
Speaker 5: is that at trial, the pathologists had testified that they
9:06
Speaker 5: were disinterred because there was some indication that there was
9:10
Speaker 5: injury made by teeth marks. But there was nowhere anywhere
9:15
Speaker 5: in the autopsy report, or in the photograph or anything
9:18
Speaker 5: else that ever suggested that any teeth marks had been
9:21
Speaker 5: left on the victim's body. And moreover, the victim's body
9:25
Speaker 5: had been autopsy within hours of her death. So any
9:28
Speaker 5: kind of bitemarks that had been inflicted at the time
9:31
Speaker 5: of the crime plainly would have been visible at the
9:34
Speaker 5: time of the autopsy, and yet they were not. Nonetheless,
9:37
Speaker 5: the victim's remains were disinterred and brought back to the
9:41
Speaker 5: ranking county Morgue.
9:43
Speaker 4: And this happened in nineteen ninety two. It was a
9:45
Speaker 4: period of time in Mississippi where doctor Hayne, the pathologist,
9:49
Speaker 4: in doctor West, the small town dentist from Haddiesburg, Mississippi
9:54
Speaker 4: who decided to become an expert in many fields. These
9:58
Speaker 4: guns were sort of tagged, teaming way through the criminal
10:01
Speaker 4: justice system in Mississippi and putting together an amazing string
10:06
Speaker 4: of convictions for prosecutors who realized that these guys would
10:10
Speaker 4: say pretty much whatever they wanted them to say to
10:14
Speaker 4: conform to their theory of guilt, and they did this
10:18
Speaker 4: time and time again. Haines would get the autopsy because
10:21
Speaker 4: at the time the state did not have a state
10:24
Speaker 4: medical examiner. That's been a problem there for forty years,
10:28
Speaker 4: and Haine was one of the few doctors who would
10:32
Speaker 4: agree to do autopsies. He once boasted performing two thousand
10:37
Speaker 4: autopsies a year and he would run through the autopsy
10:41
Speaker 4: real quick, and if it was a murder case, and
10:44
Speaker 4: he would get with the prosecutor and they would concoct
10:47
Speaker 4: some theory of guilt and put the case together. And
10:51
Speaker 4: that's what happened here. As Chris said that, you know,
10:54
Speaker 4: after the autopsy there there were no visible signs of bidmarks,
10:57
Speaker 4: but suddenly there were, or maybe there were. So they
11:00
Speaker 4: dug up the body and they looked at it again
11:02
Speaker 4: and called in doctor West, the dentist, as he so
11:05
Speaker 4: often did. West had this theory that during any type
11:08
Speaker 4: of sexual assault, there was a lot of biting going on.
11:10
Speaker 4: So thus the teeth marks and waste had this special
11:14
Speaker 4: ultraviolet light that only he could operate. And he examined
11:17
Speaker 4: the body of missus Kemp in Lo and behold, he
11:21
Speaker 4: found some teeth marks.
11:22
Speaker 1: So Haym calls in West, as he had done in
11:25
Speaker 1: other cases, to work his particular form of bullshit, something
11:30
Speaker 1: that he referred to as the West phenomenon. And Chris,
11:34
Speaker 1: can you explain what that is?
11:36
Speaker 5: The West phenomenon? Essentially, it's ultra violet lights using you know,
11:40
Speaker 5: fancy yellow goggles. Ultra Violet light penetrates beneath the skin.
11:44
Speaker 5: In that you can get images that are invisible to
11:47
Speaker 5: naked eye on skin, So that piece in and of
11:51
Speaker 5: itself is not utter nonsense. But what you can see
11:55
Speaker 5: that's invisible is a healing wound because on the surface
11:58
Speaker 5: level it appears to have been healed, but there's still injury,
12:01
Speaker 5: so that you can be viewed using UV light. So
12:05
Speaker 5: if you use ultraviolet light on a dead body, particularly
12:07
Speaker 5: a post autopsy body or something like that, you're going
12:10
Speaker 5: to find all kinds of artifacts from all kinds of
12:15
Speaker 5: instruments that may have created injuries or bruises or what
12:17
Speaker 5: have you, and there's really no way to interpret them.
12:20
Speaker 5: There's no way to say when they were inflicted, or
12:23
Speaker 5: how they're inflicted, or how much they've changed from the
12:25
Speaker 5: first time that they were inflicted. And so when doctor
12:28
Speaker 5: West testified in this case and virtually all of this cases,
12:32
Speaker 5: that he would claim that the bitemarks not only were
12:34
Speaker 5: they inflicted by the defendant, indeed and without doubt to
12:38
Speaker 5: the exclusion of everybody else on the planet, but he
12:40
Speaker 5: would say that it was done at the time of
12:42
Speaker 5: the murder. Right, So you have the defendant in violent
12:46
Speaker 5: contact with the decedent at the time of the crime,
12:48
Speaker 5: which is essentially a directed verdict if you buy the testimony.
12:53
Speaker 5: So here the use of UV light was particularly outrageous
12:58
Speaker 5: because this wound would have plainly been visible at the time,
13:02
Speaker 5: right because algason was that had been created only a
13:05
Speaker 5: few hours earlier. Right, So it doesn't become invisible and
13:08
Speaker 5: start healing and disappear in time to find this in
13:11
Speaker 5: a UV light. It certainly doesn't happen in a post autopsy,
13:15
Speaker 5: post disinterment scenario. So the UV light was very useful
13:20
Speaker 5: because it allowed the surfacing of images that could really
13:24
Speaker 5: be anything and allow doctor West and he's not alone
13:28
Speaker 5: and using this technique in terms of bitemark experts. But
13:31
Speaker 5: at the bottom is that you just you surface artifacts
13:34
Speaker 5: and then you can interpret them using your quote unquote
13:36
Speaker 5: training and experience having seen so many of these cases
13:40
Speaker 5: to say that, yeah, that was a bitemark, and I
13:42
Speaker 5: was able to match this to the defendant, to Susan
13:44
Speaker 5: for everybody else.
13:45
Speaker 4: And so you got mister Howard. They talked to him
13:48
Speaker 4: into yielding an implant from his teeth, and they said, true,
13:52
Speaker 4: there's a there's a match.
13:54
Speaker 1: But then it's even weirder than that, because mister Howard
13:57
Speaker 1: had fucking dentures. This could be a punch line in it,
14:00
Speaker 1: but there's nothing funny about it.
14:02
Speaker 3: I appreciate you're saying it's tragic, because it these cases
14:06
Speaker 3: really are. I mean, there's you know, Eddie Lee. Howard's
14:08
Speaker 3: trial did not happen in a vacuum. Bike Mark matching
14:12
Speaker 3: testimony was sort of in its infancy stages nationally, but
14:19
Speaker 3: one of its leading proponents was Mike West, and he
14:24
Speaker 3: was really beginning to make a name for himself both
14:27
Speaker 3: nationally but particularly within Mississippi and in certain pockets of Mississippi,
14:32
Speaker 3: and this jurisdiction that included Lowndes County, where mister Howard's
14:36
Speaker 3: trial was, was one of them. Because this happened in
14:40
Speaker 3: another case, another wrongful conviction from the very same area
14:45
Speaker 3: of the country that the Innocence Project in New York
14:47
Speaker 3: to people who aren't on this podcast but who were
14:50
Speaker 3: deeply involved in this case, Vanessa Potkin and Peter Nufeld
14:54
Speaker 3: in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight exonerated
14:57
Speaker 3: two gentlemen, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, also convicted on
15:01
Speaker 3: the same bogus BYTEmark testimony. There was another case Sherwood Brown,
15:07
Speaker 3: where Mike West had just finished testifying. Doctor West had
15:11
Speaker 3: just finished testifying in a case where he matched bitemarks
15:15
Speaker 3: to a blooney sandwich to help convict somebody. So these
15:20
Speaker 3: cases are sort of all of a piece, and the
15:24
Speaker 3: prosecutor forrest allgood in this particular case. But prosecutors who
15:28
Speaker 3: were using West were having real success. They were getting convictions,
15:31
Speaker 3: they were getting death sentences, and so doctor West's involvement
15:35
Speaker 3: in mister Howard's investigation in trial at this point is
15:38
Speaker 3: not an anomaly. It's sort of a well known, time
15:41
Speaker 3: tested recipe.
15:54
Speaker 1: The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode
15:56
Speaker 1: of Ravel convision with Jason Flam and of the Last
15:59
Speaker 1: Mile organization, which provides business and tech training to help
16:03
Speaker 1: incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re enter the workforce. The
16:08
Speaker 1: Pacers Foundation is committed to improving the lives of Hoosiers
16:11
Speaker 1: across Indiana, supporting organizations that are dedicated primarily to helping
16:16
Speaker 1: young people and students. For more information on the work
16:19
Speaker 1: of the Pacers Foundation or the Last Mile program, please
16:23
Speaker 1: visit Pacersfoundation dot org or the Lastmile dot org.
16:35
Speaker 3: And mister Howard's innocent. He wants to go to trial.
16:38
Speaker 3: He's had a series of lawyers that one of them
16:41
Speaker 3: had come in, he had quit, another had come in,
16:43
Speaker 3: hadn't filed any motions on the eve of trial except
16:47
Speaker 3: for emotion to continue, hadn't challenged the bite mark evidence.
16:51
Speaker 3: And mister Howard is you know we've mentioned a couple
16:53
Speaker 3: times already. It's a smart guy, he's a layperson, but
16:56
Speaker 3: he knows they're not ready for trial. And so the
16:59
Speaker 3: judge says, essentially, well, if you really want another lawyer,
17:02
Speaker 3: I can do that, but you know it's going to
17:05
Speaker 3: take another lawyer who knows how long to.
17:07
Speaker 2: Get up to speed on the case.
17:08
Speaker 3: And so mister Howard says, I'll represent myself then, and
17:13
Speaker 3: that goes about as well as most people who represent
17:16
Speaker 3: themselves pro SAE, particularly in complicated cases. And he gets
17:20
Speaker 3: convicted slash sentenced as well to death and his first
17:23
Speaker 3: trial representing himself.
17:25
Speaker 1: So the trial is May of nineteen ninety four. The
17:30
Speaker 1: case that the state put on was what exactly because
17:34
Speaker 1: they had basically nothing, Can you give us an overview
17:37
Speaker 1: of that trial?
17:39
Speaker 3: In some the state's case was that the victim's body
17:46
Speaker 3: miss Kimp's body was found as a result of an
17:49
Speaker 3: arson or what looked to be an arson that was
17:51
Speaker 3: supposed to cover up the murder, and Eddie Lee Howard
17:56
Speaker 3: lived in the neighborhood. He had made some odd statements.
18:00
Speaker 3: As Chris talked about earlier, the state's almost exclusive evidence
18:04
Speaker 3: against mister Howard was doctor Hayne talking about the autopsy,
18:09
Speaker 3: and then doctor West by far and away. At one
18:12
Speaker 3: point I knew I'd counted up the transcript pages, but
18:15
Speaker 3: the vast bulk of the transcript pages from both of
18:19
Speaker 3: mister Howard's trials are Mike West testimony.
18:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I would say the overwhelming majority of Mike
18:26
Speaker 5: West's testimony is really about his credentials. You know, all
18:29
Speaker 5: the boards he sat on, all the honors he'd gotten,
18:32
Speaker 5: every time the American Academy of Forensic Sciences sent him
18:35
Speaker 5: to China as an ambassador, the discovery of the West phenomenon,
18:39
Speaker 5: the literature, the research grants, that he'd been given, the
18:42
Speaker 5: FBI training, that he'd done, that he'd been to Scotland
18:45
Speaker 5: Yard and lectured them about by marks. The credentials themselves
18:49
Speaker 5: are so persuasive, coupled with West's folksy charm and kind
18:53
Speaker 5: of you know, a local kid made good all that
18:57
Speaker 5: as potent snake oil.
18:59
Speaker 1: Let's not leave out the fact that the bitemark quote
19:03
Speaker 1: unquote evidence didn't actually exist anywhere except for in West's
19:07
Speaker 1: twisted brain, right, because there were no photographs ever taken
19:11
Speaker 1: or presented of these alleged mysterious bite marks that only
19:15
Speaker 1: turned up four days after she was dead and disinterred.
19:18
Speaker 5: You know, he testified without an exhibit at all, Right,
19:21
Speaker 5: He just got on the witness stand with his folksy
19:24
Speaker 5: charm and persuaded twelve jurors that he saw three different
19:28
Speaker 5: bite marks, all of them he matched to Eddie Lee Howard.
19:32
Speaker 5: The one on the victim's neck in particular, and the
19:38
Speaker 5: one on the victim's breast were Eddie Lee Howard to
19:41
Speaker 5: the exclusion of all other potential sources. And the neck
19:46
Speaker 5: where doctor West claimed to have found this bite mark
19:49
Speaker 5: that he matched to Eddie Lee Howard's dentures had been
19:54
Speaker 5: dissected during the autopsy, right, and he claimed to be
19:56
Speaker 5: able to manipulate the neck during his examination to show
20:02
Speaker 5: the exact way that had been flexing when Eddie Lee
20:05
Speaker 5: Howard allegedly bit down on it.
20:08
Speaker 2: West was never even asked.
20:09
Speaker 5: How is that even possible? Right, he was never even
20:11
Speaker 5: asked to see a photograph. It's really an astonishing lack
20:15
Speaker 5: of evidence and just astonishing claims that were allowed in
20:19
Speaker 5: without objection.
20:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, not to be gross, but she really
20:23
Speaker 1: wouldn't have even had a neck at this point in time,
20:26
Speaker 1: after all the things that her body had gone through
20:28
Speaker 1: during the examination post mortem. Just for the edification of
20:32
Speaker 1: our audience. Courts just rely on precedence. So if something
20:36
Speaker 1: was allowed in a court doesn't matter how long ago,
20:38
Speaker 1: then a judge will say, well, it was allowed another time,
20:41
Speaker 1: so allow it now. There's no objective analysis of the
20:44
Speaker 1: validity of the science. It's just well somebody else said
20:48
Speaker 1: it was okay, so it's okay with me too. It's
20:50
Speaker 1: just something everyone should be aware of because it is
20:54
Speaker 1: absolutely asked backwards. And so May twelfth, nineteen ninety four,
20:59
Speaker 1: a day that will an infamy. Eddie Lee Howard was
21:02
Speaker 1: convicted and sentenced to death. So he appealed because he
21:07
Speaker 1: was in fact unfit to represent himself in court. And
21:10
Speaker 1: John the Mississippi Supreme Court gets involved, right, which is
21:14
Speaker 1: not a common thing. Right that they actually saw fit
21:17
Speaker 1: in ninety seven to overturn his original conviction, right or
21:22
Speaker 1: to order a new trial.
21:23
Speaker 4: Well, he told them, the Mississippi Supremes reverse a conviction,
21:30
Speaker 4: we all stop and take a hard look because it
21:32
Speaker 4: doesn't have very often.
21:33
Speaker 1: And the new trial happened in two thousand and The
21:35
Speaker 1: state now presented a new witness, Eddie's ex girlfriend Kathe
21:39
Speaker 1: and Folgum where they sort of dragged her into this,
21:42
Speaker 1: who testified that Eddie bid her occasionally during sex and
21:46
Speaker 1: that he smelled like smoke the day after the murder.
21:48
Speaker 1: By the way, she had not previously reported that alleged
21:51
Speaker 1: smell during her initial interview. So this this doesn't smell good,
21:55
Speaker 1: so to speak, and all good get ready for this.
21:59
Speaker 1: He's quote unquote, the progress of mankind has been carried
22:04
Speaker 1: forward on the backs of people like Michael West And
22:08
Speaker 1: that's not enough. He goes on to say, back to quote,
22:11
Speaker 1: the Church threatened to burn Copernicus because he dared to
22:15
Speaker 1: say that the planets didn't revolve around the Earth. So
22:19
Speaker 1: it was with Michael West end quote. So forget the
22:22
Speaker 1: fact that he confused Copernicus and Galileo, because that's far
22:26
Speaker 1: from the most ridiculous portion of this outburst, but Eddie
22:31
Speaker 1: was again convicted and sentenced to death.
22:33
Speaker 3: It's kind of astonishing, I mean, it's an astonishing claim
22:36
Speaker 3: to make at that point in time, especially because there
22:41
Speaker 3: already was plenty of evidence that, in fact, doctor West
22:47
Speaker 3: was not anything approaching what all Good was arguing, you know,
22:51
Speaker 3: because he had been already creating problems for himself. He
22:54
Speaker 3: was going to be suspended from the American border, Forensic
22:56
Speaker 3: got ontology had to be reinstated. Their national article about
23:00
Speaker 3: him already I think in Newsweek, National Law Journal. So
23:04
Speaker 3: if you were paying attention, this was a bold claim
23:08
Speaker 3: to begin with, and it was also one that was
23:12
Speaker 3: really starting to swim upstream against empirical data that was
23:17
Speaker 3: starting to creep in.
23:18
Speaker 1: Even then, there's developments in two thousand and one, two
23:21
Speaker 1: thousand six, two thousand and eight. Eddie was ultimately excluded
23:25
Speaker 1: from every piece of evidence that was tested for his DNA,
23:28
Speaker 1: including the male DNA and blood found on the butcher knife,
23:30
Speaker 1: and the testing also undermined West's theory if it was
23:35
Speaker 1: even a theory that Camp had been bitten. No male
23:37
Speaker 1: DNA or saliva was proven to be found on the
23:40
Speaker 1: nightgown in the areas that would have come to contact
23:42
Speaker 1: with the teeth and the areas that had allegedly been bitten.
23:45
Speaker 1: So basically all of it was a combination of lies, nonsense,
23:48
Speaker 1: and junk science. And twenty fifteen, the Lownes County Circuit
23:52
Speaker 1: Court ruled the DNA evidence wouldn't change the outcome of trial,
23:55
Speaker 1: which I find too crazy for even me.
23:58
Speaker 5: You know, this same judge. Over all of the evidence
24:02
Speaker 5: that we've been discussing around the Eddie Lee Howard case
24:04
Speaker 5: over the course of two years in Lowndes County, Mississippi,
24:08
Speaker 5: same place where Eddie Lee Howard was convicted. There is
24:11
Speaker 5: evidence about the National Academy of Sciences findings on bitemark evidence.
24:16
Speaker 5: There was testimony about Michael West's dramatic fall from grace
24:21
Speaker 5: and the forensic science community. There was a new scientific
24:24
Speaker 5: research based on bitemarks that were created in candaver skin
24:28
Speaker 5: that showed that skin cannot record a bite mark no
24:31
Speaker 5: matter what, you can't associate it with the teeth the
24:33
Speaker 5: known to have made these bite marks. There was testimony
24:37
Speaker 5: by now a judge in California who was a defense
24:40
Speaker 5: attorney at the time who burned Michael West in a
24:42
Speaker 5: blind sting and West Matt's teeth to a bitemark that
24:46
Speaker 5: were known not to have made it very persuasively. Moreover,
24:50
Speaker 5: videotape of that was played in open court, all that
24:54
Speaker 5: was presented before the court, none of it was sufficiently
24:57
Speaker 5: persuasive to overturn the conviction.
25:00
Speaker 2: And real.
25:02
Speaker 1: You know, and the blind the blind test I'd read
25:04
Speaker 1: about that it's an investigator submitted his own teeth marks
25:09
Speaker 1: as a potential culprit in this particular case, and the
25:12
Speaker 1: genius doctor West concluded without any doubt whatsoever that this
25:18
Speaker 1: was in fact a perfect match. And so yeah, he's
25:21
Speaker 1: been exposed, re exposed, and yet you know, here we are,
25:25
Speaker 1: and is he still practicing?
25:27
Speaker 5: By the way, you know, the really repulsive irony doctor
25:32
Speaker 5: West's career is that he's wound up as a prison dentist.
25:46
Speaker 3: One of the things about the Eddie Howard case which
25:49
Speaker 3: is fascinating is it kind of offers a snapshot of
25:53
Speaker 3: some of the friends that before him, that Chris and
25:55
Speaker 3: the Innocence Project had been working on. Because in two
25:57
Speaker 3: thousand and nine twenty ten, when we first filed for
26:01
Speaker 3: post conviction relief in Eddie Howard's case, there were really
26:05
Speaker 3: only a handful of exonerations involving bitemarks, you know that
26:12
Speaker 3: we were just sort of beginning to realize that this
26:14
Speaker 3: was junk. Two of them, of course, were Levon Brooks
26:17
Speaker 3: and Kennedy Brewers case, which the Innocence Project had done
26:20
Speaker 3: just a couple of years prior, and in the span
26:22
Speaker 3: of the years between two thousand and nine or ten
26:25
Speaker 3: up until twenty twenty, thanks to Chris and the folks
26:29
Speaker 3: in the forensic unit at the Innocence Project and others,
26:33
Speaker 3: we were looking at two dozen exonerations by twenty twenty
26:36
Speaker 3: based on fraudulent bitemark evidence. So the landscape had really
26:41
Speaker 3: changed significantly. But by the time we filed our final
26:47
Speaker 3: sort of petition in the Mississippi Supreme Court in twenty nineteen,
26:51
Speaker 3: I guess so much water had passed under the bridge
26:55
Speaker 3: that it was just manifestly obvious in our minds. And
26:58
Speaker 3: of course we prevailed that this was a conviction that
27:01
Speaker 3: could not stand, and the Mississippi Supreme Court went even
27:05
Speaker 3: a bit further in their opinion, reversing and vacating the
27:08
Speaker 3: conviction by saying, look, there's really no there's really no
27:11
Speaker 3: evidence here. There's really no evidence to retry mister Howard.
27:14
Speaker 1: August thirty first, twenty twenty, just a short time ago,
27:18
Speaker 1: when the Mississippi Supreme Court finally vacated the murder conviction,
27:22
Speaker 1: that death sentence, Justice Kitchens ruled that Mississippi shouldn't uphold
27:26
Speaker 1: the conviction that death sentence based on the testimony of
27:29
Speaker 1: a proven unreliable witness of course, doctor West, as we're
27:33
Speaker 1: talking about, and the DA had to decide whether or
27:36
Speaker 1: not he would pursue a new trial. So we finally
27:39
Speaker 1: got the news we had all been waiting for and
27:41
Speaker 1: you guys had been working for, and he was finally free.
27:45
Speaker 1: But where is the case now, because the state still
27:49
Speaker 1: has the option to retry him.
27:50
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, the conviction and sentence have been vacated, so
27:54
Speaker 3: it's back in the circuit court in a what I
27:58
Speaker 3: think is a nod to the Supreme Court's opinion to
28:02
Speaker 3: some of the things the Supreme Court said in addition
28:04
Speaker 3: to vacating the conviction and the sentence is the paucity basically,
28:09
Speaker 3: there's no evidence to really retry this case. The Court,
28:13
Speaker 3: upon motion really of both parties, the defense and the prosecutor,
28:17
Speaker 3: release mister Howard on bond while the state makes an
28:20
Speaker 3: ultimate determination about whether it's going to proceed with this.
28:24
Speaker 2: Matter or not.
28:25
Speaker 5: That Eddie Lee Howard will certainly have company counsel if
28:28
Speaker 5: there's ever another trial.
28:30
Speaker 1: Right, So amen to that. And so Eddie Lee Howard
28:33
Speaker 1: is free. And that brings us to closing arguments, where
28:37
Speaker 1: first I thank each of you for joining me and
28:41
Speaker 1: us here today, and then I simply kick back in
28:45
Speaker 1: my chair, turn off my microphone, leave my headphones on,
28:49
Speaker 1: and just listen and learn from whatever you have to say.
28:53
Speaker 1: And if you have a memory of Eddie's freedom that
28:56
Speaker 1: you'd like to share, no pressure, but that would be
29:00
Speaker 1: extra grade. So let's start with Chris Tucker and then John.
29:04
Speaker 5: One thing that Tucker and I talked about before mister
29:09
Speaker 5: Howard was released is changes that we had seen in
29:13
Speaker 5: clients that had been incarcerated for many, many years wrongfully,
29:18
Speaker 5: and that we meet clients like that in prison, and
29:23
Speaker 5: like because we're human, we make judgments about intellectual capacity,
29:28
Speaker 5: about who they are as people, about their ability to
29:31
Speaker 5: survive on the outside. So we get the exoneration and
29:36
Speaker 5: the change that will overcome a person upon being exonerated
29:43
Speaker 5: and released is one of the most profound things that
29:46
Speaker 5: I've experienced that I have been fortunate to experience. At
29:48
Speaker 5: the Innocence Project, we formed a picture of a deeply damaged,
29:54
Speaker 5: institutionalized person that was going to have real trouble navigating
29:59
Speaker 5: just day to day life outside. But what's remarkable is
30:04
Speaker 5: just how cogent, how happy, how on point mister Howard
30:09
Speaker 5: is today. It's overwhelming the difference, and it just shows
30:14
Speaker 5: how deeply damaging wrongful incarceration, or any incarceration, particularly for
30:18
Speaker 5: long periods of time, and a place like Parchment is
30:21
Speaker 5: to a human being, to their soul, to their ability
30:24
Speaker 5: to relate to their fellow man. And to watch that
30:27
Speaker 5: cloud lifted and the shackles, you know, literally come off,
30:32
Speaker 5: it's just incredible.
30:34
Speaker 1: Tucker, go ahead.
30:35
Speaker 3: I've really been amazed and thankful to witness the kindnesses
30:40
Speaker 3: that so many people have done for us and mister
30:45
Speaker 3: Howard upon his release, trying their level best to make
30:51
Speaker 3: his transition successful. And these are people, by the way,
30:55
Speaker 3: some of whom you know are on our team social workers,
30:57
Speaker 3: for instance, but many of whom are not.
31:00
Speaker 2: They owe us no.
31:01
Speaker 3: Obligation whatsoever help him find housing. People have donated clothing, furniture.
31:07
Speaker 3: It's just remarkable. This community that has all of a
31:13
Speaker 3: sudden popped up and built itself around him and tried
31:17
Speaker 3: to hold him up as he begins what Chris said.
31:19
Speaker 3: You know, it's going to be a very very difficult
31:23
Speaker 3: transition after.
31:24
Speaker 4: All this time, John, when you read these cases, case
31:30
Speaker 4: after case after case of just the bad junk science.
31:35
Speaker 4: It's not just bite mark, it's arson boot mark, it's
31:38
Speaker 4: tire print.
31:39
Speaker 2: It's blood spatters. I wrote a book about that one.
31:41
Speaker 4: You know, It's just these ridiculous areas of so called
31:45
Speaker 4: science where people become experts like doctor West. He became
31:49
Speaker 4: was a small town dentist who became somehow qualified to
31:51
Speaker 4: testify all sorts of scientific.
31:54
Speaker 2: Theories of guilt.
31:55
Speaker 4: One thing that we do, Jason, as you know, with
31:57
Speaker 4: the Innocence Project, we advocate in all the states policies
32:01
Speaker 4: and new laws to tighten up the forensics.
32:04
Speaker 2: We have no national standard. Any Lee was convicted because
32:06
Speaker 2: of junk science, bad science.
32:08
Speaker 4: And you know, again there are a lot of people
32:10
Speaker 4: that fault here, the prosecutors who have no evidence. Every
32:15
Speaker 4: wrongful conviction case should start off with the fact that
32:18
Speaker 4: there was no physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime.
32:22
Speaker 4: Think about that, No fiscal levels, no blood, no semen,
32:25
Speaker 4: no DNA, no fingernails, scratches, no eyewitness nothing.
32:29
Speaker 2: There's nothing there for the police.
32:31
Speaker 4: So they have to get desperate, and that's how they
32:34
Speaker 4: get false confessions. They get jail house snitches, they hire
32:38
Speaker 4: bogus scientists.
32:39
Speaker 2: That's after they arrest the guy.
32:41
Speaker 4: After they pick out their suspect with no evidence, they
32:43
Speaker 4: have to build a case. And it happens in almost
32:46
Speaker 4: every one of these wonwful convictions.
32:54
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flopp.
32:57
Speaker 1: Please support your local innocence projects. Go to the link
33:00
Speaker 1: in our bio to see how you can help. I'd
33:03
Speaker 1: like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburn
33:06
Speaker 1: and Kevin Warnis. The music on the show, as always,
33:09
Speaker 1: is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be
33:13
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Speaker 1: on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
33:21
Speaker 1: Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
33:23
Speaker 1: association with Signal Company Number one