Justice delayed

I’ve always viewed state and federal crime laboratories and medical examiners’ offices as linchpins in our criminal justice system.

We rely on their expertise in resolving the cause and manner of deaths and objectivity in discovering truth in matters of guilt or innocence. While closely associated with fighting crime, neither should become extensions of law enforcement or the courtroom. The facts alone should tell the story of what actually happened.

Sadly enough, politics, incompetence and misplaced priorities can cause widespread mistrust and loss of credibility throughout the criminal justice system when that goal isn’t met.

The year was 1979. Arkansas Democrat reporter Clay Bailey and I decided to team up to uncover questionable activities within the State Crime Laboratory during that era.

The governor at the time was Bill Clinton, and the state’s director of public safety was the colorful and controversial Tommy Robinson.

Although I lived an hour away from Bailey while editing the Hot Springs Sentinel Record, we devised a plan to coordinate our efforts. Thus began several months of examining the examiners. The state’s tax-supported crime lab and medical examiner’s offices must be relied upon for objectivity, integrity and ability. Otherwise, innocent people could be convicted, and in some cases executed.

As we began to dig into questionable cases left by the state’s previous chief medical examiner, who had left suddenly for a similar job in Texas, the mess he’d left behind quickly became evident.

For instance, we pieced together facts about the death of a young woman whose body had been found floating in Lake Ouachita a year earlier. The medical examiner ruled she’d died of a suicide by drowning. The apparent gash in the top of her head was determined to have been caused by a boat propeller as her body rose to the surface.

The story questioning that finding led to her parents requesting an exhumation, and her body was re-autopsied in Little Rock. Two forensic pathologists revealed that “gash” was actually an exit wound from a bullet fired into the roof of her mouth, a crucial fact not documented during her original postmortem. The powder burns around a hole in her upper palate were clearly visible.

Then there was the case of Department of Correction inmate Richard Fuller who supposedly died from a heart infection called myocarditis. Our story questioned that finding, and editorials called for an exhumation and forensic re-examination.

At that point Governor Clinton was solidly behind getting to the bottom of these questionable cases, whose numbers grew as the weeks passed. That meant the exhumations increased with each subsequent story.

Following the re-autopsy on Fuller, it was revealed he had died from manual strangulation and a fractured neck that reportedly occurred during inexplicable “horseplay” with a prison guard outside his cell after midnight.

There had been no mention of this injury in his original autopsy report, and upon re-examination of original autopsy slides, no myocarditis was found.

Stories raising questions about botched autopsies grew week by week until six bodies had been exhumed and re-examined. Problems were discovered with each original postmortem.

An exasperated governor finally announced that the state was finished exhuming bodies on autopsies conducted by the former medical examiner because, well, there was no desire to exhume our entire state.

Several years after that series, a continuing related series of stories discovered the state’s former crime lab dentist had misidentified the body of a Jane Doe found murdered outside Little Rock. A crime lab technician also had wrongly testified that a hair found on the unidentified woman’s body matched one from Ronald Carden of Bigelow, the man convicted of her murder.

Both actions played key roles in convicting Carden, who after those false findings (confirmed by the FBI crime lab) was subsequently freed by an incredulous circuit judge who overturned Carden’s conviction.

These forensically related cases and others equally shocking always will remain close to my surface. In those years, I was still fairly naïve and idealistic about the way things worked in the system.

I assumed agencies tasked with such weighty matters of justice relied foremost on integrity to function honorably on behalf of the people.

I grew a lot during that year with Bailey (who afterwards returned to his native Memphis). My resulting interest in medical examiners and the vital role they play in ensuring justice only increased during my reporting stints in California and Chicago, as well as more recent forensic cases back at home, such as that of 16-year-old Janie Ward of Marshall.

Valued readers may recall how shockingly the details of that teenager’s 1989 brutal death were mishandled by our previous officials from the crime lab and medical examiner’s offices in a disgrace that left an indelible stain on our state.

Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly how you want them to treat you.