Dr Michael West Filmed Committing Attempted Murder
Over at Reason, Radley Balko has published a damning article and video of Dr Michael West attempting to murder a man named Jimmie Duncan.
In 1993, [Dr Michael West and Dr Steven Hayne] conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video shows bite marks mysteriously appearing on the toddler’s face during the time she was in the custody of Hayne and West. It then shows West repeatedly and methodically pressing and scraping a dental mold of a man’s teeth on the dead girl’s skin. Forensic scientists who have viewed the footage say the video reveals not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering.
The dental mold came from the teeth of the man babysitting the girl at the time of her death. The manufactured bite-mark evidence put the man, Jimmie Duncan on death row. I am convinced that Mr Duncan, who was described by witnesses as being very remorseful and in hysterics with shame, was guilty of negligent manslaughter. Nowhere in the United States are people executed for manslaughter through negligence. In his attempt to make him look more depraved than he actually is, by attempting to send him to the death chamber without justification, Dr West was attempting to murder Jimmie Duncan, as surely as if he had booby-trapped Duncan’s car with a bomb connected to the ignition system.
This might seem like an isolated incident, except for the fact that Dr Hayne has conducted nearly every autopsy of crime victims performed in the state of Mississippi in the past 20 years. In cases where Dr Hayne could not find evidence to help convict criminals, he frequently sent the bodies to Dr West, who had a special test for bite-marks that has never been reproduced by any other forensic specialist. And, like any monopoly, the monopoly criminal apprehension organization operated by the Mississippi state government refuses to revisit all the cases affected by these men’s testimony.
Given the thousands of people that Hayne and West helped put behind bars, there is a near certainty that many innocent people have been sent to jail for crimes committed by others. One could argue that that amounts merely to malpractice. However, the last time I checked, when one person tampers with a crime scene for the purpose of framing an innocent man with a crime while obsucring the actual guilty party’s role, it is called being “An accessory to murder after the fact”
I strongly encourage our readers in Mississipi to question the news media and government officials regarding the destructive trail of injustice left by Dr’s West and Hayne. Their victims cry out for justice.
