I have long been familiar with Dr. Hayne from his testimony in the Tyler Edmonds case - the then 13 year old boy who "confessed" to killing his sister's estranged husband.
Although it became clear that the sister had committed the murder (and she has since been sentenced to death) - Dr. Hayne glibly testified for the prosecution that the bullet wounds indicated that two people held the gun together and fired the fatal shot. Anyone with an iota of common sense would ask the operative question - how in God's name could you tell who held the gun or how many people held the gun from the bullet wound???
Even the Mississippi Supreme Court could not stomach that one - it was obviously contrived and made up. They threw out Dr. Hayne's testimony, along with the conviction. So while Edmonds waits to be retried (after serving several years in one of Mississippi's notorious youth prisons), Hayne still runs loose to perpetrate perjury upon men, women and CHILDREN - in his bizarre quest.
The strange part of the Edmonds case is that the defense attempted to introduce evidence of "false confession syndrome" - a now widely accepted, understood, and proven theory about the effect of coercive interrogation techniques used by law enforcement on children. The doctor who attemtped to testify is a recognized expert and has studied the Micheal Crowe, Central Park Jogger, and other cases where it was shown that children have been induced to falsely confess to terrible crimes under duress. The court held that his theory was not sufficiently proven to introduce as evidence, but Dr. Hayne's "two killer" nonsense was scientifically proven. That says something about bias against defendants in the court system.
The most important issue lost in this article is the problem of complicity by the prosecutors in the cases where Dr. Hayne has appeared and provided perjured testimony. Lawyers have a responsibility under the code of ethics - in Mississippi as in every other state - to ascertain the truth of their witnesses' testimony, and if they have evidence to disprove that testimony, they should not introduce it. Every single prosecutor who introduced Haynes' testimony, knowing that there were serious questions about his honesty and the veracity of the testimony - committed an ethical violation. Perhaps some smart person would file charges with the Bar Association where it can be shown that the lawyers may have been complicit, or at least had constructive knowledge that their witness was untruthful.
Moreover - prosecutors, unlike defense attorneys - have an ethical oblogation to seek the truth - not a conviction. At minimum, all of the attorneys who used Dr Hayne or the testimony of Dr. West - after evidence surfaced to undermine their truthfulness - should face ethics charges with the Bar Association. Mississippi might lose a lot of lawyers to disbarment, but perhaps it would serve as a deterent to other lawyers who abuse the public trust. They give the rest of us bad names.
We should really ask ourselves what would be fair in these cases as well. Wouldn't it be nice if the good Dr. were to serve out the remainder of the terms on death row to which he condemned others through his overtly false testimony?
