This op-ed originally appeared in the Magnolia Tribune
Editor’s Note: This column was co-authored by Jeremy Hutchinson, Mark Bowling and Mary Kate Mull.
In an American courtroom, few words carry more weight than “the science shows.”
Jurors may question an eyewitness or a defendant’s explanation, but forensic evidence is different. When someone dubbed “an expert” testifies about forensic evidence, such testimony carries substantial weight. However, bite marks, hair comparisons, bloodstain patterns, and other analyses have turned out to be junk science – unvetted, inaccurate, and unreliable. When the State fails to act as gatekeepers, so-called ‘expert testimony’ is mistaken for scientific proof.
Under modern evidentiary standards, scientific analysis should not reach a jury unless it rests on reliable methods and validations. Yet for decades, courts admitted forensic disciplines before their reliability had been established. For example, bite-mark analysis, microscopic hair comparison, and bloodstain interpretation was presented to juries as objective science, even though unbiased researchers had failed to validate their reliability. The consequences were devastating—innocent people were convicted, guilty people remained free, and public trust in the criminal justice system eroded.
Those harms have been especially severe in the South because junk science did not operate in a vacuum. It operated alongside underfunded public-defense systems, elected coroners with limited medical training, and communities where Black defendants often faced judges, juries, prosecutors, police departments, and forensic witnesses shaped by the region’s racial past. A forensic claim that might have been challenged by a well-funded defense team could become nearly unanswerable for a poor defendant in a rural county.
The clearest example is Mississippi. In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write about how the state’s criminal justice system allowed forensic pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne and bite-mark analyst Dr. Michael West to become two of its most influential expert witnesses. For years, Hayne performed the bulk of Mississippi’s criminal autopsies, while West repeatedly testified, untruthfully as it turns out, that bite marks could identify suspects with remarkable precision.
Their influence mattered because Mississippi’s death-investigation system was not merely inefficient; it was historically tied to local politics. Like many Southern states, Mississippi relies heavily on county-level officials and informal arrangements rather than a consistently independent, professionally staffed medical examiner system. In such an environment, Hayne and West often testified as neutral experts, but in reality, they were peddling junk science as part of the prosecution’s team.
The human cost was enormous. Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, two Black men from rural Mississippi, were convicted in separate child-murder cases after testimony from Hayne and West link them to bite marks that later proved unreliable. Together, they spent decades in prison before DNA evidence exposed the truth: another man was responsible. Their cases show how junk science can do more than convict the innocent. It can protect the guilty by giving the legal system a false sense of certainty.
The tragedy is not only that two so-called experts got it wrong. It is that judges repeatedly allowed juries to hear testimony that lacked the scientific foundation Courts accepted their testimony with little scrutiny because it sounded scientific and because the defendants most harmed by it often lacked the money, status, and institutional trust needed to challenge it. In the South, where criminal punishment has long been entangled with racial politics, that failure carries particular weight.
Read the full article in the Magnolia Tribune
**About Unify.US**
Unify.US is a nonprofit advocacy organization formed by free-market conservatives and activists from the faith community. The organization embraces the core principles of individual freedom, limited government, and traditional American values, in finding common sense solutions to some of America’s most complex problems.
Follow our work on X (@UnifyUSOfficial) and our Facebook page.
