Tag Archives: Jeffrey Havard

December 3, 2012 · 9:32 am

A Critical Look at a Key Witness

Photo by Cheryl Havared Harrell

Photo by Cheryl Havard Harrell

The case of Jeffrey Havard in Mississippi could be the tip of a wrongful-conviction iceberg, according to an excellent in-depth report by Radley Balko at the Huffington Post.

Havard has been on death row since 2002, convicted of murdering the 6-month-old daughter of his girl friend. Havard said he was lifting the little girl from the tub after a bath when she slipped from his hands, hitting her head on the toilet as she fell. Private medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne, however, concluded the girl had died of shaken baby syndrome. The Mississippi Innocence Project has been fighting the conviction.

The reporter calls SBS “a diagnosis that comes with the implication that the last person to be alone with the child was the one who killed her,” observing:

“Because the symptoms can only be produced by violent shaking, the diagnosis also comes with a built-in indictment of the suspect’s state of mind. It’s a diagnosis that does much of the prosecutor’s work for him.”

Balko has written about Hayne several times over the past decade, as the medical examiner has become more controversial. Hayne has apparently been the favorite pathologist of Mississippi prosecutors for years, reliably providing autopsy reports and testimony that work in the courtroom. New information about Hayne is now available—ironically, through the discovery phase of a defamation suit Hayne pressed against the Missippi Innocence Project after they started questioning his work. Balko writes:

“What they’ve found since implicates not only Hayne, but a host of police officials, prosecutors, even judges who knew Hayne was deficient and offering dubious testimony, but did nothing to stop it. ‘We’ve known for a while that there was a problem here,’ says Tucker Carrington, the director of the project. ‘But I really had no concept of the depth and breadth of the malfeasance. This isn’t just Hayne. It’s … well, it’s almost everybody. The state has known all along that it was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.’”

According to Balko, Hayne was already under a serious cloud at the time of Havard’s trial, yet the court refused Havard the money to pay for a second opinion. The story is astonishing, and I recommend reading it:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/steven-hayne-jeffrey-havard_b_2213976.html

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February 27, 2012 · 1:15 pm

Cases, Cases, and More Cases

More bad news than good lately from the front lines in the SBS struggle. Fathers and men watching other people’s children have been especially in the headlines this month.

In the one positive development, a Michigan jury has acquitted a man who was watching his employee’s 3-month-old son so the boy’s father could work. The prosecution had applied the theory of immediate but subtle symptoms to target the babysitter, although the serious problems emerged later, while the child was with relatives. The defendant’s damning act was apparently asking his mother-in-law to check on the baby, as he thought the child was having trouble breathing. See the coverage in the Pestosky News.

A 42-year-old  man in Oklahoma has entered an Alford plea, which is not strictly a confession of guilt but an acknowledgment that the prosecution would probably win at trial. The original charge was first-degree murder, reduced to manslaughter with the plea. According to the story in the Enid News, the defendant  called 911 when a 7-month-old boy in his care seemed to choke on a bottle and quite breathing, in September of 2009.

A terrifying case is heading toward the death penalty in Mississippi, where a man claims to have dropped his girlfriend’s daughter after giving her a bath. He was convicted of capital murder after prosecutors argued he had both battered and raped the girl.  A rape kit administered at the time showed no signs of semen, but the child’s dilated anus—a normal finding near or after death—convinced the doctors that she’d been sexually abused. You can read about this case in the Clarion Ledger coverage. In light of the prosecution of Ernie Lopez, one has to wonder if misdiagnoses of sexual abuse will now start showing up routinely in child-death cases.

In New Hampshire, meanwhile, on-line comments have been especially venomous against a young father accused of shaking his son while the child’s mother was in another room drawing a bath. I admit the young man looks like trouble in the published photographs, but the facts as reported in the Eagle Tribune coverage sound like the same old story to me.

A judge in Colorado has sentenced a father to 20 years in prison after he confessed to shaking his 2-month-old, as reported by their local channel 9 news, and a father in New Jersey has been charged in the death of his 11-week-old daughter, as reported by abc news.

A day care provider in Missouri is scheduled for trial this fall, accused of hitting and shaking a girl in her care. According to an article on Connect MidMissouri, the babysitter says she tripped over another child and dropped the baby.

And finally, an appeal in Britain has hit the usual wall, as reported in Family Law.

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