Questionable Ruling Grants Jeffrey Havard New Sentencing but Not New Trial in Controversial ​“Shaken Baby” Case

Sixteen years after a noto­ri­ous and now-dis­cred­it­ed foren­sic wit­ness told a Mississippi jury that Jeffrey Havard had sex­u­al­ly abused and shak­en his girl­friend’s six-month-old daugh­ter to death, Havard’s death sen­tence — but not his con­vic­tion — has been over­turned. On September 14, 2018, Adams County Circuit Judge Forrest Johnson ruled that state pathol­o­gist Steven Hayne’s recan­ta­tion of his diag­no­sis that infant Chloe Britt had been a vic­tim of Shaken Baby Syndrome was ​“not suf­fi­cient to under­mine this court’s con­fi­dence in the con­vic­tion,” but that ​“there is a cau­tious dis­tur­bance in con­fi­dence of the sen­tence of death, even if slight.” 

Havard’s co-coun­sel, Graham Carner, told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, ​“With all due respect, we think the court got it wrong. We are dis­ap­point­ed, but we are not done.” 

Washington Post colum­nist Radley Balko crit­i­cized Johnson’s five-page rul­ing — which repeat­ed­ly mis­spells the expert’s name as ​“Haynes” — as ​“gut­less” and ​“slop­py.” Balko, whose book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South exposed ram­pant irreg­u­lar­i­ties in foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny in Mississippi mur­der cas­es, said, ​“It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that the judge cor­rect­ly spell the name of the state’s expert whose tes­ti­mo­ny is the entire rea­son that the hear­ing took place.” 

During a 2002 tri­al that rock­et­ed from jury selec­tion to a death sen­tence in just two days, the state — sup­port­ed by Hayne’s tes­ti­mo­ny — argued that Havard had anal­ly and oral­ly raped the infant and shak­en her suf­fi­cient­ly to cause injuries that would lat­er kill her. The defense pre­sent­ed a sin­gle wit­ness who pro­vid­ed all of three pages of tes­ti­mo­ny, fail­ing to chal­lenge the foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny in the case. Defense coun­sel also failed to explain to the jury that, as Balko writes, Havard sup­pos­ed­ly ​“anal­ly raped the infant, oral­ly raped her, shook her vio­lent­ly enough cause injuries that would lat­er — but not imme­di­ate­ly — kill her, then bathed and cleaned her” so thor­ough­ly that ​“none of Havard’s hair, skin cells or semen was found on or inside the girl,” ​“dressed her, and tucked her into bed as if noth­ing had hap­pened” — all in the time it took Chloe’s moth­er to go the store ​“to buy some burrito supplies.” 

Since the tri­al, Hayne has recant­ed his tes­ti­mo­ny that Chloe was sex­u­al­ly assault­ed and says he was wrong to attribute the child’s head injuries to SBS (Shaken Baby Syndrome). Hayne had tes­ti­fied under oath that he reg­u­lar­ly per­formed 1,500 or more autop­sies each year, near­ly five times the max­i­mum num­ber rec­om­mend­ed by the National Association of Medical Examiners. He had nev­er been cer­ti­fied in foren­sic pathol­o­gy by the American Board of Pathology and failed the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exam in 1980. Three oth­er rep­utable experts who reviewed Hayne’s autop­sy report found no evi­dence of abuse on the infant. In 2008, he was barred from doing autop­sies for Mississippi pros­e­cu­tors and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit called his work ​“dis­cred­it­ed.”

At least ten men and women have been exon­er­at­ed from death rows across the United States after hav­ing been wrong­ly con­vict­ed for killing a child. In the cas­es of Rodricus Crawford and Sabrina Butler, the med­ical evi­dence also showed that no crime had occurred, but the defen­dants were con­vict­ed based on false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny. In April 2018, Vicente Benavides was exon­er­at­ed from California’s death row after the pros­e­cu­tion pre­sent­ed false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny claim­ing that a tod­dler in his care had been sexually assaulted.