In 2008, even the Wall Street Journal questioned Steven Hayne’s autopsies.
As a former lay midwife, I have strong feelings about the same “fetal harm” prosecutions that were used to go after midwives — and women who decided to labor and give birth at home. They made up a bunch of fake research to justify their witch hunts. They tried to throw midwives in jail — and force women to give birth in hospitals.
It’s also one of the reasons I feel so strongly about abortion and fetal personhood: because I’ve seen how the “interests of the child” can be twisted and distorted for ambitious prosecutors. It’s why I don’t believe a fetus (for legal purposes) is a human being until it draws its first breath — because you have to have consistency in how the law is applied, and if you decide otherwise, it opens Pandora’s box.
Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by “cocaine toxicity.”
In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for “depraved heart murder” — defined under Mississippi law as an act “eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
Seven years and much legal wrangling later, Gibbs could finally go on trial this spring — part of a wave of “fetal harm” cases across the country in recent years that pit the rights of the mother against what lawmakers, health care workers, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and others view as the rights of the unborn child.
A judge is said to be likely to decide this week if the case should move forward or be dismissed. Assuming it continues, whether Gibbs becomes the first woman ever convicted by a Mississippi jury for the loss of her pregnancy could turn on a fundamental question that has received surprisingly little scrutiny so far by the courts: Is there scientific proof that cocaine can cause lasting damage to a child exposed in the womb, or are the conclusions reached by Hayne and prosecutors based on faulty analysis and junk science?
First of all, remember the “crack babies” scare of the 80s and 90s? How the children would grow up brain damaged and irretrievably harmed? Not so much. In fact, an earlier study pointed out specifically that the damage to babies whose mothers smoked crack was due to malnutrition and poverty, not crack, and pretty much remedied with proper diet.
But the real kicker? That Steven Hayne did the autopsy and tests on which this bullshit case rests.
Steven fucking Hayne, the non-board certified pathologist who’s since been banned from doing autopsies in the state of Mississippi. Radley Balko’s been following this monster for a long time. Even after Balko exposed some of the unbelievable things this guy did to convict people, and after the state of Mississippi actually passed a specific law to keep him from practicing, state prosecutors showed little interest in going back and reopening the cases.
Even though he fabricated bite marks on a toddler’s cheek to send someone to death row. (You can see the incriminating video here.)
The Innocence Project has also been after him for a long time, too.
Shame on Mississipi, who’s allowing this man’s discredited work to put this young woman on trial — when the man who did the tests should have been tried long ago.
