Death of the American Expert

Dr. Steven Hayne giving testimony in an undated photo (source)

This essay is a follow-up to Southern Comfort and Down-Home Injustice

For over a quarter century, Dr. Steven Hayne and Michael West, DDS, made healthy paychecks as “expert witnesses” for Mississippi prosecutors. As Balko and Carrington describe, the two doctors maintained a robust schedule of medical examinations, written and oral testimony, and full-time medical practices. Radley Balko himself has been key in bringing national attention to Hayne and West’s quackery, and the injustice they precipitated.

However, reading Balko and Carrington, I felt distinct discomfort. The authors wrote before the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought dueling definitions of expertise, and high-profile media debates about who to trust. Anti-mask and anti-vaccine advocates used almost exactly the same language to disparage Anthony Fauci as Balko and Carrington use to disparage Steven Hayne. This backs me into a difficult corner regarding how we identify and use experts.

Our authors describe the Daubert standard, the current rule of evidence in American courtrooms, which authorizes judges to determine expertise. Essentially, judges make rulings on whether expert witnesses have sufficient standing in an accredited field to voice opinions that mean anything. This requires opposing counsel to be sufficiently well-informed (and sufficiently lucrative) to actually challenge expertise, and judges to know enough to make such rulings.

However, as we’ve seen since COVID, public officials frequently aren’t sufficiently well-informed to make such decisions. The perception of “scientific consensus” may swing on the Availability Heuristic: that is, if a field like Michael West’s bite-mark analysis gets media attention, judges will know of it, and therefore deem it plausible. Bite-mark analysis helped bring Ted Bundy to justice, and still holds water in courts, but is widely regarded as pseudoscience today.

In Balko and Carrington’s telling, Hayne’s biggest sin was probably maintaining an autopsy and testimony schedule that makes no sense. One autopsy can take four hours, plus weeks of preparation for testimony; but Hayne, at his peak, claimed to complete five or six autopsies per day. The numbers simply strain plausibility.

West, by contrast, apparently invented scientific disciplines from whole cloth. He pioneered an ultraviolet bite-mark identification system that supposedly provided ironclad evidence. However, nobody but West ever successfully replicated his process. Then, his process involved damaging the supposedly already-damaged tissue, ensuring no third party could either verify or dispute West’s findings. Because only West could do it, and nobody could possibly contradict him, his claims were implausibly self-sealing.

Michael West, DDS (Netflix photo)

Without meaningful peer review of Hayne and West’s techniques, they could claim anything, no matter how extravagant. Which, of course, is exactly what Balko and Carrington assert. Hayne and West’s lucrative “expertise” mainly involved courtroom acclamation, not studied give-and-take. In practice, these doctors’ scientific expertise involved oodles of laboratory jargon that mainly served to confuse jurors.

No wonder, when COVID hit America, that so many heel-draggers thought they could answer the Centers for Disease Control with (and I paraphrase) “Nuh-uh!” In this environment, science isn’t a process of inquiry; science is what scientists do. When Anthony Fauci presented steps for preventing disease spread—and importantly, when those prescribed steps changed with new information—his opponents, including the President, challenged his person, not his evidence.

A recurrent social media meme asserts that “if you can’t question it, it isn’t science.” Which is true as far as it goes, but this often reduces to the most ridiculous possible minimum. Popular anti-mask spokespeople, like Judy Mikovits or Stella Immanuel, engaged in fault-finding missions, conflated dissimilar facts to bolster a flimsy narrative, or simply made stuff up. These “questions” were treated seriously by credulous politicians and media giants.

One knock against Fauci was a March 2020 60 Minutes clip where he specifically said mask-wearing wasn’t necessary, at a time when there weren’t enough quality masks to go around. Months later, new information, and more widespread mask availability, led Fauci to endorse mask-wearing. But Facebook and Twitter exhumed that original claim, asserting that Fauci was inconsistent. If a scientist’s claims are inconsistent, his science is disproved, Q.E.D.

Hayne and West emerged from a system wherein expertise was accorded by authority figures, not refined through testing and verification. Courts deemed their statements scientific because they themselves were deemed scientists—and, not coincidentally, because they told state prosecutors whatever they wanted to hear. This wasn’t just bad for individual cases; it redefined “expertise” in ways that privilege individuals over the scientific method.

In that environment, I can’t fault Americans for failing to recognize legitimate science, even when ignorance caused human death. COVID, global warming, and industrial pollution are serious concerns supported by serious evidence. But Americans need responsible individuals to translate that evidence for us, and our credentialed experts act in bad faith. We’re left paying the price.