Huffington (Issue #34)

DR. OZ ON SILVER LININGS | AWARD SHOW MANIA | MIKE TYSON, SERIOUSLY

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

DOUBT FORENSICS ON TRIAL IN MISSISSIPPI

FEBRUARY 3, 2013

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02.03.13 #34 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Obama Slams the Press ... The Diary of Amy Poehler Q&A: Mike Tyson HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE

Voices MEHMET OZ: The Silver Lining of Mental Illness GARY HART: One Seat That’s Always Saved for Republicans

DOUBT Inside a Mississippi murder scandal.

BY RADLEY BALKO

LISA BELKIN: What I Know About Work Now That I’m in My 50s QUOTED

Exit SPORTS: Har-Who? The Super Bowl Bros Aren’t the Only Story in NOLA

FROM TOP: RADLEY BALKO; ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

EAT NOW: Totchos BEHIND THE SCENES: Why Are There So Many Award Shows?

TFU

LEFT OUT Too poor for healthcare.

FROM THE EDITOR: ‘Good People Live Here’

Too rich for Medicaid.

BY PETER S. GOODMAN AND JEFFREY YOUNG

ON THE COVER:

Illustration by Troy Dunham

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

‘ Good People Live Here’ IN THIS WEEK’S issue, Peter S. Goodman and Jeffrey Young look at the 49 million Americans who lack health insurance, “a crowded group that no one chooses to join.” And as the time nears when Obamacare will finally go into effect, Goodman and Young tell the stories of several Americans who would benefit from it — and who are struggling under the current system. These stories, while unique, all share one quality: a vicious cycle of unmet medical needs, worry and financial strain. As one health care expert puts it, “We have a health care system that has the best medical

ART STREIBER

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science in the world that delivers third-world health care to the vast majority of our population.”

There’s Laura Johnson, who was deemed too well-off by the state of Louisiana to receive Medicaid, but who is also unable to afford $200 a month for the prescription drugs to treat her high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. So she simply doesn’t take her pills on a regular basis, opting instead for what Goodman and Young call “a selfwritten prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.”

And Dianne Laird, who lost her job — and her health insur-

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ance — at the same time her husband’s kayak rental company shut down. These losses paved the way for more setbacks: they scraped by on their unemployment benefits, they sold their house, Dianne got a part-time job that paid even less than unemployment. And though they are poor by the federal standard, there is no safety net to provide them with health insurance.

As Dianne put it, “If something happens, then I’m going to have to deal with it.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Radley Balko writes about a Mississippi cold case — part real-life murder mystery, part exposé of the state’s justice system. The crime is the gruesome 1997 murder of 39-year-old Kathy Mabry. The town is Belzoni, Miss., a place rooted in Civil Rights-era racial turmoil, and which today is home to the World Catfish Festival and the “Miss Catfish” pageant. This is the part of the state that produced great bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James. Balko introduces us to characters who could have sprung from a Mississippi murder ballad: J.D. “Bubba” Roseman, the

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county’s first black sheriff; Steven Hayne, a cigar-smoking medical examiner who performed autopsies in the basement of a loBalko cal funeral home; Miintroduces us chael West, a dentist to characters and self-proclaimed who could have bite-mark expert sprung from who assisted on, and a Mississippi sometimes videotaped, those autopmurder ballad.” sies; and Julie Mae Wilson, the mother of the victim, who spent most of her life working in cotton fields.

After 15 years the case remained unsolved, and lawyers from the Mississippi Innocence Project began to investigate. Their scrutiny raised questions about the state’s justice system and prompted criticisms that Mississippi officials were more interested in defending themselves than solving the case — and preventing future crimes. Roseman, the sheriff, is among the critics; as he puts it, “Good people live here.

They deserve to feel safe. I took it personal.”

ARIANNA

POINTERS

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Enter

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IMMIGRATION 1 REFORM TAKES THE SPOTLIGHT

A bipartisan group of eight senators introduced a framework for immigration reform Monday, just one day before President Obama spoke on the issue. The plan is comprised of four points and includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but only after border security measures kick in.

“This will be an arduous pathway, but it will be a fair one,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said at a press conference. The “gang of eight” said they want to introduce legislation in March or April. Speaking from Las Vegas, Obama said he is encouraged by the senators’ plan. “The good news is that -for the first time in many years -- Republicans and Democrats seem ready to tackle this problem together,” he said.

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POINTERS

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OBAMA ON 60 MINUTES: ‘YOU GUYS IN THE PRESS ARE INCORRIGIBLE’

In his first joint interview with anyone other than Michelle Obama, the president sat down with Hillary Clinton on 60 Minutes. When interviewer Steve Kroft asked, “what’s the date of expiration on this endorsement?” Obama wouldn’t hear it. “Steve, you guys in the press are incorrigible. I literally got inaugurated four days ago,” he said.

THE BOY SCOUTS COULD MAKE A MAJOR CHANGE

Boy Scouts of America is considering lifting its ban against gay members, which has been in place for decades. The revised policy would remove the ban from the organization’s national rules, and local sponsoring organizations would be able to decide for themselves who could join the ranks. The announcement comes just seven months after the organization reaffirmed its ban on gay scouts and scout leaders.

SANDY AID BILL PASSES SENATE ... FINALLY The long-delayed bill to bring relief to victims of superstorm Sandy passed the Senate this week and now heads to President Obama’s desk. The $51 billion in aid will go toward reconstruction of coastal areas and a federal program that gives cash grants to hurricane victims.

The Senate had passed a relief package in September, but House Republicans failed to bring it up for a vote before the end of the congressional session.

Enter

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POINTERS

AMY POEHLER WRITING FIRST BOOK

After successfully co-hosting the Golden Globes, Amy Poehler is trying her hand at writing. It Books announced that Poehler has an agreement for an “illustrated, nonlinear diary” that is scheduled for release in 2014. Her fans squealed with delight upon hearing the news, with many on Twitter saying the book is going on their wishlist, and one tweeting, “Amy Poehler! Writing a book! I don’t even remember praying for this!”

GRIM DECADE AHEAD FOR BARNES & NOBLE

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FROM TOP: LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES; JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

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Barnes & Noble will close at least 20 stores a year for the next decade, a top exec told The Wall Street Journal. The closings would reduce the total number of stores by a third if the company does not open any new ones. During the last fiscal year, Barnes & Noble did not open any new locations and closed 14 existing ones. In response to the report, Barnes & Noble said it “is fully committed to the retail concept for the long term.”

THAT’S VIRAL MICROSOFT TAKES IT BACK A DECADE OR TWO

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

HER HIPS DON’T LIE

15 DRAWINGS THAT DIDN’T MAKE PARENTS PROUD

AND ... SHE’S ... OUTTTTTTA THERE!

TURNS OUT SELENA GOMEZ IS HUMAN

FROM TOP: JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ILYA S. SAVENOK/GETTY IMAGES

Enter

Q&A

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Mike Tyson on the Backlash to His Role on Law & Order: SVU “This is all new to me, being this Mr. Non-Threatening Black Man. So I’m just trying. I’m really trying.

I’m trying not to give up.”

Above: Tyson, 46, at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. Below: Tyson promotes his one-man Broadway show, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, directed by Spike Lee (right).

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (ANDALE); HUFFINGTON POST (PRESIDENT ROMNEY); EVERRETT COLLECTION (THE RIGHT TO FIGHT); AUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE; WWW.BENNET.SENATE.GOV; AP PHOTO/NASSER NASSER; AP PHOTO/NASSER NASSER; AP PHOTO/MATT YORK; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE (THE IMMIGRATION 8)

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PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDITTap TK here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post.

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Š 2011 THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

Voices

The Silver Lining of Mental Illness

DR. MEHMET OZ

WHEN I ATTENDED the candlelight vigil memorializing the shooting victims of the Newtown Massacre, I talked with people in the community who kept trying to understand the complex machinations in a sick mind that commits such a senseless act. The Newtown shooting created a new sense of urgency to understand and embrace

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook.

Voices mental illness. Just as we tackled a threat to our national security with a comprehensive Homeland Security approach, we need to break down barriers with a comprehensive approach to treating mental illness. This is needed to keep us safe and to save us money, as we alleviate the personal pain so many feel. Most importantly as a nation we owe it to the victims of Newtown and their honor.

With the best of intentions, due to past abuses, we have strict rules around confidentiality and confinement of those with mental illness. As a result, mental health professionals have a confined ability to push solutions on families.

Yet heart surgeons like me can do whatever we deem appropriate to help a heart attack victim, including emergency transport to catheterization labs.

In many ways, managing mental illness represents the final frontier of medicine because we struggle with the painful reality of coping with an invisible ailment that sneaks up on us unpredictably and has overt consequences on families and communities. But we are surrounded by differing degrees of mental illness in ourselves, in relatives we love, and

DR. MEHMET OZ

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

in some people that we should fear. I was thrilled to witness this reality addressed so tenderly in the hit movie, Silver Linings Playbook. The movie’s humor cracks our natural defense against “messed up people” so wisdom and insight penetrates into our psyche. More importantly, solutions for the unlikely protagonists come from unexpected places as profoundly flawed people comple-

We have strict rules around confidentiality and confinement of those with mental illness. As a result, mental health professionals have a confined ability to push solutions on families.” ment each other’s ailments. An institutionalized manic-depressive man (Pat Jr.) is freed by his loving mother who is willing to lie to her obsessive, compulsive gambler husband (Pat Sr.) to give the boy another chance. Pat Sr.’s first question after being surprised by his son’s return is, “Are you taking the right dosage?” Pat Jr. falls in love with a complementarily strange woman and they awaken a

Voices dormant sense of hope by understanding each other without judgment. The movie shows us the humanity and similarities in the lives of those who are challenged with major disorders.

Silver Linings Playbook reminds us that what makes us so adorable as a species is how unique we really are, yet how we complement each other like pieces of a puzzle. I remember taking my three daughters to the Natural History Museum in New York for our annual pilgrimage to the gemstone section. They would innocently pick the stones that they hoped to take home as we left.

Two would fight over the Hope diamond while another picked the purest sapphire. None of them ever picked the huge jade stone.

Why? Because a flawless jade is pretty boring. What makes them beautiful is their flaws. Just like each of us. We are all unusual in our own ways, but these are the qualities that endear us to the people who care for us.

Mental illness can no longer be stigmatized as we hide our heads in the sand. Let’s recognize that when well-managed, symptoms can provide the color and nuance to our lives and shame

DR. MEHMET OZ

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

has no place. In fact, many creative geniuses do their best work when depressed, because feeling down calls for action as we seek to change a reality that is pulling us down. Instead of ignoring the cries for help of those afflicted with mental illness, let’s provide more comprehensive tools to help our communities cope. Like everything else, it takes a village, one I am proud to be a part of.

Silver Linings Playbook reminds us that what makes us so adorable as a species is how unique we really are, yet how we complement each other like pieces of a puzzle.”

The first step will be revisiting our society’s outlook on mental illness. As Pat Sr. proclaims to his son, “Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to the signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it’s a sin if you don’t reach back.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz is vice-chair and professor of surgery at Columbia University.

Voices

GARY HART

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS, FILE

One Seat That’s Always Saved for Republicans

T

HERE IS A DISTINCT pattern for Democratic presidents to select Republicans as Secretaries of Defense.

These include: Bill Cohen, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta (a Democrat who began as a Republican), and now Chuck Hagel. All of these were good Secretaries. ¶ But the question is whether there are any Democrats who are qualified to manage the Pentagon, and if not, why not. There is some history to consider. For decades, Taft (or traditional conservative, isolationist) Republicans claimed that the Democratic party was the war party. They cited Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson as evidence. The political claim was: “Democrats get us into wars.” This was repeated by a traditionally con-

Pres. Obama shakes hands with his choice for Defense Secretary, former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel (R).

Voices servative Republican Robert Dole as recently as the late 1970s.

But he was late in his timing.

Anti-Vietnam war protesters gravitated toward the Democratic party during the 1968 and 1972 elections and, thereafter, exerted influence on most matters relating to the military. They opposed the draft, most major new weapons systems, military intervention almost anywhere, Cold War confrontations, and most of all increased military budgets. To be liberal was to be skeptical if not hostile toward defense and the military.

As a new member of the Senate Armed Services Committee during this transition from war party to peace party in the 1970s, this became counter-productive at the least and obstructionist at the worst. We had legitimate national security concerns. The issue wasn’t to run and hide from this reality but how best to respond to it.

If you look at the national leaders the Democratic party produced in the last 30 or 40 years, very few qualified as knowledgeable about security and defense matters. So, once elected to national office, they found it necessary to look to the new war party, the Republicans, for credentials on defense. It was non-

GARY HART

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sense to believe that by selecting a Republican Secretary of Defense a Democratic White House was buying insurance against attacks for being “weak on defense.” It has never worked. There is no such insurance, as Pres. Obama will find with Secretary of Defense Hagel whose nomination will be opposed by many if not most Republicans.

As a decorated Vietnam war veteran, Sen. Hagel is rightly skeptical of using military force as the preeminent foreign policy tool, and There he has more strictly is a distinct defined U.S. national pattern for security interests than Democratic the knee-jerk hawks presidents who rarely find a conto select flict in which they do Republicans not wish to intervene. as Secretaries But even after he has of Defense.” a term as a successful Secretary of Defense as I hope, there will still remain the question: When will Democrats rightly claim to be the most knowledgeable, thoughtful, experienced, imaginative leaders on defense of our nation?

Gary Hart is a former Democratic Senator and president of Hart International, Ltd.

Voices

LISA BELKIN

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

GETTY IMAGES/IMAGENAVI

What I Know About Work Now That I’m in My 50s BACK WHEN my older son was a toddler, I found him in his booster seat one morning scribbling furiously on a legal pad with a stub of a crayon.

“Evan,” I asked, “do you want breakfast?”

“I can’t talk, Mommy,” he answered. “I have to work or my editor will be mad with me.”

I’ve spent the decades since trying to live the balanced message that I want my children to hear.

I’m not quite there yet, but over the years I have gotten closer, and learned more than a little — not just about the meaning of life, but also of work.

1. It is okay to live for your work. “No one on her deathbed ever said, ‘I should have spent more time at the office,’ “ the saying goes. But I’d wager that many have looked

Voices back on their lives and been damn proud of what they accomplished at work. Isn’t the goal to find something you are so passionate about that you want to be doing it all the time? Go ahead. Define yourself by what you do.

2. You probably won’t feel that way every day, or even every year. The workplace has changed — job security is more about months than decades now — and that has freed workers to change, too. My mother (who has been a teacher, guidance counselor, lawyer, businesswoman, business law professor and travel agent) believes you should change careers every seven years so you don’t get bored. That’s not practical for all of us, but odds are you will change your feelings about work at least that often.

3. Embrace that. Ping pong around, zig and zag — not only from one job to the next, but from one state of mind to another. Go full throttle straight out of school. Take a more scenic side road during the years while you raise children.

Roar back again when those kids are grown. Or, maybe, the other way around. It doesn’t make you an inconsistent worker, but rather a better human being.

4. Build your life with someone in a

LISA BELKIN

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

different line of work. My two serious relationships before I met my husband were with journalists. In one, he was just plain better at it than I was; in the second, I was more successful. In both, the feeling of competition broke us. So I married a pediatrician. He gets to be the best doctor in our house, and I get to be the best reporter.

5. Talk to that person about work and life from the start. Are there unspo-

What seems like a crisis will probably look far less dramatic by tomorrow, and it’s better to take the long view of life rather than riding the roller coaster day to day.” ken assumptions that one of you will be the breadwinner and the other the caregiver? You won’t be able to anticipate the choices life will throw your way, but you will get comfortable with the conversation when those choices arise.

6. Stop feeling guilty about the gel time. The best place to find inspiration, perspective, enthusiasm or direction in your job is outside of it. Take a walk, read a book, play with your kids. When I get stuck

Voices in my writing, I take a shower.

7. Sometimes you just have to do the work. Or, as my grandmother used to say, there’s a reason they call it work. No job is free from the tasks you hate. Complaining only makes them take longer.

8. Sheryl Sandberg is right. Too many women “leave before they leave,” moving emotionally away from work when they start to have families, failing to “raise their hands” for promotions and big projects.

9. Anne-Marie Slaughter is right, too.

Women can raise their hands day and night, but there are logistical barriers in the current outdated workplace, that are far higher than any “ambition gap.” The reason women are “leaning out,” rather than “leaning in,” is largely because they are overwhelmed by the impossibility of “doing it all.”

10. They are both right because the answer is somewhere in the middle. A la Sandberg, women need to raise their hands — but not only for promotions. A la Slaughter, they also need to demand workplaces that are more flexible day to day as well as year to year. All of us need to slow down and speed up on the career track, interspersing times when work is all encompassing with times when it isn’t.

LISA BELKIN

The solution is staring us in the face: embracing the pauses rather than writing off the workers who take them.

11. I know more than an eager 20-something. I am wiser. I have made more mistakes, hence learned more lessons. I know that what seems like a crisis, or a debacle, or a triumph, will probably look far less dramatic by tomorrow, and it’s better to take the long view of life rather than riding the roller coaster day to day.

12. They know more than I. Every day they teach me something about technology, or pop culture, or optimism, or how things need not be done the way they’ve always been done. Mostly they have taught me about balance. Everything I just wrote I learned by trying to articulate it for the now-21-year-old who once scribbled on a pad at breakfast. His generation deserves a better mix of what Freud called the “cornerstones of our humanness,” love and work. Mine can’t build that for him, but we can take hardwon knowledge and point the way.

Lisa Belkin is The Huffington Post’s senior columnist on life, work and family.

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

Voices

QUOTED

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“In porn I am used to working with professionals who are courteous to others. But Lindsay was like a child lashing out.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JASON KEMPIN/GETTY IMAGES; JEFF VESPA/GETTY IMAGES FOR GQ; WIKIPEDIA COMMONS/SPLETTE; JEFFERSON BERNARDES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

— Porn star James Deen, who stars opposite

“ I got my first screen role at 12 years old in the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation, playing Chevy Chase’s niece. Today I would be cast as his wife. In two years, I will play his mother.”

Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons, told The Sun

— Jane Krakowski, during the SAG Awards

“ It was terrible inside — it was like one of those films of the Holocaust, bodies piled atop one another.”

— Police inspector Sandro Meinerz on the Brazil nightclub

fire that killed more than 230 people early Sunday

“ Scientists should be as popular as rock stars.”

— HuffPost commenter ahordeofrand,

on the quadruple helix DNA found in human cells that may aid the cancer fight

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AP PHOTO/ROGELIO V. SOLIS; ANTONIO DE MORAES BARROS FILHO/ WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES; KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

“ Typical GOP rationalization.

If we just ignore it, it’s not a problem. Unless of course if it can be bombed.”

— HuffPost commenter cgjgeoman, on Mississippi’s

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“ Five billion of them on the planet and the sight of one is still a news event.”

— HuffPost commenter rafaelrobyns, on an Alexandre Vauthier couture show featuring a dress exposing a model’s breast

GOP governor saying no American lacks healthcare

It is the height of revisionism to try to reinstate an Italian dictator who helped legitimize and prop up Hitler as a ‘reincarnated good guy.’

— Rabbi Marvin Hier on former Italian Premier Silvio

Berlusconi, who praised Benito Mussolini for “having done good” despite the Fascist dictator’s anti-Jewish laws

“ You know, these sandwiches are also not made in a subway.”

— HuffPost commenter Spacecowboy64, on Subway’s 11-inch “footlong” sandwich

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

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FEATURES MURDER AND MALFEASANCE IN MISSISSIPPI LEFT OUT

A Forensic Nightmare Shakes Mississippi

DOUBT

By RADLEY BALKO

PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS PAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK

BELZONI, MISS. —

J.D. “BUBBA” ROSEMAN, the first black sheriff of Humphreys County, is a convivial man. In his office and in casual conversations on the street in this town of 2,200, he engages people quickly and easily, inquiring about a son on the football team, a niece in college or a grandmother in the hospital. He talks loud and fast, always smiling, and works a deep, infectious laugh into just about every conversation. ¶ But when Roseman, 57, talks about Kathy Mabry, the mirth drains from his face. His brow straightens. He speaks softly. He pauses from time to time to swallow the catch that latches onto his words.

His eyes sometimes well up. It’s an unexpected reaction from a stout man wearing a gun.

RADLEY BALKO

DOUBT

Mabry was murdered here in 1997 at the age of 39. This part of America once produced murder ballads about brutal crimes like this one — blues greats like Pinetop Perkins, Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson have all called Humphreys County home. Kathy Mabry’s killer raped her, then slashed her face, head and throat with a rusty razor blade. She was left to bleed to death on the floor of a vacant house.

“I think about that case every day,” Roseman says. “I told Kathy’s momma I wouldn’t get an honest’s night’s rest until we got the man who did this.”

Roseman was the Belzoni police chief back then, the first black man elected to that position as well, a sign of how much the region has changed over the past half century. The Rev. George Lee was murdered here in 1955, in what may have been the first assassination of the civil rights era. In those years, white citizen councils regularly beat volunteers attempting to register blacks to vote, earning the town the nickname “Bloody Belzoni.”

Today, Humphreys (population: about 9,000) is the seventh-poorest county in America’s poorest state. The poverty rate here approaches 40 percent. But it’s also a close-knit community, where families can go back several generations or more.

Violent crime is rare. The county saw all of one murder in 2012. “It just doesn’t happen that often here,” Roseman says.

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Sheriff J.D. “Bubba” Roseman of Humphreys County, Miss.

Mabry’s murder stunned people here in part because it was so unexpected, but also because it was so unspeakably vicious. “She came from a quiet, respected family,” Roseman says. “They’re well-liked. Most folks around here hadn’t ever experienced that kind of murder. So it shook the town. It’s still shaking the town.”

The case went unsolved for 15 years, until December, after a casual courtroom conversation led lawyers from the Mississippi Innocence Project to investigate it. That two attorneys for an organization better known for getting the wrongly convicted out of prison would take it upon themselves to solve a cold case is remarkable enough. Their search spread from Columbus in the northeastern part of the state, to Oxford in the northwest, to the crime lab in Jackson, to a dusty attic in the Humphreys Coun-

DOUBT

ty courthouse.

The reason they felt compelled to act is part of a larger scandal currently unfolding in Mississippi. The original police investigation into Mabry’s murder hinged on the forensic analysis of Steven Hayne, a longtime Mississippi medical examiner, and Michael West, a dentist and self-proclaimed bite-mark expert.

Hayne was a doctor in private practice who performed nearly all of the state’s autopsies. West was one of his frequent collaborators. The two men have been at the heart of the Mississippi death investigation system for two decades. West has testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in thousands, including a number of death penalty cases.

Media investigations over the years, however, including my own for The Huffington Post and Reason magazine, have revealed that both Hayne and West have contributed critical evidence that led to the convictions of people who were later exonerated, and routinely and flagrantly flouted the ethical and professional standards of their respective fields. West, for example, once claimed he could match the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich found at a murder scene to the the teeth of the prime suspect. Hayne claimed the bullet wounds in a murder victim showed that two people held the gun when it was fired, not one. In this case, West identified an innocent man

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for Kathy Mabry’s murder. That man spent nearly a year in jail. But the Kathy Mabry story also shows that there are victims in this mess beyond just the wrongly convicted.

Mississippi officials have thus far resisted calls for a thorough review of Hayne and West’s cases. In particular, the Mississippi Supreme Court has shown little concern over the possibility that Hayne and West may have put an untold number of innocents behind the razor wire at Parchman Penitentiary. Neither has Attorney General Jim Hood, whose office continues to defend convictions won primarily on the testimony the two men have given on the witness stand.

To concede there’s a problem would implicate many state officials who used the two men themselves in their days as prosecutors. It would also open hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases to review.

Tucker Carrington, the director of the Mississippi Innocence Project, says he and his colleague Will McIntosh decided to pursue Mabry’s killer themselves after they attempted to bring the case to the attention of the prosecutor in Humphreys County, and then to Hood’s office, and received no response from either one.

“When you take on a case and it reveals a glaring injustice like this, something that could easily be taken care of if someone would just give it some attention — you can’t just turn a blind eye to that,” Carrington says. “In the end, I guess we saw this through because no one else would.”

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The defensiveness and nonchalance of Mississippi officials over the possible wrongful conviction, imprisonment and execution of innocent people is troubling enough. (Neither Hayne nor Hood’s office responded to an interview request.

The Huffington Post was unable to reach West.) But the Kathy Mabry case shows that the harm Hayne and West have done goes deeper still. The same problems that have allowed for the conviction of innocents have also left brutal crimes unsolved, leaving those affected to grieve and worry, with little hope of closure.

“Good people live here. They deserve to feel safe,” Roseman says. “I took it personal.”

And there’s another corresponding harm when the innocent are implicated: The guilty often go free. Indeed, Kathy Mabry’s murderer went on to kill again.

FRONTLINE

‘THIS IS YOUR MAN’

Julie Mae Wilson last saw her daughter on Saturday, March 22, 1997, around 7 p.m. “She had just cooked up some fish for the boys and said she had to go out for a while,” Wilson says. “She said she’d be back in an hour or so. I never did see her again.”

Wilson has lived in Humphreys County all her life. The drive down historic Highway 61 from Memphis, Tenn., slices through the harsh, agrestic beauty for which the lower belly of the Missis-

Medical Examiner Steven Hayne.

sippi Delta is known. There are scenes of crushing poverty, gooey marshes and quiet bucolic landscapes. The route south backtracks the great black migration of the middle of the 20th century, when Delta sharecroppers traveled upriver in pursuit of better lives in Detroit, Indianapolis and Chicago. Like its neighbors, Humphreys County lost a good chunk of its population then, and still grows smaller with each census.

Wilson and her husband, now deceased, spent most of their working lives in the cotton fields. The two had eight children, including Mabry, and led the typically hardscrabble lives of black farm workers in the civil rights era.

Today, cotton has given way to a new business, catfish: raising them, processing them, eating them and celebrating them. Two-thirds of America’s farmraised catfish are grown within an hour of Belzoni. It’s home to the World Catfish Festival and the “Miss Catfish” pageant.

The downtown features a collection of

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ceramic flatheads painted in different getups — overalls, fur coats, top hats — for “Catfish on Parade,” a down-home take on Chicago’s popular “Bulls on Parade” public art exhibit. There’s also hope that the new “Delta Blues Trail” will bring tourists down from the casinos in Tunica. But the residents of the county, which is 70 percent black, still continue to struggle economically.

All of Wilson’s children have left the area and now live in Chicago with their families. She had hoped for better things for Mabry, too. Mabry graduated from high school and had started college, but then began using drugs.

“Kathy came up when things started to get better around here,” Wilson says.

“We had spent a lot of years chopping cotton. But I was working [as a maid] in houses by then. My husband was driving tractors,” Wilson says. “But she didn’t last long in college before she got into the drugs. Wasn’t long before she was back at home.”

Mabry battled her crack addiction for the rest of her life. She had some periods of sobriety. She married and had two sons. But her struggle with addiction eventually dissolved the marriage and dashed any hope of going back to school.

She fell into a series of abusive relationships. She and her boys moved in with her mother in Isola, a tiny town of 900 about 10 miles south of Belzoni.

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The last of those abusive relationships was with James Earl Gates, who was 48 at the time of the murder. “He was no good,” Wilson says. “Broke her arm once.

They were in some kind of love, but he had a short, short temper. He would come in here, into my home, and take over like he was the man of the house.

I’m just an old lady. Kathy was tiny. The boys were young. There wasn’t much we could do about him.”

Mabry didn’t come home that Saturday night in 1997. When she hadn’t returned by late Sunday morning, Wilson began to worry. She knew about her daughter’s drug problem, but Mabry had managed to handle her addiction while still taking care of her boys and working her job at the Confish catfish plant. She wasn’t one to disappear without a phone call.

On Monday morning, Gates called Wilson to ask if she knew where Mabry was. He’d called her several times over the weekend, he said, and she hadn’t picked up. Until then Wilson had worried, but just assumed her daughter had been with Gates. Now she panicked. She called Roseman and asked the police chief to look for Mabry in Belzoni. Roseman checked around town. No one had seen her.

At 5:30 a.m. the following morning, a truck driver named Junior Mitchell pulled his rig up to his house, to fill up from the diesel pump in the front yard.

Mitchell had moved out several months earlier to live with his girlfriend, but still came by from time to time to get gas

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“ When you take on a case and it reveals a glaring injustice like this … you can’t just turn a blind eye to that.” and check on his property. The place had been burglarized several times since he left, and on more than a few occasions he had shooed off the drug addicts he found squatting inside. The vacated building had become a gathering spot for them over the winter months.

That morning, March 25, Mitchell noticed that a wall panel under the carport had been kicked out. When he approached the front door to investigate, he saw a trail of blood. He followed the trail inside and discovered Kathy Mabry’s body.

The murder set the entire community on edge. “You might see someone getting shot after an argument or something, but even that is really rare,” says Dim Pyle, the mayor of Isola. “Nobody had ever seen anything like this. Because of the closeness everybody had with Kathy’s family, the whole town, both towns, well we were all just devastated.”

Roseman, the county coroner and John Allen Jones, the Humphreys County sheriff at the time, arrived at the crime scene about an hour after Mitchell found Mabry’s body. Jones called the Missis-

sippi Highway Patrol, who sent an investigator and two inspectors from the state crime lab. They began interviewing suspects that afternoon.

Mabry’s body was sent to Steven Hayne for autopsy. Though he held no official state position, and was never board certified in forensic pathology, between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, Hayne performed 80-90 percent of the autopsies in Mississippi, according to his own testimony in trials and depositions.

That amounted to an astonishing 1,5001,800 autopsies per year.

The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends that a single doctor perform no more than 250 autopsies per year. The organization refuses to certify any lab where doctors perform more than 325.

Hayne’s workload could result in some odd autopsy reports. According to a complaint filed by the Mississippi Innocence Project, in one case, Hayne included in his report the weight of a man’s spleen, and made comments about its appearance. The problem: The man’s spleen had been removed four years before he died. In an autopsy on a drowned infant, Hayne noted the weight of each of the child’s kidneys, even though one

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of them had previously been removed. In another murder case, Hayne noted in his report that he had removed and examined the decedent’s ovaries and uterus.

The victim was a man.

Mississippi’s autopsy system at the time was loaded with bad incentives. Because prosecutors and the elected coroners assigned autopsies on a case-by-case basis, doctors had a strong incentive to tell them what they wanted to hear if they wanted to benefit from future referrals. Sometimes, critics say, pleasing prosecutors meant finding things that would help them get convictions. Sometimes it meant reaching conclusions that cleared a police officer or prison guard or relative of an important person.

The state has made some progress in recent years, requiring that anyone who performs an autopsy for prosecutors be board certified, and Mississippi now has a credentialed state medical examiner. But the damage from the old system is ongoing.

“If hadn’t been Hayne,” the Innocence Project’s Carrington says, “it would have been someone else.”

Hayne performed most of his autopsies not in the state-of-the-art crime lab in Jackson, but in the basement of a funeral home owned by longtime Rankin County Coroner Jimmy Roberts. One former state official who had visited Hayne’s operation on several occasions likened it to “a sausage factory.” Another

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Dentist and “bite mark expert” Michael West.

said that in 2006 he watched Hayne and his assistants eat pork sandwiches and smoke cigars while cutting up multiple bodies at once.

Michael West, a dentist in Hattiesburg, often assisted with Hayne’s autopsies, and sometimes videotaped them.

The two men also wrote articles together.

The police investigating Mabry’s murder rounded up about half a dozen men who’d been in or near the vacant house around the time of her death and held them for questioning. Roseman and Jones initially focused on a man named Douglas Myers, an addict who’d been in the house and had a fresh scratch on his face the afternoon of the investigation.

“He couldn’t give us a good answer for that scratch,” Roseman says. But the state officials seemed interested in James Earl Gates, especially after learning that he had beaten Mabry.

Despite the history of abuse between Gates and Mabry, Roseman never liked

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Gates for the murder. “If she had been choked, or had hit her head, if she’d been dumped out in a field somewhere, I’d say, Okay, that makes sense. I could see putting that on Gates. Maybe he’d lost his temper again. Maybe he got too rough with her,” Roseman says. “But when a man who loves a woman, when he’s sleeping with the same woman, he doesn’t do her body like that. A mean man will hit a woman he loves, but he won’t cut up her face. You just don’t see that.”

Roseman also says Gates wasn’t defensive about Mabry’s death. In fact, he seemed crushed. “He showed real strong emotion when he heard she’d been killed,” Roseman says. “He didn’t try to give us an alibi. We had to ask him where he was. I don’t think he even considered the possibility that he could have been a suspect.”

He’d soon become the only suspect.

During his autopsy, Hayne claimed to have found bite marks on Mabry’s body.

As he had done in numerous other cases, Hayne then called in West, who claimed to have pioneered a new way of identifying bite marks in human skin, then matching them to one person, to the exclusion of everyone else on the planet.

He called it the “West Phenomenon.”

Conveniently, West claimed that only he could perform this method of analysis, which involved yellow goggles and ultraviolet light. He said his method couldn’t be tested by anyone else. It couldn’t be

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photographed or recorded on video to be scrutinized by other forensic specialists.

At various points in the 1990s, West and the prosecutors who used him compared his bite-mark genius to Itzhak Perlman, Galileo and Jesus Christ.

The National Academy of Sciences, however, does not consider bite-mark analysis to be credible as evidence in a trial.

On Thursday, March 27, 1997, West confirmed that what Hayne had found were indeed bite marks. He took photos of them, then drove to Belzoni to make plaster molds of the suspects’ teeth. Using only the plaster molds and the photos of the bite marks he’d brought with him, West excluded all of the men then in custody. For dramatic effect, he used the same line each time: “Sheriff, this is not your man.”

The police then escorted West to the home of James Earl Gates, who also allowed West to make an impression of his teeth. West then compared Gates’ mold to the photos. In his report, Jones writes that West next “pointed out to me the similarities between the bite marks and impressions. He informed me that this was a possible suspect.”

West then drove back to the morgue to compare the mold of Gates’ teeth directly to the marks on Mabry’s body. At 12:45 a.m., West called Jones. “This is your man,” West said.

On April 1, 1997, James Earl Gates was arrested for the rape and murder of Kathy Mabry and booked at the Humphreys County Jail.

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MISSISSIPPI’S SLOWMOTION DISASTER

By 1997, Mississippi officials should have known that Michael West was less than credible. He had already been the subject of unflattering profiles in the ABA Journal and the National Law Journal. He had also been suspended by the American Board of Forensic Odontologists for testifying beyond his expertise. In one case, he’d used the “West Phenomenon” to match the bites taken out of a halfeaten bologna sandwich found at a murder scene to the man on trial for com-

“ I don’t think there’s any doubt Sheriff Roseman wanted to solve this murder.” mitting the crime.

The defendant was convicted, but the case was later tossed out when West admitted to disposing of the sandwich after studying it. He said that he had thrown the evidence away because, since no other forensic analyst was qualified to replicate his methods, the sandwich was no longer necessary.

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Yet West remained a favorite in Mississippi courtrooms, and among law enforcement officials and prosecutors. In 1999, the Mississippi Supreme Court considered the appeal of Kennedy Brewer, who was on death row for the rape and murder of 3-year-old Christine Jackson six years earlier.

As in the Mabry case, Hayne had claimed to find bite marks on the victim’s body. He then called in West, who matched the marks to the dentition of the chief suspect, in this case Brewer, the boyfriend of the girl’s mother. In light of the continuing revelations about West, Brewer’s attorneys asked the court to overturn the conviction and death sentence, and to suppress West’s testimony.

The court refused. According to the majority opinion, West still possessed the “knowledge, skill, experience, training and education necessary to qualify as an expert in forensic odontology.”

If you don’t know better, West’s hokum can sound convincing. “I should have gone with my instincts about Gates,” Roseman says. “But when West showed me the video where he matched the marks, he made a good case. I just thought, this is what the man does every day. All these judges and crime lab folks trust him. He sounds scientific. Who am I to say he’s wrong?”

In fact, in Mabry’s case West may not have been wrong about the bite marks.

Mabry’s previous paramours told Roseman that she enjoyed rough sex, included biting. Gates himself admitted to

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In another murder case, Hayne noted in his report that he had removed and examined the decedent’s ovaries and uterus. The victim was a man. having bitten his girlfriend a few weeks before she died. That, of course, doesn’t validate West’s methods. Gates may have bitten Mabry, but there was no evidence he bit her on the day she died (indeed, a competent analyst should have recognized that the marks were weeks old).

And the bite marks weren’t evidence that he killed her.

In October 1997, Gates’ attorney asked Humphreys County Circuit Court Judge Jannie Lewis to suppress West’s testimony, citing the questions about West’s credibility and about bite-mark evidence in general. Lewis refused, finding that there was no reason to doubt West’s credibility, though Lewis did give Gates funding to hire his own expert witness.

A few months later, District Attorney James Powell sent the scrapings taken from Mabry’s fingernails to the crime lab in Jackson for DNA testing. Such testing was more primitive at that time. A DNA test could exclude someone as a suspect, but couldn’t yet match someone to biological evidence the way the technology can today. The tests came back a few

weeks later. Kathy Mabry had scratched someone in a frantic fight to save her life, but it wasn’t James Earl Gates. In fact, it wasn’t any of the men the police had rounded up as suspects — not even Douglas Myles, the man with the scratch on his cheek.

On January 21, 1998, Powell dismissed the murder charge against Gates. It was now 10 months after the crime. Memories had faded. Some witnesses had left town. And Roseman and Jones were back to square one.

Julie Mae Wilson was crushed when she heard the news. Her daughter’s killer was still on the loose, and with so much time now passed, it seemed unlikely he’d ever be found. But she was also terrified.

Gates may not have murdered Mabry, but he had shown he could be a violent man. He was now free, likely angry, and almost certainly knew that Wilson had told the police he beat her daughter, which is likely what first made him a suspect. Roseman and Jones told Gates he wasn’t to go anywhere near Wilson, her home, or Mabry’s boys without Wilson’s permission.

“We didn’t see him much after that,” Wilson says. “But those first few weeks,

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RADLEY BALKO

In a town with a population of only 2,200, Mabry’s murder shook the residents of Belzoni.

we were awful scared.”

While Gates was exonerated, Hayne and West continued to apply their questionable brand of forensic analysis to other cases. At the same time, their work also began to attract more scrutiny, though mostly from outside the state.

In 2001, a defense attorney in Arizona tricked West into matching crime scene photos of a bite mark left on a murder victim’s breast to a dental mold taken from the mouth of the attorney’s own private investigator, who obviously had

nothing to do with the crime. After accepting a retainer fee, West confidently sent back a 30-minute video in which he methodically explained how the bite marks in the photos could only have come from the attorney’s “suspect.”

It was the best evidence to date that West is a charlatan. And yet Mississippi prosecutors still defended convictions won on West’s testimony, and Mississippi judges still upheld them.

In 2002, Kennedy Brewer’s attorneys were finally able to test the DNA of the semen found in young Christine Jackson’s body. The tests showed that the DNA did not belong to Brewer. But

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rather than release Brewer and declare him innocent, West and District Attorney Forrest Allgood insisted that while someone else may have raped the little girl, West’s analysis still clearly showed that Brewer had bitten her.

They posited that perhaps Brewer had held the girl down and bitten her while someone else raped her. Brewer’s conviction was overturned, but Allgood promised to try him again. So Brewer remained in prison. Brewer’s attorneys next tried to get the DNA profile of Christine Jackson’s killer uploaded to state and national databases to see if

“ How many other cases like this are out there?” they could find a match. Allgood fought them every step of the way. (Allgood did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2004, Tyler Edmonds was convicted of conspiring with his sister to kill her husband. Edmonds was just 13 at the time. The prosecution’s theory was that Edmonds and his sister had simultaneously held and fired a gun at the victim while he slept. Hayne testified that he could tell by the bullet wounds in the body that there were two hands on the gun that created them.

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That assertion was too preposterous even for the Mississippi Supreme Court.

In 2007, the court overturned the verdict — but also went out of its way to explain that the ruling pertained only to the Edmonds case. The court wasn’t questioning Hayne’s credentials or credibility in other cases, it said.

The following February, the Innocence Projects of New York and Mississippi, now representing Kennedy Brewer, were finally permitted to search the DNA databases for a match to the semen found in Christine Jackson. The search not only turned up a match, it also found a match to the rape and murder of another little girl in the same county 18 months before Jackson was killed. Hayne and West’s testimony had already helped Allgood convict another innocent man, Levon Brooks, for that crime.

The DNA in both cases matched that of 51-year-old Albert Johnson. Johnson was arrested and convicted for both murders. In both cases, Hayne claimed to have found bite marks other doctors had missed and called in West, who matched the alleged bites to the dental molds of the prosecutor’s main suspect (who in both cases happened to be the mother’s boyfriend). Johnson was initially a suspect in both cases.

Had Hayne and West not been so eager to affirm the hunches of law enforcement, Christine Jackson could well be alive today. Brewer and Brooks were released, having served over 30 years in prison between them.

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Since then, the evidence against Hayne and West has continued to pile up. In 2009, I reported on the case of Jimmie Duncan, who was convicted in Louisiana in 1993 of sexually abusing and murdering the daughter of his girlfriend. That case produced video of West performing one of his bite-mark examinations. The video shows him repeatedly jamming a plaster mold he’d made of the suspect’s teeth into the skin of the alleged victim, 18-month-old Haley Oliveaux.

A similar video surfaced in the case of Leigh Stubbs, which The Huffington Post reported on last year. Stubbs was convicted in Mississippi in 2001 of assaulting Janet Kimberly Williams, in what prosecutors hinted may have been a quarrel between lovers. West claimed that he had matched bite marks on the victim’s hip to Stubbs’ teeth, and also testified, bizarrely, that lesbians were more likely to bite one another during domestic disputes.

The videotaped examinations in the Duncan and Stubbs cases show that, at best, West was committing malpractice, tampering with evidence, and desecrating a corpse. (In the Stubbs case, West may have committed assault, since he performed his analysis on the alleged victim while she was comatose.) At worst, West was using dental molds of the defendants in these cases to create bite marks.

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Julie Mae Wilson in her home in December 2012.

In response to the Stubbs video, Attorney General Jim Hood told a local TV station that he had assigned Assistant Attorney General Marvin Sanders to “investigate” a number of cases involving Michael West — the first time state officials appear to have opened any such inquiry into his work. But it appears to have been little more than talk. When asked about that investigation at a subsequent hearing in the Stubbs case, Sanders said his investigation had consisted of “a Westlaw search,” basically the legal equivalent of a Google search.

The litigation in the Stubbs case also unleashed another bombshell. “I no longer believe in bite mark analysis,” West confessed in a deposition last year.

Hayne made a similar pronouncement.

Stubbs had been convicted largely based on West’s analysis. Incredibly,

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Had Hayne and West not been so eager to affirm the hunches of law enforcement, Christine Jackson could well be alive today. however, after the court threw out Stubbs’ conviction last year, due to the fact that prosecutors failed to turn over an FBI report contradicting West’s testimony, Jim Hood’s office announced that it would still seek to retry Leigh Stubbs.

The total number of convictions tainted by Hayne and West’s testimony could number in the hundreds, or even higher. Additionally, there are likely cases in which a suspicious death that should have been ruled a homicide was dismissed by Hayne as a suicide or death by natural causes. Civil rights groups have long had suspicions about Hayne’s autopsies on people who have died in police custody, for example. Hayne and West have also testified in numerous civil cases, and West has brought his bite-mark voodoo to custody disputes.

Jimmie Duncan is still on death row in Louisiana.

FINDING KATHY MABRY’S KILLER

In 2007, Tucker Carrington moved from Washington, D.C. to Oxford, Miss., to open the Mississippi Innocence Project,

started in part with funding from bestselling author John Grisham.

A couple years later, as Carrington began to learn about the central role Hayne and West played in the state’s criminal justice system, his office started assembling dossiers on the two men and filing relief petitions in the cases in which their testimony may have had an impact on a guilty verdict. So far, the office of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has opposed Carrington’s office in every one of these cases.

Innocence Project attorney Will McIntosh first heard about Mabry in January 2011, from the former prosecutor on the case, James Powell, who had since retired and was working in private practice as a defense attorney. McIntosh contacted the Humphreys County clerk’s office, which faxed him a copy of the docket — a list of the Mabry case’s procedural history.

That wasn’t much to go on. Because the Mississippi Innocence Project’s small team was busy at the time with other cases and the broader investigation into Hayne and West, they didn’t follow up.

But the following August, at the Lowndes County courtroom in Columbus, Miss., Powell was again chatting

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A view of Belzoni’s downtown area.

about Hayne and West and the latest in the Stubbs case, this time with Andre de Gruy, who heads up Mississippi’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel. In that conversation, Powell again casually mentioned the Mabry case. A few days later, de Grey mentioned Powell’s comments in passing during a conversation with Carrington.

West had testified in numerous other cases over the years — including the Stubbs case — that his method of bitemark analysis had never been wrong. Yet it had clearly been wrong in the Mabry investigation, in which West had pointed the finger at an innocent man, James

Earl Gates. To Carrington, the Mabry case was yet more evidence that West had knowingly lied on the witness stand.

“I think that’s when we really put two and two together,” Carrington says. “We realized that not only had West again identified the wrong person, but that this case was still open, and that if there had been primitive DNA testing to clear Gates, there was at least some chance that the biological evidence was still around, and could be retested with more modern technology.”

Carrington first spoke with Powell, who couldn’t remember the name of the victim. He reached out to the office of the new district attorney, Akellie Oliver, but never heard back. He finally reached

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out to Ken Winter, the executive director of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, and then to Sam Howell, director of the Mississippi State Crime Lab. Howell said there wasn’t much he could do without the victim’s name and the number the crime lab had assigned to the case. McIntosh went back to the Humphreys County clerk. This time he spoke with Deputy Clerk Sharon Neal, who remembered the case well and said she’d set out to find the complete file.

“She found it upstairs, in a nasty

One former state official who had visited Hayne’s operation on several occasions likened it to “a sausage factory.” courthouse attic in a dusty file cabinet with junk all around it,” McIntosh writes via email. That file contained enough information to allow Howell to find the case at the crime lab. To everyone’s surprise, the biological evidence was still stored at the lab.

“That was remarkable,” Carrington

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says. “The evidence usually gets sent back to the prosecutor or the police department [where DNA evidence isn’t necessarily well preserved], especially in a case that hasn’t been closed. For whatever reason, in this case no one asked for it back, so it stayed at the lab.”

Howell created a DNA profile and uploaded it to CODIS, the FBI database.

The program spit back a match. Kathy Mabry had been raped and murdered by 37-year-old Michael Johnson, a former resident of Belzoni.

There would be no manhunt to track Johnson down. Five years after he killed Mabry, he beat a man to death with a hammer in Rankin County, Miss. He was convicted of murder in 2003, and had been in prison ever since.

Ken Winter says he’s never seen anything quite like it. “You don’t normally see defense attorneys go out of their way to solve a murder like that. I was just tickled to death when I heard that they got him. It speaks to the integrity of Tucker and that office.”

When Roseman learned the results of the Innocence Project’s investigation, the first thing he did was call up Julie Mae Wilson. She had just returned from putting flowers on her daughter’s grave.

“Thank you, Jesus,” she said.

After hanging up with Wilson, Roseman says he quietly closed the door to his office. He stops talking for a moment, and looks away.

“I just sat at my desk and cried,” he says.

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RADLEY BALKO (3)

‘A LOT OF THINGS JUST SLIP THROUGH THE CRACKS’

Roseman says there’s little doubt in his mind that if West hadn’t effectively ended the investigation he’d have found Michael Johnson.

“We knew she had been dropped off with Johnson to get some dope from him about a week before the murder,” Roseman says. “There were some kids we talked to who we think saw Kathy’s killer leave the house. They weren’t volunteering anything then, but they were scared.

Everybody was scared to talk about anything back then, because the crime was so brutal. If a witness is scared, they’ll confirm something you already know, but they won’t always give that to you on their own. We were going to go back and talk to the witnesses after we learned Kathy had met with Johnson. But West ended the investigation after just a few days. We never got the chance to get that far.”

Roseman says that after the charges against Gates were dropped, he continued to investigate the case the best he could, when he could. But a year out, witness memories had faded. Some had moved away. The conventional wisdom, law enforcement officials say, is that the odds of solving a murder are cut in half after 48 hours. A year after putting the investigation on ice due to the mistaken belief that the killer was sitting in a jail

Belzoni, Miss. (above and below), and Isola, Miss. (middle).

cell, the outlook for closing the case seemed dim.

But the biological evidence taken from Kathy Mabry was always available. As chief of police — and then later as sheriff — Roseman could have ordered the more advanced DNA testing himself, really any

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time after it became available in the early 2000s. In talking to him, it becomes clear that he didn’t really understand that more advanced testing was possible.

“In some of the poorer, more rural counties in Mississippi, your sheriff or chief of police just doesn’t have the resources to keep up with the latest technology,” says Ken Winter. “They depend on the crime lab, on prosecutors, on state officials to know what’s going on. I don’t think there’s any doubt Sheriff Roseman wanted to solve this murder. But you had a switch in the DA’s office, a backlog in the crime lab, and of course this mess with Hayne and West. I think a lot of things just slip through the cracks.”

But of course the DA’s office and the attorney general had the resources. So why didn’t they take up Mabry’s case again?

“I think it’s just the old story about the squeaky wheel getting the grease,” says Oliver Diaz, Jr., a former associate justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court. “If you have a powerful family, an influential family pushing the DA, then the case will get some attention. But if there’s no one to champion the cause, the case gets buried under other priorities. It’s unfortunate, and I don’t think it’s a problem that’s limited to Mississippi. It’s just the way things are.”

In fact, many of these problems exist well outside of Mississippi. Forensic scandals have been erupting all across

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the country over the last decade. Most recently, there was a scandal at the state drug lab in Massachusetts that could affect thousands of convictions; another drug lab scandal in Nassau County, N.Y. that could also hit thousands of cases; and misconduct at the state crime labs in Connecticut and North Carolina that have led to reviews of hundreds of cases, including murder convictions. Currently, there’s an ongoing controversy involving the FBI’s crime lab, in which analysts were found to have vastly overstated the significance of hair and fiber analysis while testifying in court. That too has spurred a review of thousands of cases going back more than a decade. The FBI lab had been considered one of the most elite crime labs in the world.

The one difference in Mississippi has been the obstinacy of state officials to even acknowledge the problem. Whereas other states have addressed forensic scandals with task forces and commissions charged with determining the extent of the problems and, as much as it’s possible, undoing some of the damage, the response thus far in Mississippi has largely been to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

Hayne and his defenders have claimed he has been performing a public service all these years, working long hours, often seven days per week to help with a continual backup of autopsies due to a lack of other qualified medical examiners. But there’s strong evidence that this was all by design. One medical examiner, who

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now works for another state medical examiner’s office, told me in 2007 that when he tried to start bidding for autopsy contracts in Mississippi in the 1990s, he was told by a county coroner that he’d first need to get permission from Hayne.

That was odd, given that Hayne held no official state position.

When Emily Ward, Mississippi’s previous state medical examiner, began to question Hayne’s practices and credentials in 1993, West circulated a petition among the state’s coroners and prosecutors demanding Ward’s resignation. It worked. Ward, who was board-certified and well-respected among her peers, was forced out of office. Her predecessor Lloyd White also encountered pushback for attempting to provide some oversight to Hayne. After Ward, the state didn’t hire another official medical examiner for 15 years — essentially giving Hayne and West free rein.

In a recent New York Times article on Hayne, former prosecutor and judge John T. Kitchens said, “from a prosecutor’s standpoint I don’t know anybody who didn’t like him. He was always so helpful and useful to law enforcement.” Leroy Riddick, a former state medical examiner for Alabama told me in 2007, “All of the prosecutors in Mississippi know that if you want to be sure you get the autopsy results you want, you take the body to Dr. Hayne.” Critics say that this is pre-

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cisely the problem. Medical examiners should be impartial witnesses, not part of the prosecution’s “team.”

Carrington says Mabry’s case shows exactly why the state needs to conduct a thorough, soup-to-nuts investigation of Hayne and West. “I can’t think of a single case in which West has testified where we didn’t find a problem.” He adds that in cases where West has testified in court there is usually a record, so his name will at least turn up in legal searches. But in cases like Mabry’s — and likely many others — there’s no such record.

“It was just fortuitous that we found this case,” Carrington says. Gates’ attorney fought the murder charge, but Carrington says that the case easily could have gone another way. “Gates’ attorney could well have told him, ‘Look, they’ve got you dead to rights. Plead guilty and maybe they’ll go easy on you,” he says.

“Innocent people can often find themselves in that predicament. If he had plead guilty, there’d be no record of West’s role in the conviction. How many other cases like this are out there?”

Winter, of the association of police chiefs, agrees. “I’ve been telling Jim Hood for years that this calls for that kind of investigation into Steven Hayne and Michael West,” he says. “At the very least, we need a bona-fide cold case unit that looks for cases like this. And it needs to be done by people with some integrity, people who are willing to look for open murders, but who will also look for cases where an innocent person may

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have been convicted.”

The main reason that hasn’t happened is likely because the people with the power to call for such an investigation may have a lot to lose. “The fact is, most of the prosecutors in Mississippi have used Hayne at one point or another, and many of them have also used West,” Winter says.

And most of the judges and Mississippi are former prosecutors. The officials with the most authority to acknowledge and address the problem are those who stand to fall hardest should it be fully exposed.

Hood, the attorney general, is a former prosecutor who used Hayne in his cases.

The problem extends even to some of the state’s defense attorneys. The public defender in Mississippi is usually a parttime position. Many public defenders in the state, then, make their living in private practice. Many of them specialize in wrongful death and medical malpractice cases. Those cases may require autopsies. And for many years, in most of the state, Hayne was the only game in town.

Certainly, many public defenders in the state did and do their jobs well. But the incentive problem is unmistakable — aggressively attack Hayne’s credibility in your low-paying criminal cases, and you could be putting your livelihood at risk.

Diaz has thus far been one of a few state officials to speak up. While on the Mississippi Supreme Court, he wrote a

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“ It’s just unconscionable.

The state cheated by using West.” scathing concurring opinion in the Tyler Edmonds case arguing that Hayne should be barred from testifying in the future.

In fact, the court had originally voted to uphold Edmonds’ two-hands-on-the-gun conviction until Diaz’s dissent convinced several justices to change their minds.

He has been calling for a thorough investigation of Hayne, West, and how the state has dealt with expert testimony every since.

“It’s well past time someone put together a task force to look at this,” he says.

One other Mississippi official who did take some action was Steve Simpson, the state’s former commissioner of public safety. In 2008 Simpson effectively fired Hayne from performing any more autopsies in the state. Simpson, however, was a former judge and prosecutor from the Gulf Coast, one of the few areas of the state that didn’t use Hayne.

“I’m sure Commissioner Simpson’s motives were pure,” Winter says. “But it’s worth noting that he had nothing to lose in going after Hayne.”

(Simpson did not respond to a request for comment, but did talk with The Huffington Post about the issue in 2011.)

If such an investigation does ever hap-

SHUTTERSTOCK

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pen, it seems unlikely that Hayne and West will suffer much in the way of repercussions. Giving unscientific testimony isn’t a crime. A prosecutor would need to show that the men willfully gave false testimony, which is difficult to prove. Both men are currently the targets of lawsuits by Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. So far, similar suits have been unsuccessful, although none of the prior suits involved a DNA exoneration.

Currently, Hood is not only seeking to retry Leigh Stubbs, he’s defending three death penalty convictions won on questionable forensic evidence, two involving Hayne (Jeffrey Havard and Devin Bennett), and the other involving both Hayne and West (Eddie Lee Howard).

“It’s just unconscionable,” Carrington says. “The state cheated by using West.

And even in the unlikely event that they actually believed him at trial in these cases, there’s no question they’re knowingly cheating by continuing to defend those convictions.”

Meanwhile, well-intentioned public officials like Roseman are left with the task of explaining to people like Julie Mae Wilson why her daughter’s killer remained free because Roseman and others were duped by Hayne and West.

Wilson sits her house beneath the big wall covered with photos of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

She has taken down most of the pictures of Mabry. She’ll never forget her daughter, of course, but she also doesn’t need the constant reminder. There are just

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two still hanging, and Mabry’s image in each are small enough that she has to pull them down from the wall to point out what her daughter looked like.

“It had been so long, I just thought they were going to wait until everyone stopped talking about it, thinking we’d forget,” she says. “They made a mistake.

Seemed like they were just planning to sweep it under the rug.”

James Earl Gates passed away a few years ago. He dropped dead of a heart attack while working on his car. His death was yet another unexpected jolt — one of many unpleasant reminders about the murder to blindside Wilson.

In the coming months she’ll get more reminders once Michael Johnson is charged and, if he doesn’t plead guilty, as he’s tried. She says she’ll attend the trial, and if he’s convicted, she’ll attend the sentencing. She says that maybe once all of that is over, she can start thinking about closure, finally safe in the knowledge that there won’t be any more unpleasant surprises.

“I’m glad they found out who did it,” she says. “But I’m tired.”

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TOO POOR FOR HEALTH CARE, TOO RICH FOR MEDICAID.

By PETER S. GOODMAN and JEFFREY YOUNG RUSTON, LA. —

WITH NO HEALTH INSURANCE and not enough money for a doctor, Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.

Over decades, she made her living assisting elderly people in nursing homes in jobs that paid just above minimum wage and included no health benefits. So even as her feet swelled to such an extent that she could no longer stuff them into her shoes, and even as nausea, headaches and dizziness plagued her, she reached for the aspirin bottle or made do with a teaspoon of vinegar. She propped her feet up on pillows and hoped for relief.

COURTESY OF LAURA JOHNSON

Laura Johnson and her 20-year-old son Dustin.

“Before I got sick,” she said, “I hadn’t been to the doctor in 20 years.”

After she collapsed last year and landed in a local emergency room, doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and hypothyroid. They ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social Security disability benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She used her Medicaid card to secure needed prescription medications.

Her ailments stabilized.

But this year, the state determined that the $819 a month she draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By the federal government’s reckoning, her $9,800 annual income made her officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too well off to receive Medicaid.

This is how Johnson, 57, finds herself back amid the roughly 49 million Americans who lack health insurance. This is why she must again reach into her pocket to secure her prescription drugs, a supply that runs about $200 a month.

That sum is beyond her, so she has gone more than four months without taking her pills on a regular basis. Once again, her feet are swelling and her chest is filling with fluid. Once again, she is confronted with the realization that a lifetime of labor does not entitle her to see a doctor any more than it enables

“ WE HAVE A HEALTH CARE SYSTEM THAT HAS THE BEST MEDICAL SCIENCE IN THE WORLD THAT DELIVERS THIRDWORLD HEALTH CARE TO THE VAST MAJORITY OF OUR POPULATION.”

her to gain crucial medications.

“It just doesn’t seem right to me,” she said. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”

Johnson is precisely the sort of person who is supposed to benefit from the national health care reform now known as Obamacare.

The law championed by President Obama and enacted by Congress nearly three years ago includes a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. In place of the patchwork of eligibility levels now set by each state, one standard is to prevail everywhere: Individuals with annual incomes up to 133 percent of the federal

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poverty line — currently, $14,856 or less — are supposed to be able to enroll.

Were the Obamacare expansion enacted today, some 17 million people would gain the right to coverage under Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance program, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Laura Johnson would be among them.

But the policy does not take effect until 2014. And in several states, including Louisiana, it increasingly appears the policy may not take effect at all.

This is in large part because of a landmark Supreme Court decision earlier this year. The court affirmed Obamacare’s key mechanism — the authority of the federal government to mandate that people buy some form of health insurance or pay penalties — but the justices overturned another crucial provision: They decreed that states have the right to opt out of the Medicaid expansion, a step that would deprive people like Johnson of care.

Though Medicaid is jointly run and financed by the states and the federal government, Washington is obligated to cover the full costs of expanding the Medicaid rolls

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over the first three years. Even as the federal share gradually declines over subsequent years, by 2022 Washington would still be on the hook for 90 percent of the additional costs. But the court said states could turn down that federal money and continue to run their Medicaid programs as they do now, setting their own standards for eligibility.

Since that ruling, Republican governors in nine states — Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana — have indicated that this is what they intend to do.

Here in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, who now chairs the Repub-

“ I JUST LIVED PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK. HOW YOU GOING TO GO TO THE DOCTOR WITH NO MONEY?”

lican Governors Association, has criticized the Medicaid expansion as a threat to taxpayers and an incursion on his state’s right to set its own policies.

“That’s crazy,” said Johnson. “I don’t understand why he’s doing that. He’s not thinking about poor people like us.”

Jindal declined requests for comment. But in public state-

PHOTOWONG/GETTY ALEX OR ILLUSTRATION IMAGES CREDIT TK

ABOVE: Opponents of the Affordable Health Care bill protest in front of the Supreme Court on the morning of the ruling.

BELOW: Supporters of the bill rally in front of the Supreme Court on the same day.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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ments, he has portrayed his opposition as a principled stand in favor of fiscal prudence. Yes, he says, the costs are to be borne by Washington initially, but the states have to pick up a share.

“This is not free health care,” Jindal said last summer during a conference call with reporters, adding that the Medicaid expansion would cost Louisiana $3.7 billion over the first decade.

Obamacare proponents dispute such accounting as both flawed and incomplete.

Expanding Medicaid nationally under Obamacare would increase total state costs by just 2.9 percent, or $76 billion in total between 2013 and 2022, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute and published by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

The federal government would cover the rest of the roughly $1.03 trillion cost of expanding Medicaid during those years, according to the report. Some new state Medicaid spending would be offset by cutting existing state health programs for the poor.

In Louisiana, participating in the Medicaid expansion would cost the state an additional $1.8 billion over that timeframe, while the

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federal government would deliver $16.7 billion, the Urban Institute projects. Some 400,000 now-ineligible Louisiana residents would be able to enroll in Medicaid.

As some experts portray it, the benefits of adding uninsured people to Medicaid rolls spill over beyond the recipients. Even people who already have insurance effectively profit through reduced eco-

“UNINSURED PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE SICK, ARE MORE LIKELY TO DECLARE BANKRUPTCY, ARE LESS PRODUCTIVE AT WORK AND DON’T LIVE AS LONG.”

nomic waste and by improving the overall health care system.

Uninsured people are more likely to be sick, are more likely to declare bankruptcy, are less productive at work and don’t live as long, said John Lumpkin, the director of the health care group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a Princeton, N.J.-based research organization. These impacts effectively cost the economy as much $200 billion every year, he said, citing a 2008 study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

People who lack health insurance run the risk of winding up like Johnson: putting off care as

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their conditions worsen to the point that they can no longer work, removing their payroll and income taxes from government coffers while drawing on taxpayers for disability benefits. People in that situation effectively increase the costs of health care for everyone, say experts, because they eventually require emergency services, with the bill often picked up by state and federal taxpayers.

In 2010, hospitals nationwide delivered $39.3 billion in health care services for which they received no payment, according to the American Hospital Association, citing the last year for which data is available. Some of these costs are covered by taxpayer-funded programs that reimburse hospitals that have especially high rates of unpaid bills. The rest gets absorbed by the health care system, yielding higher prices for patients.

The result: an American medical system characterized by extreme inefficiency.

“We have a health care system that has the best medical science in the world that delivers thirdworld health care to the vast majority of our population,” Lumpkin said. “Our nation spends more per capita for health care, by far, than

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any of the other developed countries in the world. And when you compare outcomes based on any measurement of health or health care, we underperform.”

Laura Johnson’s son, Dustin, a 20-year-old college student, suffers from severe asthma and himself lacks health care, frequently landing in the emergency room.

He offers his own sense of the accounting at work: In his view, people like him and his mother have simply been pushed beyond the ledgers of American life.

“Some of the people who can afford health insurance just kind of forget about people who can’t,” he said. “I don’t think health care is something anyone should be denied. It’s not anyone’s choice to get sick.”

OUT OF THE WOODWORK Dianne Laird, 57, has experienced both sides of that divide.

Four years ago, as the American economy sank into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, she lost her job as an office manager in Texas. She lost her $42,000 annual salary along with her health coverage. At about the same time, her husband, Ron, 58, shuttered his kayak rental company in the face of declining business.

The Lairds found themselves part of a crowded group that no

PHOTO AP PHOTO/BILL OR ILLUSTRATION HABER CREDIT TK

Louisana Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized the Medicaid expansion as a threat to taxpayers and an incursion on his state’s right to set its own policies.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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one chooses to join: people who lack health insurance.

In Texas, that group is especially large, numbering about 6.1 million.

As of last year, Texas had the highest rate of residents who were uninsured — 24 percent compared to 16 percent nationally, according to census data compiled by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Texas also claims distinction as a state with one of the more restrictive standards for Medicaid eligibility: It does not offer Medicaid to adults, regardless of their income, except some pregnant women, poor parents with children at home, and people with disabilities. A single parent, for instance, cannot enroll in Medicaid in Texas if they make more than 25 percent of the federal poverty line — now, about $2,800 annually.

For a time, the Lairds scraped by on her unemployment benefits while she enrolled in community college, aiming to become a fitness instructor. They made a few dollars on the side selling peaches at a roadside stand and occasional housesitting. They sold their home to raise funds to pay their bills and they moved into a rental apartment.

About a year ago, Dianne got a part-time job teaching exercise

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classes at the YMCA, a job that pays less than she previously received in unemployment benefits.

As a family, the Lairds are poor by the federal standard. But because they don’t have children at home and have no disabilities, it doesn’t matter how poor they are in Texas, so they have no health coverage.

“If something happens,” Dianne

“ I DON’T THINK HEALTH CARE IS SOMETHING ANYONE SHOULD BE DENIED. IT’S NOT ANYONE’S CHOICE TO GET SICK.”

said, “then I’m going to have to deal with it.”

That mindset has become something of a family trait. Elise, 22, the youngest of the Lairds’ three children, is a full-time student at nearby Texas State University, where she studies photography and mass communications.

She lives on her own with her boyfriend and works part-time at an ice cream shop, sometimes bringing in extra money through photography and modeling jobs.

All told, Elise subsists on about $1,000 a month, supplemented by student loans. She is seeking to apply for food stamps.

“Everyone I know is at poverty,” Elise said. “I don’t know anyone

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that doesn’t have two jobs, that isn’t going to school, who isn’t trying to better their lives.”

Elise has had no health coverage since she turned 19, which made her too old for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a federal-state benefit similar to Medicaid. So far, she’s avoided serious illness, but she feels a gnawing sense of vulnerability, combined with the knowledge that any health problem would be a financial calamity.

“It would be such an ineffable amount of money that it would just be like, ‘Well, I can’t pay you,’” she said.

Elise and her mother have come to rely on Lone Star Circle of Care, a network of community health centers in central Texas that provides basic medical care and charges on a sliding scale based on income. Elise and her mother visit the network’s clinics for annual gynecologic exams, they said.

Given the clinic’s mission as a provider to low-income people who lack other options, getting an appointment there sometimes takes a week, they say. The clinic is limited in the services it provides, so Dianne has yet to have a colonoscopy while skipping other

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basic services.

“I have ailments that I would like to get looked at,” said Dianne.

“I mean, my hip just kills me all the time.”

In the spring, when Dianne broke her ankle, the clinic could not help, so she went to the emergency room at a local hospital, University Medical Center Brackenridge.

“There are no regular doctors that’ll see you without you having to shell out cash,” she said.

That visit resulted in a $2,500 bill.

She has no inkling how she will pay it.

“I’m a month behind on my cell phone bill,” Dianne said. “I have to pick and choose what is worthwhile paying right now, and so I choose the car payment, the roof over our head, the electricity, the water,” she said.

The Medicaid expansion would relieve families like the Lairds from having to choose between basic health care services and electricity. But Gov. Rick Perry has staked out a strident position against the expansion, objecting to what he portrays as the worst dimension of Obamacare — greater federal involvement in his state.

“Medicaid is a system of inflexible mandates, one-size fits-all requirements and wasteful, bureaucratic inefficiencies,” Perry wrote Health and Human Services

COURTESY OF DIANNE LAIRD

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Secretary Kathleen Sebelius earlier this year. The health care law’s “unsound encroachments will find no foothold here,” he declared.

Perry has also described the Medicaid expansion as a fiscal threat, questioning whether Washington can be relied upon to deliver

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its promised funding going forward.

Experts say such opposition masks the real cause of concern in states such as Texas and Louisiana: They fear what has become known as “the woodwork effect,” with the Medicaid expansion serving to publicize the existence of the program, prompting a surge of people to enroll.

That surge would include not

Dianne Laird, a 57-yearold Texas resident who lacks health insurance.

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only people made eligible by Obamacare, but also people who have been eligible all along but perhaps had not known how to apply. Nationally, just 62 percent of people eligible for Medicaid are actually getting benefits, according to an estimate published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010.

While the federal government is obligated to cover the full costs of newly eligible people added to the Medicaid rolls, people who are already eligible would be governed by the existing split: The states on average absorb 43 percent of those costs.

“The state’s complaint is, ‘We said we would cover these people and now we’re going to have to actually cover them and pay for them,’” said Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Marci Roe worries about the consequences of not paying for them.

As executive director of the Volunteer Health Clinic in Austin, she witnesses every day the full dimension of the costs borne by people who live without health insurance.

“They lead sicker lives,” she said. “It affects their ability to work, their ability to go to school, to basically support themselves.”

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WHY DID YOU WAIT SO LONG? Laura Johnson’s working life traces the arc of an American economy that has for decades replaced jobs that paid middle-class wages and provided health insurance with low-wage service sector positions that lack benefits.

Johnson was raised in the town of Homer, La., about 35 miles southeast of here. Her father worked as a machine operator at a plywood company. He came home with dirt under his fingernails and aching joints, but also a paycheck large enough to allow his wife to stay home and look after their seven children. His earnings included health coverage and a retirement savings program.

After high school, Johnson enrolled at Grambling State University, a historically African-American university, where she studied to be a teacher. In her junior year, her father died, felled by heart trouble at 45. Devastated, she fell into depression.

“I loved my daddy more than life itself,” she said, recalling how she would ride around in his truck while he made his rounds. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. My dad was my world.”

She dropped out of school and moved to Washington, D.C., where she moved in with an aunt who

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thought a change of scenery might help her transcend her grief. There, she worked in a department store.

But after a year, Johnson’s mother persuaded her to return to Louisiana in the hopes that she would resume her studies. She came home but could not find the motivation to return to classes.

Instead, she took a job as a dietician at a nursing home, planning the meals, earning about $1,000 a month, she says.

“I just didn’t want to go back to school,” she said. “It was the beginning of a downward spiral. I feel like I should have gone back to college and my life would be better.”

Over the subsequent decades, Johnson attended to elderly people in nursing homes and in private residences, delivering meals and medication, emptying bedpans and changing seats.

Most of those jobs paid minimum wage. None included health insurance.

“It didn’t bother me,” she said, “because I never was sick.”

But as the years passed, the minor ailments to which a person can grow accustomed burgeoned into life-threatening conditions. Her feet and ankles swelled, and so did her face, in what her doctors would

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later conclude was a likely manifestation of thyroid problems. Her left side felt increasingly heavy.

Even as pain and worry became constant, she did not consult a doctor for two simple reasons: She didn’t have health insurance, and she didn’t have money.

At her last job before she collapsed, she was bringing home about $400 every other week, she says. The rent on her brick-faced

“ MEDICAID IS A SYSTEM OF INFLEXIBLE MANDATES, ONE-SIZE FITS-ALL REQUIREMENTS AND WASTEFUL, BUREAUCRATIC INEFFICIENCIES.”

apartment on the edges of town ran $575 a week. Her utilities absorbed another $300 a month.

“I just lived paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “How you going to go to the doctor with no money?”

In her town in northern Louisiana, Johnson did not lack for company. Nurtured more than a century ago by cotton farming, Ruston is home today to some 22,000 people — more than a third of them living at or below poverty, according to census data.

Its compact downtown is dotted by markers of inadequate finance, from the payday lenders and pawn shops that dominate the strip

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Former Republican presidential candidate and governor of Texas Rick Perry has described the Medicaid expansion as a fiscal threat.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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malls, to discount grocery outlets and fast-food joints.

When the pain got so bad that she could not handle it, Johnson lay on her couch and watched television (mostly soap operas) and consulted a book on home remedies. That’s where she learned about vinegar treatments. (“It brings your blood pressure down,” she says.) That’s where she read that dabbing rubbing alcohol on her temples might limit her headaches, while a little lemon juice could be used for dizziness. For kidney troubles, she says, baking powder and water are thought to do the trick.

On a muggy morning in May 2011, she felt so faint that she could not get herself to work, the pressure in her chest having become unbearable.

“It felt like something was smothering my heart,” she said. “I was terrified. It was very traumatic.”

Her sister drove her to the emergency room at the E.A. Conway Medical Center, a half-hour drive to the east in the town of Monroe. The hospital — part of the Louisiana State University health care system, which specializes in care for low-income people — occupies a five-story brick

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building next to a juvenile prison ringed by razor wire. Nearly half of the patients at the medical center are enrolled in Medicaid, and 38 percent have no insurance, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

System-wide, the LSU hospital chain derived nearly half of its 2011 revenues from state and federal funds that reimburse facilities that treat large numbers of people who fail to pay their bills, accord-

“ IT FELT LIKE SOMETHING WAS SMOTHERING MY HEART.”

ing to its latest annual report. At E.A. Conway, nearly two-thirds of the revenues came from these sources, according to the report.

The medical staff put Johnson on a ventilator and ran a battery of tests.

The doctors found a substantial quantity of fluid around her heart, which was severely enlarged, she says. They determined that her blood pressure was so high that she was at severe risk of a stroke.

“The doctor asked me, ‘Why did you wait so long to come in?’”

Johnson recalled. “He told me my body was almost getting ready to shut down. And I’m thinking in my head, ‘I didn’t come because I don’t have any insurance.’”

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She spent eight days in the hospital, she says, and she never received a bill. It was clear enough that she could not pay.

A hospital spokeswoman declined to discuss the cost of Johnson’s care, citing patient confidentiality restrictions, but estimated that the typical stay there runs upwards of $1,000 a day.

Johnson’s doctors discharged her with strict instructions not to go back to work, she says, and with a voluminous list of prescriptions.

Her son, Dustin, went online and filled out her Medicaid application. Soon, she had in hand a Medicaid card. She took it to the pharmacy and brought home the shelf-full of pills the doctors ordered, while surrendering minimal co-pays — typically just a dollar or two. She made regular follow-up visits to the doctors, who adjusted her medications when her stomach bothered her or when she felt dizzy.

Her health stabilized. Her pain receded.

But this past spring, another letter came from the state, this one informing her that her disability payment put her over the income threshold for Medicaid.

So ended her subsidized trips to

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the pharmacy.

Forced to fend for herself, she has instead frequented a local Walmart, where she is able to purchase the pills that she needs a few at a time, but never enough for a full course. She visits a community nonprofit pharmacy for the poor that provides her some of her needed medication, but not all.

In short, she takes what pills she can get when she is able to af-

“ IT JUST DOESN’T SEEM RIGHT TO ME. IT JUST DOESN’T SEEM FAIR.”

ford them, an ad hoc arrangement that has seen her symptoms return with a vengeance.

She recently paid $25 to visit a subsidized clinic where a doctor warned her that her kidney is now failing — probably because of the effects of her medication.

She could soon require dialysis.

Should that come to pass, she has no idea what she will do.

Not for the first time — and probably not for the last — she diagnosed her own condition in starkly simple terms.

“I don’t have insurance,” she said.

“I don’t have any money. I pray to God I get my Medicaid back. I pray every day, because I’ve got no insurance for anything.”

FROM LEFT: ROB CARR/GETTY IMAGES; EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES

Exit

SPORTS

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Har-Who? 10 Super Bowl Storylines That Have Nothing to Do With Brothers

BY CHRIS GREENBERG

UPER BOWL XLVII is a family affair. As you’ve likely heard, the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens are both coached by a member of the Harbaugh clan. Brothers John and Jim, separated by just 15 months in age, will stand on opposite sidelines when the game kicks off in New Orleans on Sunday.

S

“I don’t know if we had a dream this big. We had a few dreams, we had a few fights. You know, we had a few arguments, just like all brothers,” John, 50, told reporters during after his Ravens clinched a berth in the big game. “We’ll try to stay out of that business. We’ll let the two teams duke it out as much as possible.”

Despite the fact that these sibling rivals won’t be reenacting any of the battles from their youth in Ann Arbor, Mich., when

Super Bowl coaches and brothers John Harbaugh (left) and Jeff Harbaugh (right).

FROM TOP: ROB CARR/GETTY IMAGES; JEFF SINER/CHARLOTTE OBSERVER/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES

Exit their shared bedroom was bifurcated by a line of tape, the game between the 49ers and Ravens has been dubbed the HarBowl (and sometimes the Bro Bowl or the Harbaugh Bowl). On Thanksgiving 2011, the Harbaughs made history by becoming the first brothers to face off as NFL head coaches. The Ravens emerged victorious, 16-6. Oddsmakers favored Jim, 49, and the 49ers to win this Super rematch, but bettors moved the line toward the older brother’s team as kickoff approached. If the game could end with neither team winning, losing or covering the point spread, that would be just fine with the mother of both coaches.

“I am going to be neutral in the game,” Jackie, the mother of both coaches, who participated in a pre-game media call with her husband Jack, an accomplished coach as well. “I know one is going to win and one is going to lose, but I would really like to end in a tie. Can the NFL do that?”

Not if John or Jim has anything to do with it.

With a draw unlikely and a surfeit of sibling coverage assured, here are 10 storylines to follow leading up to the game that have nothing to do with birth order in the Harbaugh family.

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JOE FLACCO The Ravens’ quarterback doesn’t have the off-field glamor or Super Bowl-ring glitter of Tom Brady, but he has outplayed him in two straight AFC title games. Even his father called him “dull,” but he is making a case that he is among the game’s elite signal callers.

NEW ORLEANS VS. THE NFL In what appeared to be an attempt to placate local fans ahead of his arrival, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell lifted the season-long suspension of Saints coach Sean Payton a bit early. Needless to say, this gesture will not make fans forget about the punishments levied — and in some cases rescinded — in the Bountygate scandal.

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SPORTS

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RAY LEWIS The trial, triumphs and alleged performingenhancing-drug use of the Ravens’ retiring linebacker have been nearly as talked about as the first family of football. Like him or loathe him, Ray Lewis’ pre-game dance could rival anything Beyonce does at halftime.

GENE SWEENEY JR./BALTIMORE SUN/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES (LEWIS); AP PHOTO/VOLKSWAGEN OF AMERICA (COMMERCIALS); STEPHEN DUNN/GETTY IMAGES (KAEPERNICK); DILIP VISHWANAT/GETTY IMAGES (AYANBADEJO)

THE COMMERCIALS Even if the game turns out to be a dud there are still a few dozen reasons to stay tuned on Sunday night. Who will be this year’s Darth Vader kid?

MARRIAGE EQUALITY COLIN KAEPERNICK In his first career playoff game, the second-year quarterback out of Nevada posted more rushing yards than any NFL quarterback had posted in any game, ever.

To top it off, he threw for more yards than reigning NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers in that Divisional Round win. Can the Ravens stop him and the 49ers’ “pistol” offense?

Capping a season that included a public spat with a Maryland politician over samesex marriage, Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo brings his advocacy of marriage equality to New Orleans.

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SPORTS

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BOURBON STREET Does any other Super Bowl site make it as simple for a player to find himself embroiled in a pre-game debauchery — leading to an in-game distraction — quite like the Big Easy?

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SKIP BOLEN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; STEPHEN DUNN/GETTY IMAGES; ANDY LYONS/ GETTY IMAGES; JARED WICKERHAM/GETTY IMAGES; ICHAEL ZAGARIS/SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS/GETTY IMAGES

ALEX SMITH The former No. 1 overall draft pick and starting quarterback for the 49ers will be watching the Super Bowl from the sideline, having lost his job to dual-threat dynamo Colin Kaepernick.

THE BLUEPRINT With the NFL having a reputation as a “copycat league,” the outcome of this game could go a long way toward determining how teams build going forward. Will big-armed Joe Flacco be the model for teams, or will Colin Kaepernick’s read option find its way into a playbook near you?

LAST CHANCE FOR RANDY? “I do think I’m the greatest receiver to ever do it,” 35-yearold Randy Moss said with his characteristic modesty at Super Bowl Media Day. The one thing missing from his impressive statistical resume is a Super Bowl win.

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Super Food: Totchos

BY KRISTEN AIKEN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CATE ALEXANDRA, GIRL COOKS WORLD

EAT NOW

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EAT NOW

Exit LIKE MOST GREAT American holidays, the Super Bowl is a free day pass to eat whatever you want.

And because we’ll burn so many calories watching the 49ers and Ravens run around (that’s how it works, right?), there’s no reason to hold back. In this spirit, we bring you: Totchos.

Tater tots have been on the rise since the days of Napoleon Dynamite, and this nacho recipe is the perfect showcase for their finer virtues.

The crispy nuggets of potato are baked, then topped with seasoned beef, cheese sauce, salsa, guacamole, sour cream, green onion and crumbled bacon. You may never go back to regular old nachos again.

Recipe from Girl Cooks World Yield: 4 as a main course or 8 appetizer-sized servings

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TOTCHOS SUPREME INGREDIENTS

DIRECTIONS

32-ounce bag frozen tater tots 3-4 slices bacon ■ ¼ onion, finely chopped ■ 1 large clove garlic, minced ■ ½ lb very lean ground beef ■ 1 ½ teaspoons chili powder ■ ½ teaspoon ground cumin ■ ¼ teaspoon paprika ■ ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper ■ ¹/8 teaspoon oregano ■ ¼ teaspoon salt ■ ¼ teaspoon black pepper ■ 15-ounce jar salsa con queso/ cheese sauce, heated in the microwave (or make your own nacho cheese) ■ salsa ■ guacamole ■ sour cream ■ several green onions, finely chopped

1. Prepare the tater tots using the oven method instructions on the package. Err on the side of overbaking because you’ll be adding a lot of wet toppings, and you want the tots to remain as crunchy as possible.

■ ■

2. While the tater tots are baking, fry the bacon until crisp in a large frying pan. Remove and set aside to cool. Ladle out all but about one tablespoon of the bacon grease. Add the onion and garlic to the frying pan and cook over medium heat until softened. Add the beef and stir to mix. Once the beef is no longer pink, add the chili powder, cumin, paprika, cayenne pepper, oregano, salt and pepper. Stir to incorporate and then cook several additional minutes until the flavors have melded and the meat is cooked through.

3. Once the tater tots have finished baking, use tongs or a spoon to transfer to a large platter or individual plates. Top with the seasoned beef, salsa con queso, salsa, guacamole, sour cream and green onions. Crumble the bacon over the top and serve immediately.

BEHIND THE SCENES

FROM LEFT: KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES; KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES; RAY MICKSHAW/ WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; STEVE GRANITZ/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

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CRITICS’ CHOICE MOVIE AWARD

GOLDEN GLOBE AWARD

MODERN MASTERS AWARD

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SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD

Why Do We Have So Many Award Shows?

BY CHRIS ROSEN

Exit N FRIDAY, Jan. 25, Ben Affleck was honored with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s “Modern Master” award.

On Jan. 26, Affleck and Argo coproducer Grant Heslov accepted the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures from the Producers Guild. On Jan. 27, Affleck and his Argo castmates won Outstanding Ensemble in a Motion Picture at the Screen Actors Guild awards, the SAG equivalent of Best Picture.

Affleck has been in a lot of rooms like that over the last month. On Jan. 10, he won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Director, while Argo won Best Picture. On Jan. 13, he won those same awards at the Golden Globes. This is to say nothing of his recent whirlwind weekend, nor the upcoming Directors Guild Awards (Feb. 2), BAFTA awards (Feb. 10) and Oscars (Feb. 24), all ceremonies where Argo or Affleck are nominated.

How many awards does one movie need? Apparently, a lot.

“Award shows are so popular because they are the gladiatorial sport of our day,” GoldDerby.com editor Tom O’Neil told The Huffington Post. “Instead of big ugly lugs duel-

O

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HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

ling to the death in the arena, we cast our gorgeous pop culture icons ... and let them hack away at each other for our amusement.”

Beyond that, as O’Neil noted, television networks and critics’ groups love awards shows “because they get gads of star power for free.”

Indeed: It’s hard to imagine any other scenario where big names like

It’s no wonder that events like the SAG Awards, which didn’t even exist before 1995, get primetime placement today — the ceremony is another spoke in the Oscar-season wheel.”

Affleck, Anne Hathaway and Daniel Day-Lewis would mingle with members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association or spend three hours showing their faces on NBC. There’s another reason awards shows are so popular: the audience.

This year’s Golden Globes ceremony on NBC was the highest-rated broadcast since 2007. The 2012 Academy Awards ceremony was watched by 39.3 million viewers, this despite the fact that only one film, The Help, grossed more than

CHRISTOPHER POLK/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

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$100 million at the North American box office. Even the SAG awards, the forgotten ceremony that airs simultaneously on TNT and TBS, saw a ratings bump last year. It’s not just relegated to movie awards, either: The 2012 Grammys and Emmys also saw audience totals increase from the year prior.

That viewer interest has translated to bottom-line success as well. “We were virtually sold out

by Christmas, which speaks to the appeal of the Oscars,” Debbie Richman, senior VP-prime-time ad sales at ABC, told Advertising Age earlier this year. “We haven’t been this well sold, this early, in over a decade.” ABC was selling 30-second ads for as much as $1.8 million, an increase of more than $100,000 from the 2012 Oscar telecast.

It’s no wonder that events like the SAG Awards, which didn’t even

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exist before 1995, get primetime placement today — the ceremony is another spoke in the Oscar-season wheel. The demand, facilitated by audiences, networks, advertisers, critics’ groups and guilds, has turned awards shows into a yearround boon for Hollywood.

Need more proof? Look no further than Park City, Utah, where in-

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

The 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 27, 2013.

Award shows are so popular because they are the gladiatorial sport of our day.” die film Fruitvale won both the audience award and grand jury prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

“This will not be the last time you guys walk to a podium,” Sundance juror Tom Rothman said when announcing that Fruitvale won the grand jury prize. As Affleck can probably attest, he’s not kidding.

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TFU

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YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (JAPANESE MINISTER); ADEK BERRY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (SOLDIER); AP PHOTO/TIM KORTE (ABORTIONS); GETTY IMAGES (O.R.); AFP/GETTY IMAGES (GOOGLE)

Japanese Minister: Let Elderly People ‘Hurry Up and Die’

2

But Ladies Can’t Pee Outdoors!

(And Other Arguments for the Ban on Women in Combat.)

3

PROPOSED BILL WOULD CRIMINALIZE ABORTIONS AFTER RAPE AS TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE

4

05 ‘She Lost a Womb But Gained a Penis.’

FBI, Local Cops Are Asking Google for User Information Without Getting a Warrant First

06 Exit

HUFFINGTON 02.03.13

TFU

TIM SLOAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (MATTIS); GETTY IMAGES (PRISON); SEYLLOU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (MAURITANIAN WOMEN); GETTY IMAGES/PHOTOALTO (STUDENTS); NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (OH, CANADA)

General Mattis Is Replaced, and No One Called to Tell Him

7

When TV Tries to Help Troubled Teens … but Does the Opposite

8

THE FATTENING FARMS OF MAURITANIA: FORCE-FEEDING YOUNG GIRLS UP TO 16,000 CALORIES A DAY

9

University Charges Students ‘Pedestrian Fee’ for Using the Sidewalks

10

Oh, Canada.

The Maple Leaf On Your New Bills Are Norwegian.

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