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Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, Obstetrics and Gynecology - Physicians

UAB Department of Justice Sciences

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology

Media- UAB's Lucy Jones Named Mock Trial "Best Attorney"

The faculty at UAB are educators first—but they are also practicing physicians, scientists, and researchers. On occasion, UAB faculty are called to lend their expertise—be it in forensics, business, or medicine—to legal cases; in recent years, they have served as expert witnesses in matters from civil and family-court proceedings to widely publicized criminal trials. In such cases, an expert’s testimony is more than just an opinion; it can change the course of people’s lives.

The alleged baby was due in June 1999, but when the sheriff encountered Banks the following August and asked about the baby, Banks claimed she had miscarried. The sheriff was suspicious, and three days later Banks was charged with murdering the baby that no one had ever seen. Keahey then threatened Banks with the death penalty unless she implicated the people who had helped her kill the phantom child. Scared and confused, she implicated her sister and former husband.

Meanwhile, another doctor examined Banks and said that she showed no signs of ever having been pregnant. In fact, the defense attorney for her former husband uncovered records showing that Banks had undergone a tubal ligation in 1995, but the prosecutors claimed that Banks’s tubal ligation had failed.

Seeking to prove that Victoria Banks was unable to conceive children, the defense attorney asked Steinkampf to perform a hysterosalpingogram (HSG) that confirmed Ms. Banks’s tubes were still blocked. The next task was to go to the Choctaw County courtroom to give his expert opinion. "I was a little concerned, going down there," says Steinkampf. "I was portrayed by the prosecutor as being a big-city doctor, which I found sort of ironic, since my friends in big Northeast cities consider me a doctor out in the country. But the people in the audience were very sympathetic and thanked me for coming."

Steinkampf testified that the X ray that eventually led to the destruction of the prosecution’s case was "unequivocal." The HSG so clearly showed Banks’s inability to conceive children, he said, that any qualified physician would reach the same conclusion.

While acknowledging that his testimony turned the case around, Steinkampf plays down his role in freeing Dianne Tucker and Medell Banks Jr. (Victoria Banks’s sentence was not appealed, as it was running concurrently with an unrelated sentence.) "I don’t see myself as a hero," he says. "It was the defense lawyer’s realization that he could find someone to do the X ray—that was really the key to the case. It’s unfortunate that their earlier legal counsel led to a plea that they thought was their best option. They didn’t realize that there was another way out."

The appeals process in which Steinkampf gave his testimony led the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals to declare the case a "manifest injustice." To hasten her release—in July 2002, a year after Steinkampf’s testimony—Dianne Bell Tucker agreed to having her sentence reduced to time served, and so the conviction of manslaughter of a phantom baby remains on her record. Medell Banks Jr. refused to plea-bargain and remained in jail, wanting to be fully exonerated. In January 2003, on the eve of a new trial, the prosecution finally dismissed the charges. He had served almost three and a half years in prison.
—Stanley Holditch

NEVADA
VS.
TED BINION

WHEN SCIENTIFIC TESTIMONY REVERSES ITS VERDICT

"A good attorney will look for any area he can attack, whether it’s personal, professional, or whatever—anything to discredit an expert witness or to bring his expertise into question," says forensic scientist Fred Smith, Ph.D.

Smith speaks from experience. During his tenure as a professor in the UAB Department of Justice Sciences, he has withstood his share of such courtroom attacks, some of which questioned the validity of his method of analyzing hair for evidence of drug use.

Smith spent years developing the "hair analysis" method and was thrust into the national spotlight in 1982 when he provided expert testimony in the first U.S. trial to allow a hair test as evidence. He testified in several subsequent trials, repeatedly fending off attacks by attorneys who challenged the validity of hair testing.

Eventually he ended up challenging his own method—not in a courtroom, but in his own lab. "My opinion changed because the research findings changed," Smith explains.

Though he never doubted that his hair test could detect drug use, Smith says continued hair analysis at UAB began to turn up false-positive readings in children of drug users. "These were young children between the ages of two and 12 whose hair was showing evidence of cocaine," he says. "We also tested their urine, and by and large, those tests came out negative. But the hair tests showed the same amount of cocaine metabolite as the parents’ tests. In most cases, you couldn’t tell them apart."

With research pointing to false positives, Smith says he thought at that point that his career (as an expert witness) was over. Instead, he found quite the opposite.

In 1992, Ted Binion, part owner of Binion’s Horseshoe casino, lost his gaming license because of a heroin addiction. To get his license back, he had to prove that he could remain drug-free. "He requested the hair test rather than the urine test, since the hair test required testing only every three months or so, as opposed to every week," Smith says. "So he submitted a lock of hair, and lo and behold, it came back positive for cocaine and marijuana."

Binion challenged the results of the test, claiming that his girlfriend used both drugs but that he had used neither. The prosecution, familiar with Smith’s earlier testimony about the validity of hair testing, initially contacted Smith—who explained that, in light of the false positives found in his UAB research, it was possible for a non-user to show evidence of drug use. Soon after, he found himself in Las Vegas, testifying to that fact in Binion’s defense.

"It’s difficult to admit that you could have been wrong in the past, but by doing that, I think I have become even more credible," Smith says. "The truth is, science does change. We learn new things all the time. I think people appreciate an effort to know the truth and accept it, as opposed to doggedly pursuing an opinion that can no longer be substantiated by scientific facts."

As a result of Smith’s testimony, the decision on whether to permanently revoke Binion’s gaming license was delayed while he submitted to continued drug tests. Not that it helped him much. In 1998, Binion was at the center of another high-profile trial—this time as a murder victim. Sandy Murphy, the girlfriend whose alleged drugs had shown up in his hair, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Thankfully, Smith says, he wasn’t called back to testify in that case.
—Grant Martin

UNITED STATES
VS.
BOBBY FRANK CHERRY

FOUR LITTLE GIRLS WHOSE DEATHS CHANGED THE WORLD

When the bomb that killed four young African-American girls at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church exploded in 1963, Charles Ford, M.D., was doing his medical internship in California. "I was working such long hours, the entire decade of the ’60s was a blur," Ford remembers. For that reason, he was unaware of the details of the church bombing. And he had no idea that nearly 40 years later, he’d be coming face-to-face with one of the culprits.

Ford, a professor in UAB’s psychiatry department, was assigned to meet with bombing suspect Bobby Frank Cherry and offer his expert testimony at Cherry’s December 2001 mental-competency hearing. It was an interesting challenge for Ford, who had been an expert witness in numerous cases but hadn’t worked on any criminal trials. "It was a little bit unusual for me, because I’m not a forensic psychiatrist, and I don’t pretend to be one. I can’t remember being involved in any other criminal case," he says.

Ford’s relative lack of familiarity with the bombing case may actually have been a plus, since it helped keep him from forming any opinions or bias. "I actually told Mr. Cherry, ‘I’m not here in any way to investigate whether or not you might be guilty. It’s not my job to collect facts or have opinions in regard to the alleged events,’" Ford says. "That’s what I committed myself to. I never even asked him anything about the bombing or what he was doing around that time."

Ford’s first impression of Cherry: "Mr. Cherry seemed like a well-dressed good ol’ boy," he recalls. "And I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense—he was wearing a suit, and he was outgoing, friendly, gregarious. He was a big man."

Cherry and his attorneys had been claiming that Cherry was not mentally competent to stand trial based on his advanced age—he was 71—and a certain degree of dementia they said had been brought on by cerebrovascular disease. But inconsistencies Cherry displayed during their interview led Ford to the conclusion that he was mentally and legally competent.

"When he thought I was asking specific questions that would test his memory and so forth—when he thought I was testing him—he performed poorly," Ford says. "But when I kicked back and talked to him like a good ol’ boy, he seemed to have a remarkable memory for things that were going on, and he had sufficient detail of things that occurred. That’s inconsistent."

Ford adds that while Cherry may have had some loss of brain function due to disease, it wasn’t enough to render him incompetent to stand trial. "We actually did an IQ test, and his test suggested that even if there had been some loss of cerebral functioning, he was probably at least in the 25th or 30th percentile," he says. "Well, if we were going to say that everybody at or below the 25th or 30th percentile is incompetent to stand trial, we’d have to empty out our prisons."

Ford’s emphasis on objectivity continued even after his meeting with Cherry—he didn’t attend the trial in which Cherry was ultimately found guilty, and he avoided making any public or media appearances. "I maintained a low profile," Ford says, "and if anybody asked, I said that everything I could say had already been put in the record, and that was it."
—Doug Gillett

MOCK EXPERTS Students Stand Trial

Lucy Jones is still a UAB undergraduate, a senior majoring in English with a concentration in professional writing and public discourse, and she plans to go to law school. She says her experience with the UAB mock trial team has already given her a feel for what expert witnesses can mean in court cases.

"I’ve done mock trial for three years, and our cases always involve expert witnesses," Jones says. "Most of our civil cases are wrongful death, and most of the criminal cases are murder, so typically there is some kind of death involved. We often have competing doctors, if you will, who disagree about the cause of death."

In mock trial, "expert witnesses" are not real doctors, but undergraduates who have studied background material. But the artificial elements of mock trial do not detract from the learning experience, Jones says.

"The students serving as witnesses have to know a lot. If they get an autopsy report, they have to understand it. They have to understand test reports and explain how they came to their conclusions about the evidence.

"In one case, we had a dispute about whether the victim was killed by blunt-force trauma or a cerebral aneurysm. In a case like that, you can see how valuable an expert witness is in terms of credibility with the court."

What characteristics make for an effective expert witness? "You like to see confidence; you don’t want someone who has to think too long about his or her answers," Jones says. "You want someone who can take complicated ideas and make them clear and simple for the court. The expert’s role is to clarify and boil down."

Television shows about lawyers sometimes give a false impression about expert witnesses, Jones says. "TV shows tend to create a false reality that expert witnesses are always right. In the real setting, you have to spend a lot of time making them believable, convincing the court that these people really do know what they are talking about."
—Roger Shuler