Carved in Bone

enforcement powers. In the normal pecking order of the academic and forensic world, a forensic anthropologist with a Ph.D. was considered a rung below a medical examiner with an M.D. On the other hand, there were certain areas in which my expertise far surpassed the medical examiner’s, and one of those was skeletal structure and geometry. In addition to studying thousands of human skeletons and hundreds of corpses—including scores of mangled, murdered ones—I had also spent a year teaching human anatomy to medical students. So if a man’s life hinged on whether or not a knife blade could thread a zigzag path through the human back, spine, and rib cage, I felt confident that my skeletal research and anatomical knowledge more than equaled Dr. Hamilton’s medical degree.
    “Off the record, Dr. Brockton, I’m gonna level with you,” Grease had leaned in and confided. “The vast majority of my clients are probably guilty of the crimes they’re charged with.” Golly, what a news flash that was. “Eddie Meacham is not. He did not kill Billy Ray Ledbetter. He’s being railroaded by an incompetent, impaired medical examiner—and by a prosecutor who doesn’t want to humiliate the ME and compromise his other cases. And for the sake of that, they’re willing to send an innocent man to prison for life. That’s wrong, and if I’ve learned anything at all about you over the years, Dr. Brockton, it’s this: you stand for the truth. Period. I’m begging you, set aside your personal feelings about me and speak the truth about this case and this sham of an autopsy. Eddie Meacham needs your help.”
    God, he was good. For years I’d loathed him—today, settling into the witness chair, I loathed him still—but sitting in that restaurant a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help admiring his skill and what appeared to be his passion. I also couldn’t resist his plea to exercise my best judgment and do whatever I thought was right. Flattery? Probably. But wasn’t it possible to be flattered and right?
    And what was right, I came to decide as I studied Dr. Hamilton’s autopsy report and my own collection of skeletons and corpses, was to take the stand and point out the impossibility of the medical examiner’s conclusions. Thus it was that I found myself on the witness stand this bleary-eyed morning, wielding bones and diagrams to explain skeletal geometry. Grease led me smoothly through it all, ending with the account of my futile attempt, the previous morning, to replicate the wound path described by the autopsy report. “In your expert opinion, then, Dr. Brockton—based on your extensive knowledge of skeletal trauma and on your own experimental investigation—is it even remotely plausible that the blade of a hunting knife followed that zigzag path through the body of the deceased?” It was not, I said. “Thank you, Doctor, for your candor and your courage,” he concluded, his voice breaking slightly with emotion. I half expected a tear to trickle down his cheek as he returned to the defense table and gave his client’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze.
    At the prosecution table, Bob Roper stared morosely at his copy of the autopsy report, then rose to cross-examine me. Neither of us was looking forward to this. He began by leading me through a grade-school exegesis of the steps in the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, controlled experiment, conclusion. I wasn’t sure where he was headed with it, and I grew impatient as we covered the subject in numbing detail. Then I began to discern the trap he was setting for me. “You’ve done dozens of scientific experiments on human decomposition at your research facility, haven’t you, Doctor?” I acknowledged that I had. I could hear the jaws of the trap creaking open: “Dr. Brockton, do you consider reproducible results to be an important part of the scientific method?” Yes, I hedged, in general I do. “And yet you performed this experiment you’re testifying about today, the one you’re using to impugn the medical examiner’s autopsy, only once, isn’t that correct?” Snap!
    “That is correct, but—”
    “Doctor, correct me if I’m wrong, but if one of your graduate students turned in a Ph.D. dissertation—let’s say, a dissertation about the effects of temperature on the rate of human decomposition—and if that dissertation were based on a single thermometer reading and a single corpse, I’m guessing you’d call that shoddy research.