<snipping out the specifics of the Spector case, to get to what I find interesting>
>Still, Jackson's effort to persuade the jury to disregard the defense
experts as presumptively tainted was deeply inappropriate and should
have resulted in a judicial rebuke in open court.
>What is particularly galling about this line of argument is that it
should come from a prosecutor after a litany of scandals over the
years involving discredited government experts. It is prosecutors who
often hire experts to testify that any babbling or barking defendant
is demonstrably sane, and experts who will claim to find a virtual
portrait of a defendant in blood spatters. These "hired guns" make
small fortunes working for the government.
>They are so predictable that they are given such nicknames as "Dr.
Death" -- the nom de guerre of James Grigson, a psychiatrist who
helped prosecutors secure 115 death sentences in 124 capital cases.
>Or Fred Zain, one of the most prolific government experts. The former
chief of the West Virginia crime lab and the San Antonio medical
examiner's office, Zain testified in countless trials and always
seemed to find incriminating forensic evidence. Zain was undone by an
investigation into the case of Glen Woodall, who was sentenced to two
life terms plus 300 years for two rapes. He was tied to the rapes by
Zain's analysis of blood and hair samples. Years later, it was shown
that Woodall was innocent, and an investigation into Zain's testimony
found a long history of false conclusions and deceitful practices. In
1992, a court concluded that he may have fabricated and misrepresented
evidence in almost 150 cases of conviction.
>Then there is Johnny St. Valentine Brown Jr., who was credited with
testifying in roughly 4,000 trials in 14 states despite the fact that
prosecutors never checked into his background to see that he had lied
about his credentials.
>A special prosecutor investigated leading prosecution expert Ralph
Erdmann, who was found to have falsely testified in a number of Texas
death penalty cases.
>The investigation concluded that "if the prosecution theory was that
death was caused by a Martian death ray, then that was what Dr.
Erdmann reported."
>In the case of Louise Robbins, a North Carolina anthropologist turned
prosecution witness, prosecutors found an "expert" willing to match
boot prints to individuals with virtual certainty. Despite the lack of
scientific basis for her claims, Robbins made a lucrative career as a
prosecution witness.
>John Sam, a detective in the infamous case of Rolando Cruz (who was
wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death), explained how
prosecutors would shop for experts:
>"The first lab guy says, 'It's not the boot.' We don't like that
answer, so there's no paper. We go to a second guy who used to do our
lab. He says yes. So we write the report on Mr. Yes. Then Louise
Robbins arrives. This is the boot, she says. That'll be $10,000. So
now we have evidence."
>The list of debunked and discredited prosecution witnesses stretches
across the country. Indeed, in a study of 200 exoneration cases
involving DNA (including death row cases), more than 25% involved
flawed forensic testimony from prosecution witnesses.