I've been reporting on the unfolding criminal justice disaster in Mississippi involving Steven Hayne and Michael West for several years now, including several pieces since I started working here at HuffPost.

This morning, The New York Times picks up on the story.

Between the late 1980s and the late 2000s, Dr. Hayne had the field of forensic pathology in Mississippi almost to himself, performing thousands of autopsies and delivering his findings around the state as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases. For most of that time, Dr. Hayne performed about 1,700 autopsies annually, more than four for every day of the year and nearly seven times the maximum caseload recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners.

During the past several months, in courthouses around Mississippi, four new petitions have been quietly submitted on behalf of people in prison arguing that they were wrongfully convicted on the basis of Dr. Hayne's testimony. Around 10 more are expected in the coming weeks, including three by inmates on death row . . .

The recent lawsuits suggest that in only a limited number of cases did a verdict most likely hinge on Dr. Hayne's testimony. But without any systematic review, it remains a question as to what that number may be.

"There are hundreds of cases that have to be reconsidered," said Dr. James Lauridson, a former state medical examiner in Alabama, who provided an affidavit in one of the recently filed cases. Dr. Lauridson said Dr. Hayne was an extreme example of a familiar problem: a forensic analyst with inadequate training who was given far too much deference in the courts.

All you need to know about the problem down there can be summed up in these two paragraphs:

"I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't like Hayne, but from a prosecutor's standpoint I don't know anybody who didn't like him," said John T. Kitchens, a former district attorney and circuit court judge. "He was always so helpful and useful to law enforcement . . .

"I had a prosecutor one time tell me, 'These guys may not have done it but they're bad guys and they have to go to prison,' " Dr. White said. "The whole thing kind of rolls downhill from there. And in the interim you can't help but wonder how many people ended up in prison who didn't get a fair trial."

Several prosecutors in Mississippi have made the same point to me that Kitchens makes to NYT reporter Campbell Robertson quote above--they defend Hayne by pointing out how helpful he has been over the years at assisting them in winning convictions. I really don't think they understand what's wrong with what they're saying. Which is pretty incredible.

I have a long feature in the works about another Mississippi case tainted by bad forensics. It's a haunting story about a brutal murder that went unsolved for 15 years because of Hayne and his sidekick, the bite mark charlatan Michael West. Look for it at HuffPost soon.

-- The Wall Street Journal runs an op-ed by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy advocating an end to the drug war.

-- Terrific long-form article on union thuggery in Philadelphia.

-- Mistaken identity leads to the wrong man being detained, dosed with anti-pscyhotic drugs at an Australian mental hospital.

-- Puppycides: In Lafayette, Louisiana and in Las Vegas, Nevada.

-- Wrongly convicted mans gets his freedom, but only by pleading guilty to a felony.

-- Let us never forget the brave souls who have perished defending the noble cause of the Oxford comma.

-- Kevin Drum makes the connection between lead exposure, IQ, and social deviance, with particular focus on the crime rate. Some push-back from Reason's Ron Bailey here.

-- Here's some more interesting discussion of the falling crime rate, from Jason Kuznicki.

-- Glenn Greenwald: The war on terror is open-ended and indefinite--by design.

-- Influential environmentalist Mark Lynas says he was "completely wrong" to oppose genetically-modified food.

-- Ex-painkiller addict Rep. Robert Kennedy and the ever-earnest paternalist David Frum are behind a new organization aimed at preventing the legalization of recreational marijuana. The Reuters article notes that Frum's involvement makes the group "bipartisan." Which I guess is technically true. It's also an illustration of just how little that word actually means.

-- Shopping in ancient Rome.

-- "Cash for Clunkers" wasn't quite the success proponents claim it was. It also appears to have had some negative unintended consequences for the environment.

It's always a nice surprise to rediscover a great album of music I'd forgotten about. It happened to me the other day when I found my CD of Jeff Black's 1998 release Birmingham Road while cleaning out a desk drawer. Earnest, heartland rock at its finest.

Mental Floss has put together a collection of the better time lapse videos released in 2012. Full list here.

I'm partial to this tilt-shift video from Singapore.

It's great that a D.C. cop took this on. It's too bad that it took a D.C. cop to get the city to finally pay attention.

Metropolitan Police Department Sgt. Mark Robinson tried for months to persuade D.C. traffic officials to rescind more than 100,000 defective citations he said were a result of unreliable speed cameras, but when he got caught by one of them himself in the Third Street Tunnel, he took a different course.

“I thought about it and realized, no problem, this is a perfect opportunity to challenge these citations,” the 22-year veteran of the police force told The Washington Times.

The result was a decision in his favor by a hearing examiner that could brighten the day of anyone who has ever been caught by a speed camera — and cause nightmares for budget-stressed city officials who depend on them. If upheld, that decision could force D.C. officials to return $1.8 million in penalties associated with more than 14,000 tickets that misidentified the posted speed limit.

Take a few seconds to contemplate that last sentence. The city could be forced to return fines issued by a speed camera because the camera was issuing tickets to motorists who weren't breaking the law. That it took an arbitrator's decision to move the discussion even that far tells you all you need to know about the real motivation behind traffic cameras.

-- The New York Times continues with its weird attempt to start a panic over energy drinks.

-- New Jersey town must pay $38K to compensate two police officers for their recreational helicopter flying lessons.

-- The only chart you'll need to understand why people often read too much into charts.

-- This column by the commander of an Arizona SWAT team is a pretty scary illustration of what police militarization does to the mindset of cops.

-- "Yet their lack of concern for Larry is made up for by their intense interest in how far splashes of his vomit can fly . . . "

-- This is a compelling essay by Sam Harris on guns and gun culture. Like Harris, I wouldn't consider myself part of the gun culture.(And unlike Harris, I don't actually own a gun.) But like him, I'm also very much in favor of gun rights. My position pretty much boils down to this: I think there's reason to be fearful of a government that has both the power and the desire to disarm its citizens. Especially when the same government is arming itself to the teeth.

-- Police in Macon, Georgia, shoot an unarmed man in a grocery story parking lot. And the cops' account keeps changing.

-- Joe Arpaio responds to Newtown as only Joe Arpaio can.

-- The finalists for another great year-end Internet tradition: Fark's Headline of the Year competition.

-- Botched raid in Ogden, Utah, terrorizes family. This would be the same Ogden SWAT team that killed golf club-wielding Todd Blair during a botched meth raid in 201o, and that got into a fatal shootout with Matthew Stewart earlier this year, resulting in the death of one cop. Stewart was raided after an ex-girlfriend tipped off cops that he was growing marijuana plants.

-- Let's end the last links roundup on a positive note: Here is a monkey, riding on a border collie, while herding some goats.

Fontella Bass died this week. Here's the song she wrote and made famous, although like too many 1960s soul and R&B artists, the song made money for everybody but her. (At least until she finally won in court, nearly 30 years later.)

The experience apparently soured her to the music business. She made one more album--Free in 1972. It was a commercial flop, but it's one of my favorite soul albums of the 1970s. After that, she largely retired, at least from mainstream R&B.

Our loss, then and now. Rest in peace.

And here's a personal favorite:

Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, George Schulz of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and yours truly discuss police militarization in America on Al Jazeera's Inside Story.

The FBI's crime lab was at one point reputed to be one of the most elite, well-run labs in the world. Not so much anymore. For the last year, the agency has been embroiled in a huge and growing scandal in which its crime lab technicians have been found to have vastly overstated the value and conclusiveness of forensic evidence in criminal cases. The breadth and seriousness of the problem have only come to light in the last year or so, although there have been warning signs going back to the 1990s. The number of convictions affected is in the thousands, possibly the tens of thousands.

But as the Washington Post reported last week, that may only be the beginning.

In July, the Justice Department announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory's hair and fibers unit before 2000 -- at least 21,000 cases -- to determine whether improper lab reports or testimony might have contributed to wrongful convictions.

But about three dozen FBI agents trained 600 to 1,000 state and local examiners to apply the same standards that have proved problematic.

None of the local cases is included in the federal review. As a result, legal experts say, although the federal inquiry is laudable, the number of flawed cases at the state and local levels could be even higher, and those are going uncorrected.

It would be difficult to overstate just how catastrophic this is. It's a scandal that strikes at the very heart of our democratic system of government, and it isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves. We're talking about one of the most basic functions of government -- the administration of justice. And we're talking about nationwide systemic failures in the way the government has been presenting scientific evidence in the courtroom going back 40 years, over tens of thousands of cases, all with the approval of the courts in which that evidence was presented.

Worse yet, the Justice Department had to be dragged kicking and screaming into conducting even the federal review. From the Washington Post, last April:

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly.

I mean, think about that. Taxpayer-paid employees of the Justice Department had direct and exclusive knowledge that there may be hundreds of innocent people in prison, they knew that flawed forensics in these cases needed to be reviewed, and their justification for not doing more as these people continued to rot in prison was, Hey, we did the bare minimum required of us by law...

But even beyond the problematic ethical requirements, I'm having a hard time fathoming how no one on this task force felt morally compelled to go beyond those requirements -- to, you know, actually reach out to defense attorneys, or attempt to actually reach the convicts or their families. How in the world can you possess this sort of information, then still sleep at night, year after year, knowing that (a) the information obviously isn't reaching the people who have an incentive to actually put it to use, (b) you're one of the few people who could make that happen, and (c) because the information was only available to a select group of people, if you or one of your colleagues doesn't act, no one else will?

Public officials tend to be reluctant to admit to the scope of the problem because doing so would call thousands of convictions into question. Of course, that's exactly what should happen, but I think it's about more than that. When you're talking about thousands and thousands of possibly corrupted cases spread out over several decades; when you're talking about implicating not only crime labs and crime lab technicians, but prosecutors, judges, appeals courts that failed to pick up on the problem, and, frankly, the entire field of forensics -- well, now you're talking about implicating the criminal justice system itself. It all raises some profound, far-reaching questions that start to scratch at the notion of what justice means in America.

How is it that our courts have for decades now allowed the use of bad science to put citizens in prison -- or even to send them to their deaths? Why is it that junk science can so easily slip into the courtroom during a criminal trial, but when said science is later called into question -- or even shown to be complete nonsense -- it can be so difficult, sometimes impossible, for the people convicted by that science to get a new trial? Should the objective of a prosecutor be to seek justice, or to win convictions? Do crime labs exist to objectively test and analyze forensic evidence, or are they part of the prosecution's "team?"

How have we structured the incentives at crime labs, in prosecutors' offices, and at the Justice Department? Are prosecutors rewarded for seeking justice, or for racking up convictions? We know there are professional rewards for high-profile convictions and for high conviction rates. But are there professional sanctions for going too far to win convictions? Are those sanctions severe enough to offset the payoffs for getting convictions?

Perhaps we don't want the incentives to be perfectly balanced. Maybe we want to slightly nudge prosecutors toward seeking convictions, on the theory that they're counterbalanced by defense attorneys. But it's a discussion we ought to have. Right now, we aren't having it. Currently, not only does it appear that prosecutors are rarely sanctioned for bending or breaking the rules, the Justice Department won't even tell us what punishment or sanctions they get when they do. This isn't acceptable. The immense power afforded to federal prosecutors, the fact that they're on the public payroll, and the fact that their misconduct can and has resulted in putting innocent people in prison far outweighs any interest in protecting their professional privacy. Their successes in the courtroom can be championed in public and used to advance their careers. The public most certainly ought to be made aware of their transgressions.

But let's get back to the hard questions about crime labs. If a crime lab analyst comes up with results that could undermine a high-profile prosecution, is the analyst typically rewarded, potentially thwarting a pending injustice, or possibly punished for derailing a conviction? I've reported on cases in which crime lab technicians and medical examiners have been punished for testifying for the defense. And some in the forensics community tell me its still considered unethical for a forensic expert to take the initiative of calling a defense attorney if the analyst believes he has found exculpatory evidence that the prosecution is ignoring, or hasn't turned over to defense counsel. Crazier still, there are parts of the country where crime lab technicians report to prosecutors. Prosecutors conduct their performance reviews, determine who gets promoted and who gets a raise. Who thought this was a good idea?

There have been enough scandals now that we need to start talking about these issues as systemic failures, and no longer as individual incidents to be addressed and fixed on a case-by-case basis. And it's time to start considering more fundamental changes to how we test, analyze, and use forensic evidence in the courtroom, changes that may seem radical, but that would restructure the incentives of the key players here so that we reward people for moving cases toward just outcomes, not outcomes that serve political interests

The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report on forensics started that process. But it seems to have stalled. Maybe these latest revelations about the FBI lab will get the discussion going again.

-- You're asked to pick 100 photos that will present humanity to space explorers billions of years from now. What would you include? How many would be celebrity side-boob shots? I'm thinking we'd need at least three XKCD strips.

-- Speaking of photos, here are Philip Plait's stunning selections for astronomy photos of the year.

-- Will Sandy Hook represent "a 9/11 for schools?" Let's hope not. Note that it's already being used as an excuse for more spying on online activity.

-- One of my favorite year-end traditions is the Oxford American's annual music issue, which always includes an incredible CD of rare, representative, and wonderful cuts to represent whatever state the magazine is focusing on that particular year. This year, it's Louisiana.

-- Here are five senior-citizens serving life sentences for selling pot.

-- The federal government has seized a publisher's advance payment to a well-known graphic artist currently working on a book about Joseph Cony "under suspicion that the money was being laundering for a terrorist organization."

-- DEA official says Massachusetts medical marijuana dispensaries can expect crack downs once the new state law allowing them takes effect.

-- Mark Hemingway throws some water on the Mother Jones claim that armed citizens have rarely if ever stopped a mass shooting.

-- But for video: A Denver cop may now be charged with felony for shooting a captured dog five times. The police department was ready to dismiss the incident until video shot by a neighbor contradicted police reports that the chocolate lab was "vicious" and aggressive.

-- New online marketing game lets you "race through the streets of North Korea."

-- Utah deputy under investigation for arresting sober people, charging them with DUI, then lying on the witness stand.

-- Your latest Sandy Hook overreaction: Sen. Barbara Boxer wants to put National Guard troops in the schools.

-- On a lighter note: 2012 may have been the greatest year in the history of mankind.

-- The latest attempt to explain the crime drop: cell phones!

Here are the 10 posts from The Agitator that generated the most pageviews in 2012.

-- Puppycide in New Mexico.

-- But for Audio. (Florida woman's cell phone recording proves police lied about the conditions of her traffic stop and subsequent arrest.)

-- Catching Hell for Hiring a Muslim. (Tennessee conservatives go nuts over GOP governor's decision to appoint a Muslim woman to a state agency to promote the state's businesses overseas.)

-- More, Please. (Texas jury pool rebels over decision to charge a man for a less than a gram of cocaine.)

--The 2011 Worst Prosecutor of the Year Award.

-- Florida Deputy Uses Spidey-Sense to Establish Probable Cause. (Cop claims he could smell marijuana coming out of a car he was following at 35 mph. Search (allegedly) turns up a single burnt joint in the trunk.)

-- Nevada State Troopers: Our Drug Dogs Are a Con. (Lawsuit filed by state troopers alleges drug dogs are trained to falsely alert in order to establish probable cause.)

-- DOJ Urges Federal Court To Protect the Right to Record Police.

-- Two Videos, Two Cities, Two Attitudes. (Comparing two police recruiting videos and what the values they've chosen emphasize says about their approach to policing.)

-- Take the Quiz. (Can you distinguish an American cop from an American soldier?)