El Paso County Commissioner’s Court voted last week to fire the county’s Chief Medical Examiner Paul Shrode, according to the El Paso Times. Shrode came under fire several years ago after county officials learned he had submitted three conflicting resumes which seriously impugned his credibility as a state expert witness. District Attorney Jaime Esparza said he is already reviewing cases to determine if any convicted defendants have grounds upon which to challenge Shrode’s testimony in their cases. “I don’t think we’ll see a rush to review his cases,” Esparza told the El Paso Times.

            The straw that apparently broke the proverbial camel’s back in Shrode’s case came after the Ohio Parole Board voted 4-3 last week to recommend clemency for a death row inmate because of problems the board found with Shrode’s 1997 testimony in that case.

            Although Esparza has supported Shrode publicly at previous Commissioner Court hearings at which the former medical examiner came under attack, the district attorney said some criminal defendants in the future may call the former medical examiner as a witness to question him about the autopsies he performed in their cases.

            Even though pretty much everyone in the county now want to distance themselves from Shrode who was the highest paid county employee in El Paso ($254,000 a year) and apparently had substantial political clout, most officials, like Esparza, are now trying to minimize any damage he may have done with his testimony in criminal cases. For example, Commissioner Ann Perez said she believes “there was little chance” that defendants were wrongfully convicted.

            Such public comments are absurd, if not irresponsible. If a public official will lie about his professional credentials, he/she will give false testimony in court of law and they will fabricate forensic reports to state prosecutors. For example, in August 2007 Assistant District Attorney Bruce Yetter called Shrode to testify as an “expert” in a child protection case. The prosecutor introduced Shrode’s resume as an exhibit to verify his “expert witness” credentials. The resume stated Shrode had received a “graduate law degree” from Southwest Texas State University. An attorney involved in the case knew that Southwest Texas State had no law school.

            “Do you have a law degree, doctor?” attorney Theresa Caballero asked.

            “Not in the sense of a law degree from a school of law, not like you,” Shrode responded.

            The El Paso Times reported what happened next:

            “[Shrode] then admitted under oath that he had no law degree or diploma…But in the resumes Shrode had submitted to El Paso and Harris counties, he claimed to hold a ‘graduate degree in law.’ Later, after being questioned by Caballero, Shrode produced another resume. That one said he had a degree in law from a school of political science and that he was a member of the State Bar of Texas from 1979 to 1983. A third resume by Shrode said that he had a ‘degree in law’ and that his bar membership was as a paralegal…The State bar of Texas has no record of Shrode being a member, either as an attorney or a paralegal.”

            Shrode resume embellishments are terrible enough, but what it even more terrible is that in November 2007 the County Commissioner’s Court gave Shrode a vote of confidence by refusing to either dismiss or reprimand him on the false resume issue.

            The Shrode case personifies just another in a long list of cases where state “expert witnesses” have turned out to be frauds—and that’s why the death penalty should be done away with. The Ohio Parole Board in a very narrow vote decided to try and save one man from death because of Shrode’s flawed testimony. How many more are there on other death rows waiting to die because of false or fabricated testimony from fraudulent state “experts”?

            More to the point, how many more Paul Shrodes are there infecting the nation’s criminal justice system false or fabricated testimony in criminal cases? We just don’t know. What we do know is that a wrongful conviction can be corrected in most of those cases, but there is always the ugly risk that false or fabricated evidence/testimony will be discovered too late in a death penalty case. The fact that we don’t know how many Shrodes there are is precisely why the states and federal government cannot guarantee the integrity of the death penalty system.