At the beginning of his four-decade career as a Ramsey County medical examiner, Michael McGee solved cases that had for years stumped his predecessors.
He told Star Tribune reporters in 1986 it took him only a cursory review of records to determine one victim, a 3-year-old boy, had been beaten to death, reinvigorating a case that had been cold for 20 years. The difference was in the science. Before 1979, Ramsey County had relied on part-time coroners to rule on causes of death. McGee was a doctor — trained in the science of forensic pathology — which allowed him to see what the others could not.
"It isn't some medical mystery," he said almost 40 years ago.
Now the integrity of the science McGee has used over his career is being challenged.
In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, McGee is accused of fabricating medical conclusions and providing false testimony in the 1996 drowning death of Jane Rhodes, resulting in 25 years of wrongful imprisonment for her husband. After Thomas Rhodes' release a year ago, an investigation by the Minnesota Attorney General's Office found evidence McGee used "medically unsupported testimony" to arrive at his opinion.
"McGee reasoned backward — from the nonmedical evidence to the medical findings," the report said.
Rhodes is at least the fourth person to either be released from prison or resentenced to a lower penalty after revelations that McGee provided flawed or inaccurate testimony leading to their convictions, according to court records. In the wake of these reversals, a series of judges' orders and reports has described his work as reckless and lacking in scientific discipline.
U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ralph R. Erickson called McGee's testimony in the case of Dru Sjodin, a college student who was kidnapped and murdered in 2003, "so unmoored from a scientific basis that it should not have been received at all."
"The evidence in the record demonstrates that McGee did much more than merely follow where the evidence and science led him," Erickson wrote in his opinion. "Instead, he chose to play the role of a super sleuth, something akin to Sherlock Holmes."
Attorneys for McGee did not respond to requests for an interview.
The growing body of criticism has raised questions with his longtime employer, Ramsey County.
For decades, Ramsey County prosecutors trusted McGee's expertise, even when others questioned it. After the judge's criticism in the Sjodin case, County Attorney John Choi and a group of independent experts launched a review of cases in which McGee's testimony played an integral role in a conviction. The investigation is ongoing.
Choi says they've culled 71 cases for the review, dating to the 1980s, when McGee still was a rising star in the field of death investigation science.
'False or incorrect'
This is not the first time questions about McGee's methods have prompted Choi's office to review his work.
In 2011, Choi's office launched a more limited investigation after the release of Michael Hansen, who spent six years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murdering his infant daughter, Avryonna.
McGee attributed the baby's death to "homicide due to closed head trauma," according to a review of testimony in Hansen's case by a retired assistant Ramsey County attorney. McGee suggested a fracture on Avryonna's skull was caused by a forceful strike against a hard surface. But outside experts called by nonprofit law firm, the Great North Innocence Project, determined later the fracture likely was a result of a fall from a shopping cart days earlier while Avryonna was in her mom's care. And the injury didn't kill her. The experts determined Avryonna instead died from accidental suffocation, caused by her sleeping position.
Lindsey Thomas, a longtime Minnesota medical examiner who participated in the review, said McGee went beyond the facts of the case to "invent" a story that Hansen woke up in the middle of the night and slammed the baby's head against the wall.
"It's not our job to make up a story," Thomas said in an interview. "It's our job to say, 'Tell me what happened, and I will tell you if the evidence supports that story or doesn't.'"
A judge vacated Hansen's conviction. He said there was evidence McGee may have given false or incorrect testimony at trial. The Douglas County attorney dropped the charges.
A Ramsey County Attorney's office review of Hansen's case by a retired assistant county attorney called the judge's accusation that McGee gave false testimony unfair. An investigation by Choi's office, in light of Hansen's wrongful conviction, looked at infant death cases going back to 2001 and found no similar cases. A previous review by the office that looked at McGee's interpretation of a test used in sexual assault cases found no evidence of issues.
McGee was hired on as Ramsey County's chief medical examiner in 1985. In that role, he was not an employee of the county, but rather his company was under contract to provide medical examiner services.
His star began to tarnish with a series of overturned convictions, starting in the early 2000s.
The first was Evan Zimmerman, a man convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in the 2000 death of his former girlfriend, Kathleen Thompson, found strangled on a curb one February morning in Eau Claire, Wis. McGee testified that a phone cord found in Zimmerman's van possibly was used to strangle her.
Zimmerman's conviction was reversed after the Wisconsin Innocence Project helped him successfully argue his trial counsel had been ineffective, in part because his lawyer failed to present independent medical testimony: evidence showed fibers found in Thompson's wound that could not have come from the phone cord.
'Medically unsupported testimony'
A decade after the reversal of Hansen's conviction, Judge Erickson took issue with McGee's autopsy of Sjodin and vacated the death penalty for Alfonso Rodriguez, the man convicted of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing her.
Erickson wrote that it was beyond question Rodriguez had kidnapped and murdered Sjodin. But the jury "did not hear truth," the judge said, when it came to McGee's insistence that she had been sexually assaulted.
Prosecutors had invoked the sexual assault in asking the jury to sentence Rodriguez to death.
After the judge overturned the death sentence, Choi's office launched its current investigation into McGee's work, broader in scope than a previous one, along with the Prosecutors' Center for Excellence, an independent nonprofit.
Soon after, a new Conviction Review Unit in Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's office found Thomas Rhodes had been wrongfully imprisoned in his wife's death.
Jane Rhodes died in a 1996 boating incident while the couple and their two boys vacationed in Spicer, Minn. McGee performed the autopsy because the local coroner was not formally trained in death investigations.
McGee first ruled the manner of death was "pending investigation." He changed the manner to "homicide" not long after meeting with the county prosecutor in what Rhodes' attorneys allege was an improper "attempt to influence the determination as to the cause and manner of death." McGee presented an argument that Jane Rhodes' death was premeditated and intentional: He found what he called defensive wounds on her arms and neck injuries that he said came from a blow that caused her to fall from the boat. He said injuries on her face were caused by repeatedly running her over with the boat "until he knew she was dead," according to the Attorney General report.
At trial, Ellison's office found, the prosecution relied heavily on McGee, who, "by the time of trial, was able to present compelling evidence of premeditated and intentional acts that led to Jane's death by drowning."
The Conviction Review Unit unearthed notes from McGee's meeting with the prosecutor. The meeting never came up at Rhodes' trial. After reviewing the evidence and consulting with other experts, the conviction unit "could find no evidence to support Dr. McGee's opinions."
None of the cases resulting in wrongful convictions was based in Ramsey County, where Choi's office is now conducting the case review.
This past week, Choi said the pending investigation limited his ability to comment. He emphasized the importance for the process to play out and ensure confidence in the work of the County Attorney's Office. He said the review is nearing the end of its second phase, and he's awaiting recommendations from investigators.
"I come into this role recognizing that my job is not to protect a past decision or a verdict or an outcome or any particular person that was involved in a past case. My role is to ensure that justice is done, and that means doing whatever is required based upon those recommendations," he said.
Ellison's office also is reviewing every case the office has prosecuted in which McGee testified on behalf of the state, spokesman Brian Evans said in a statement.
"If Dr. McGee's role in any of those cases raises concerns, the Attorney General's Office will investigate that case to ensure a wrongful conviction was not secured. The office has identified roughly a dozen cases for review. According to Choi's office, the Innocence Project is also helping review cases outside of Ramsey County.
In a statement, Ramsey County Board Chair Trista Martinson said the board and leadership team are in full support of the investigation by Choi's office and partners. "We are awaiting a complete picture to determine any potential next steps and cannot comment on any specific cases at this time," she wrote.
No process for handling mistakes
McGee is not the first medical examiner to be wrong.
Pathology is not a crystal ball — despite how it's often depicted in crime procedural TV shows — and the accepted science guiding a medical opinion is always advancing.
But McGee's history with wrongful convictions raises red flags beyond the normal scope of doing business, Thomas said.
"We certainly hope that we aren't that wrong," she said.
Katherine Judson, the executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, said reviews of McGee's work are called for. "Once you discover that this person has had a number of errors, and they have operated without appropriate oversight for a long time or a period of time, then we need to audit their cases," she said.
Unlike in some medical fields, the medical examiner profession is a human endeavor that doesn't deal well with human error: The only feedback medical examiners often get on their work is adversarial, coming from the party arguing the other side of the case, Judson said. There also can be issues of bias that come from working closely with law enforcement and prosecution within a bigger government apparatus.
"That's one place where people, either consciously or subconsciously, might be tailoring their processes, their conclusions, to maybe please — but at least not [annoy] — the people who are in charge of their job," Judson said.
A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the title of Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ralph R. Erickson.
