What . Traces of bird feather . Yes. In trying to solve one mystery, police may have solved two. Here i have two women that appeared to die the same way. E lightning dont strike the same place twice. Thats a whole lot of women dead at the bottom of the stairs in this guys life. Dont you think . But what looked like the end of this story its really stuff made for tv drama. Was just the beginning. I always had hope. It had to be made right. Shut with a resounding clank. I was a wreck. I really was. When the sun woke him up through razor wire every day for the rest of your life. Thats where everything both begins and ends. A convicts glimmer of a successful appeal and retrial may keep desperate hope hay live. I always had hope. It has to be made right. But in the real world of criminal justice, most of the time once youre inside, youre done. This was a reality that we couldnt change. But not every case ends the way you would expect. Meet michael pierce, his case which defies all odds beca
agent trying to replicate a bloodstain a nice curving motion like that. reporter: in an effort to prove the prosecution s case. until they get it right. that s a wrap, baby. in the bloodstain pattern unit, these agents, a, had no policy for over 20 years to guide them, and, b, they were just running the most bizarre unscientific experiments to try to put people in prison for life. that s a wrap, baby. reporter: the agent heard in the video, dwayne deaver, the same agent who failed to report greg taylor s second blood test. you d hoped that these were isolated incidents, but clearly the more we dug, the more we found that that wasn t the case. reporter: because, it turns out, greg taylor wasn t the only innocent person to spend time behind bars because of the north carolina state bureau of investigation.
reporter: because this is your next appointment. who are you meeting with? doctor, uh he doesn t have the knowledge. he could never speak with that much definition or detail. reporter: this doctor? yeah. reporter: this is the confession, six pages in the first person handwritten by sbi agent mark isley who testified it was taken down verbatim. a transcript of what floyd had told him. the only thing floyd wrote down on his confession was his name. spelled wrong. what specifics are we talking about that scream this guy did not say this. oh, gosh, there s so many. well, it starts at the first line where he supposedly started talking, my mama woke me up at 6:00 a.m. back then floyd could not tell time. it also said i live at this address. well, we know from records at that time, floyd s never been able to recite his address. if you read the level of detail, if you read the
brown case, mark isley was promoted. now he s under investigation. we wanted to ask him about this. this six-page confession that he says floyd brown dictated to him. verbatim. but isley is not talking. over the years, mark isley climbed the ladder at the sbi, and today he supervises other sbi agents in the medicaid fraud unit. and his case wasn t even investigated internally by the sbi until later this summer after our series ran. reporter: the news and observer reporters weren t the only ones investigating the sbi. an outside expert, a former fbi agent, would find that floyd brown and greg taylor were just the tip of the iceberg. i m about as hard-line law enforcement as you can get. law and order, putting bad guys in jail. but what we saw was just not right. [ female announcer ] enjoy a complete seafood dinner for two for just $29.99 at red lobster. with fresh salads and biscuits.
i was framed. yeah. chief complaint i was framed. reporter: when he entered these doors, he also entered into a kind of legal limbo, accused of murder but unable to have his day in court. floyd brown was developmentally disabled. he had the mind of a 7-year-old and was ruled incompetent to stand trial. the only evidence against floyd was a confession he had signed misspelling his own name. the details in that confession were so elaborate and so detailed that everyone who knows floyd 87, 89 his teachers from school and the doctors at dorthea dix believed he was incapable of writing that confession. reporter: the confession that kept floyd locked up was written down by sbi agent mark isley. more than 20 times floyd s competence was evaluated. two. on top. six. on top. reporter: each time he was