Chris Mooney has published an article on Lott in Mother Jones. The whole article is well worth reading, but the way that Lott kept changing his story about the coding errors is particularly interesting:
In the face of this evidence, how can Lott continue to claim the coding errors don't matter? In an interview conducted on August 18, Lott told me that he had posted "corrected" tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's "corrected" version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres---that is, the coding errors were gone---but bizarrely claimed the properly coded data still indicated statistically significant drops in murder, rape, and robbery. That's because Lott had introduced a new twist: Rather than simply fixing the incorrectly coded data, he omitted a key calculation regarding statistical significance used in the Plassmann-Whitley paper. (For statistics geeks, it's called "clustering at the state level.") Faced with no other way to save his thesis, you could say that Lott changed the rules---rules his own team had laid down---in the middle of the game.
Confronted with this, Lott's subsequent actions raise even more questions. On the website, Lott claimed the "corrected" table used "clustering," when it did not. In a heated interview on August 19, Lott said this labeling claim must be an error. But the very next day, he e-mailed a file containing precisely the same table, claiming that all the tables on his website were "clearly and properly labeled."
On September 2, Lott changed his story yet again, emailing me that "the file should now be returned to what had been up there before." But when I downloaded the new file, the key table had been altered to remove the questionable clustering assertion, but had inexplicably reverted to the incorrectly coded Plassmann-Whitley findings that Donohue and Ayres had long since debunked, and Lott himself had admitted to me were incorrectly coded. And despite all these changes, as of October 13, Lott's website still labels the table as last being corrected "April 18, 2003."