The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist Review: Justice Miscarried
In “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,” a superb work of investigative reporting, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington expose a grotesquely broken system, in which two men “dominated” death investigations in Mississippi for two decades from the early 1990s. Medical examiner Steven Hayne and his friend dentist Michael West, the authors write, offered sloppy evidence and dubious testimony that helped prosecutors in Mississippi get the convictions they sought.
Lacking a permanent medical examiner, Mississippi parceled out autopsies to private doctors. Dr. Hayne, a professed workaholic whom one attorney described as “both insecure and an egomaniac,” performed 80% of the state’s autopsies—as many as 1,800 a year, or seven times the suggested limit within the profession. Dr. West was “brash, ambitious, and, at times, breathtakingly reckless,” Messrs. Balko and Carrington write, and relied on a signature technique involving special light and yellow glasses that he called the “West Phenomenon” to find bite marks invisible to the naked eye.
Dr. Hayne and Dr. West’s activities, the authors argue, reinforced a social order that kept one class of citizen under persecution. In Mississippi, this persecution historically meant the intimidation and murder of African-Americans, specifically young black men.
Mr. Balko, a journalist at the Washington Post, and Mr. Carrington, a defense attorney and the director of the University of Mississippi’s Innocence Project, introduce us to two of these men. In 1990, Levon Brooks, 32, was cooking at a nightclub when 3-year-old Courtney Smith was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered. Two years later, 19-year-old Kennedy Brewer was sleeping when his girlfriend’s daughter, Christine Jackson, also 3, was kidnapped, raped and murdered.
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Brooks was sentenced to life. Mr. Brewer was sent to death row. The men spent a combined 30 years in prison before DNA evidence proved their innocence and set them free.
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If the convictions that Dr. Hayne and Dr. West helped secure against Brooks and Mr. Brewer were a farce, they were not without precedent. What passed for forensic expertise in Mississippi at the time reads like something out of a Coen brothers movie: In 1983, 11 of the state’s 82 coroners could not read or write. One coroner sawed off a head and claimed that the head fell off on its own.
Whether they admitted it or not, those in power in Mississippi were destroying innocent people’s lives, as they had for generations. The history offered by Messrs. Balko and Carrington is stark. Between 1882 and 1947, 577 people were lynched in Mississippi (the most in any state), their deaths recorded by coroners as “at the hands of persons unknown.” In the 1990s, a wave of young black men jailed for crimes as trivial as traffic violations were found hanging in their cells. Their deaths were ruled suicides.
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“The real problem [was] a thoroughly corrupt and inadequate system, in which black people and other minorities are traditionally regarded as something less than human,” a medical examiner is quoted as saying. When he and others in Mississippi pushed for accountability, they were forced from power. Accountability was not what prosecutors wanted, but convictions.
The board certification that Dr. Hayne touted would turn out not to exist, and Dr. West would be caught on videotape apparently administering bite marks to a corpse. Yet prosecutors defended the men’s work. Only in 2008 did the state of Mississippi drop Dr. Hayne; by 2014, a federal court described him as “now-discredited.” In 2012, Dr. West confessed in a deposition, “I no longer believe in bite mark analysis.”
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“Looking back, I can’t believe that I bought into all of that—that I believed West’s ‘science’ was really science. I wish I had voted differently,” said a former chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, which in 1997 upheld Brooks’s conviction and life sentence. Years later, he filed a post-conviction relief petition on behalf of another man who had been “convicted partly as a result of questionable testimony from Steven Hayne.” The justice’s former colleagues unanimously rejected the petition.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cadaver-king-and-the-country-dentist-review-justice-miscarried-1519862849
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Radley Balko wrote, four years ago, "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" about the militarization of the police forces.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10023404817
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Hope there's a book soon. Thanks for posting.
When I click on it I only get a small part and then a "read the entire story" which asks for me to subscribe.
Maybe it's just me?
Great. Thanks!
