Staggering compilation of investigative reporting on Steven Hayne and Michael West, two phony expert forensic witnesses whose persistent shilling for law enforcement and criminal prosecutors for over two decades in Mississippi directly and indirectly led to dubious and downright wrongful convictions, including death row cases. Two particular cases, for two men each falsely accused and convicted of raping and murdering a toddler girl (the two abduction/assault/murder cases were in fact committed by the same man, a suspect of the first case who was quickly eliminated from consideration for no good reason), frame the meticulously researched, damning evidence against Hayne and West. The authors both had published previously on these two men, and pulled this narrative together nicely. There's a bit of redundancy, but given the density of the text, it's actually helpful to hear the reiterations.

As John Grisham warns in the introduction, this book will make you fuming, steaming, screamingly mad. I stuck with it because I had to hear how the two frauds got torn down. Frankly, they did not get what they deserved, and, more depressingly, the judicial system in MS and elsewhere in the Deep South, is unlikely to ever systematically review these cases and/or compensate the victims of false testimony in our lifetimes. It is infuriating and exhausting. Thank god for the Innocence Project.

If you want to read about the horrible nightmare that is the state coroner system and its fallout, this is an excellent text. If you want to avoid hearing yucky details about the cases involving the two murdered toddlers, just skip the first two chapters (though you will also miss the astonishing, dovetailing story of cartoonist-turned-children's-TV-star Robert "Uncle Bunky" Williams in chapter 1).

Sadly, Levon Brooks died earlier this year: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/01/26/levon-brooks-a-mississippi-man-wrongly-convicted-by-bad-forensics-dies-at-58 not long after a federal appeals court ruled Hayne and West, though they provided criminally false testimony that led to their professional disbarring, is protected by qualified immunity.

Re-read for school. Book works really well for college students

You will never look at science the same way after reading this book. Even if you know that the shows like C.S.I. are science fairy tales what Balko and Carrington chronicle isn't so much a miscarriage of justice but a deliberate hoodwinking by a group of men (the two in the title are the most important but hardly the only ones) who didn't give a damn about the truth because those accused were poor, or black or the forgotten or all three.

The book focuses on Mississippi and two men who were supposedly "science experts" were anything but. Because of a variety of factors - from judges and the public who don't know or are misinformed, too science groups that slap on wrists, to racism - lives were badly effected and harmed by these two men.

You will, as the book itself notes, want to throw it across the room. But it is an important read because it disabuses (with footnotes) several myths and images readers have about science and crime.

And makes a case for getting rid of elected coroners.

A compelling truth of decades of systemic racism

a fascinating & well told account of a distressingly corrupt part of the legal process.

To read this book about the Mississippi justice system in the 1990’s is to encounter what Hannah Arendt calls the banality of evil.