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A review by bobkat
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South by Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington
5.0
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.
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.