A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives

After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi’s autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart.

Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi’s death investigation system — a relic of the Jim Crow era — failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.

The following are a couple of excerpts from Jeffrey’s story as told in this book by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington (starting on page 215):

The SBS [shaken baby syndrome] conviction of Jeffrey Havard demonstrates as well as any other how without DNA testing, it can be nearly impossible to overturn convictions based on faulty forensic testimony…

While it now seems clear that Chloe wasn’t sexually assaulted, [Dr. Steven] Hayne’s latest attempt to rehabilitate his role in the case is hard to comprehend. Although it’s true that he never explicitly testified that Chloe Britt had been sexually abused, his testimony did plenty to help prosecutors convince the jury she had…

It took Havard’s jury less than two days to deliberate, convict him based on bad scientific evidence, hear evidence on appropriate punishment, deliberate again, and sentence him to death. It took thirteen years for the court to admit that a small portion of the bad evidence might have been scientifically unsound. It took another fourteen months for the trial court judge to agree to hold a hearing on the matter…

The Havard case is also illustrative of the way Mississippi state officials have neglected their duty to look into Hayne.

To read the entire story, purchase the book.