Matthew T. Mangino reviews The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington
September/October 2020
Criminal
trials nationwide often turn on the testimony of experts who opine about
everything from insanity to hair samples. Experts, whether eminently qualified
Ivy Leaguers or dubious self-promoters out to make a profit, are often held in
high esteem. Their presence in court is marked by great deference, their
qualifications expounded upon ad nauseam, often unchallenged by overworked and
underpaid public defenders.
The pernicious influence of the expert witness is a
modern phenomenon, not because they didn’t exist in courtrooms of the past, but
because they were not so easily detected. The advent of DNA has exposed America
to the inadequacies of forensic evidence and therewith the expert who either
believes the gibberish she utters in court or, all the more appalling,
intentionally misleads for profit.
Washington Post
journalist Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, a law professor at the
University of Mississippi have provided a vivid glimpse into the hocus pocus of
forensic evidence in the deep south.
Their book, “The Cadaver King and
the Country Dentist,” published by PublicAffairs, Hachette Book Group,
is set in Mississippi and examines the wrongful convictions of two men, Kennedy
Brewer and Levon Brooks, in two separate child murders in the early 1990s.
The book is not a suspenseful whodunit, but is gut
wrenching nonetheless. Balko and Carrington painstakingly examine the faulty
work of two so called experts—Steven Hayne and Michael West—who often
collaborated, and dominated the Mississippi death investigation system for nearly
20 years. During those two decades, virtually
every homicide in the state of Mississippi included one or both of them as key
prosecution witnesses.
Hayne began performing autopsies for the state of
Mississippi in about 1987. Within 20
years, according to Balko and Carrington, he was performing more than 1,800
autopsies a year. The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends that
medical examiners perform no more than 250 autopsies per year.
West was an “expert” in bite mark analysis. The analysis of bite marks is a class of
forensics called pattern matching. As
the authors suggest, pattern matching is “entirely subjective.”
Balko and Carrington have used the egregious conduct of
Hayne and West to demonstrate the pervasive misuse of forensic evidence and
expert testimony.
The authors point to studies that have revealed problems
with ballistic, handwriting, tire tread, shoe print, hair and fingerprint
analysis. They point to weaknesses in
drug-dogs, drug field tests and even Shaken Baby Syndrome.
The authors’ research even revealed a study published in
2013 that found crime labs in many states are paid per conviction.
Mississippi is by no means the only state to be outed in
recent years regarding faulty forensic analysis. In West Virginia, a single
crime lab analyst may be responsible for as many as 134 wrongful convictions.
In 2005, a Tennessee state medical examiner was found guilty
of misconduct. Between 2015 and the publication of Balko and Carrington’s book, there were crime lab controversies in
Houston; Austin; Orlando; San Francisco; Broward County, Florida; and with the
Ohio, New Jersey and Oregon state police labs.
The Cadaver King
and the Country Dentist is an expose of the often vaunted role of experts
in the criminal justice system. Although
the news is replete with stories of exonerations of men and women who have
spent countless years behind bars for crimes they did not commit—it is still
almost sacrosanct to speak of holding detectives and prosecutors accountable
for permitting such injustices.
Just as this review was being written, Blako wrote a
lengthy article in the Washington Post
revealing a conviction and death sentence for a defendant almost certainly
innocent. Twenty-two-year-old, Toforest Johnson was convicted of murdering
William Hardy in Birmingham, Alabama.
Johnson was partying at a nightclub called Tee’s Place miles
away from the crime scene precisely when Hardy was murdered and his lawyers
provided 10 witnesses who saw him at the club.
Balko has, and continues to, convincingly point out grievous
miscarriages of justice but what is missing from Balko and Carrington’s book is
the way forward. How do we stop rogue
lab techs, overzealous criminal investigators and ambitious prosecutors from
abusing the system? The problems are clear—the solutions are not.
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