The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South - Paperback

by Radley Balko (Author), Tucker Carrington (Author), John Grisham (Foreword by)

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.

Author Biography

Radley Balko reports on criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He was previously a writer and investigative reporter at the Huffington Post, and a reporter and editor for Reason magazine. He is also author of Rise of the Warrior Cop. His work has been cited twice by the U.S. Supreme Court, and by the Mississippi Supreme Court and two federal appeals courts. He has won the L.A. Press Club's Journalist of the Year award, the NACDL's Champion of Justice Award, the Innocence Project's Journalism Award, and the Bastiat Prize for Journalism. He lives in Nashville, where he also writes about the city's music and culture.

Tucker Carrington is the director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi School of Law. He has worked as a criminal defense lawyer for his entire legal career, most of it as a public defender in Washington, D.C.