Overview

This is an account of two tragedies. At the heart of the first is Dr. Steven Hayne, a doctor the State of Mississippi employed as its de facto medical examiner for two decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, he performed anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies a year, five times more than is recommended, performed at night in the basement of a local funeral home. Autopsy reports claimed organs had been observed and weighed when, in reality, they had been surgically removed from the body years before. Hayne, the only game in town, also often brought in local dentist and self-styled bite-mark specialist Dr. Michael West, who would discover marks on victim's bodies, at times invisible to the naked eye, and then match those marks-indeed and without doubt-to law enforcement's lead suspect. This leads to the second tragic tale: that of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two black men each convicted in separate cases of the brutal rape and murder of young girls. Dr. Hayne's autopsy and Dr. West's bite-mark matching formed the bases for their convictions. Combined, the two men served over thirty years in Parchman Farm, Mississippi's notorious penitentiary, before being exonerated in 2008. Brooks' and Brewer's wrongful convictions lie at the intersection of both the most pressing problem facing this country's criminal justice system-structural injustice built on the historic foundation of race and class-as well as with the much more contemporary but equally egregious problem of invalid forensic science. The old problem is inextricably bound up with and exacerbates the new. In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write a true story of Southern gothic horror-of two innocent men wrongly convicted of vicious crimes and the legally condoned failures that allowed it to happen. Balko and Carrington will shine a light on the institutional and professional failures that allowed this tragic, astonishing story to happen, identify where it may have happened elsewhere, and show how to prevent it from happening again.

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9781478990406

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Reviews

A powerful and instructive story, masterfully told by Balko and Carrington. -- Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author This is a true crime story, but it is more than a report of the tragic murders of two young girls. The crime at the center of this book is the one committed by a justice system that is more concerned with conviction rates than unearthing the truth...A chilling reminder of what happens to the rule of law when the law forgets the rules. -- BookPage The authors uncover an unholy alliance of racist cops and prosecutors with questionable death investigations and misapplied forensics. This work should spark both admiration and outrage-and, one hopes, reform. -- Booklist Notable for its depth and geographic focus...this [is a] stinging expose of faulty forensics. -- Library Journal A clear and shocking portrait...This eminently readable book builds a hard-to-ignore case for comprehensive criminal justice reform. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Sometimes the best thing a narrator can do is just get out of the way of the story. Robert Fass does just that with this tale of stunning forensic fakery in the criminal justice system...Fass' delivery is measured, steady, and varied with slight pauses...and keeps listeners engaged. -- AudioFile A horrifying expose of how a few individuals can infect an entire state's criminal justice system. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A blistering expose of Mississippi's bungle-prone process of investigating deaths. -- Garden & Gun magazine Junk science convicted these men; real science set them free...The inability of judges and jurors to tell the difference is why innocent men languish in jail while the prosecutors who put them there run for higher office. -- New York Times A superb work of investigative reporting...Balko and Carrington combine expertise, industry, and outrage into a searing narrative. -- Wall Street Journal

Author Information

"Radley Balko is an investigative journalist and reporter at the Washington Post. He currently writes and edits The Watch, a reported opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is the author of the 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, which has won widespread acclaim, including from the Economist, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and was named one of the best investigative journalism books of the year by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. His January 2013 investigation, Solving Kathy Mabry's Murder: Brutal 15-Year-Old Crime Highlights Decades-Long Mississippi Scandal, was one of the most widely read Huffington Post articles of 2013. In 2015, he was awarded the Innocence Project's Journalism Award, in part for his coverage in Mississippi. Radley Balko is an investigative journalist and reporter at the Washington Post. He currently writes and edits ""The Watch,"" a reported opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is the author of the 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, which has won widespread acclaim, including from the Economist, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and was named one of the best investigative journalism books of the year by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Since 2006, Balko has written dozens of pieces on Hayne, West, and Mississippi's forensics disaster. His January 2013 investigation, ""Solving Kathy Mabry's Murder: Brutal 15-Year-Old Crime Highlights Decades-Long Mississippi Scandal,"" was one of the most widely read Huffington Post articles of 2013. In 2015, Balko was awarded the Innocence Project's Journalism Award, in part for his coverage in Mississippi. Tucker Carrington is the director of the Mississippi 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. John Grisham, whose name has become synonymous with the modern legal thriller, used to work sixty to seventy hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi, law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby-writing his first novel. When finally published, A Time to Kill met with little success, but when he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among publishers. Spending forty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991. The successes of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham's reputation as the master of the legal thriller. His success even renewed interest in A Time to Kill, which was then republished. This time around, it was a bestseller. Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written one novel a year, and all of them have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 275 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into forty languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films, as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man. He lives in Virginia and Mississippi. Robert Fass is a veteran actor and twice winner of the prestigious Audie Award. He has earned multiple Earphones Awards, including for his narration of Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name, one of AudioFile magazine's Best Audiobooks of 2011."

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