Southern Comfort and Down-Home Injustice

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

If your loved one was murdered in Mississippi sometime between 1980 and 2010, chances are their postmortem was conducted by Dr. Steven Hayne. That alone should give you cause for concern. But if Dr. Hayne spotted any unusual marks during the autopsy, he would’ve called in Dr. Michael West, the state’s foremost bite-mark expert. Between Hayne and West, there’s an appalling likelihood that the wrong suspect got railroaded.

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington have strong professional investments in Hayne and West, from their different perspectives. Balko, a journalist with ties to the libertarian Cato Institute and Reason magazine, has written extensively about an American law enforcement apparatus that’s long since parted company with justice. Carrington, an Ole Miss law professor, moonlights as head of Mississippi’s Innocence Project, and has faced down Hayne and West in many a contentious courtroom.

This story begins with two gruesome murders, a sure hook for today’s audience of true-crime podcast listeners. Two very young girls were sexually assaulted and murdered in rural Noxubee Country, Mississippi. Despite the murders’ similarities, investigators rushed to identify men inside the victims’ homes. Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, who apparently didn’t know one another, were quickly singled out, and police, aided by Hayne, began assembling evidence.

Even though both girls’ bodies were submerged in water for hours or days, Hayne found suspicious marks on them, and called in West for bite-mark analysis. Here’s where things become significant: neither Hayne nor West identified new suspects, or excluded existing ones. Both “experts” found evidence inculpating the men police already wanted. Both Brooks and Brewer were convicted, Brewer sentenced to die, with no physical evidence except those bite marks.

Our authors aren’t satisfied with naming and shaming two “expert” witnesses who, by the time this book debuted, were already considered discredited. Their target is larger: they expose a political system that made this injustice possible. That means not only identifying the people who railroaded two innocent men, and almost certainly did likewise to others. They must also unpack how we got here, and where the problem still exists.

Most Americans probably don’t know the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner. The words are used interchangeably in the media where most Americans learn about law enforcement: TV crime dramas and detective novels. But they’re very different positions, with very different responsibilities. Start with the fact that coroners are elected, and therefore beholden to voter sentiment, not necessarily the facts. That should scare you.

Radley Balko (left) and Tucker Carrington

County coroners regularly hired Dr. Hayne, a private pathologist, to perform autopsies, especially in rural counties with limited forensic resources. At his peak, Hayne performed eighty percent of Mississippi’s autopsies, at a breakneck pace of six per day—while maintaining two full-time hospital jobs and giving testimony. Not surprisingly, obvious errors crept into many postmortem reports. Yet Hayne, often with West, remained indispensable to prosecutors for decades.

Exactly why Hayne and West remained popular isn’t difficult: they delivered convictions. Amiable and charismatic on the witness stand, the men charmed juries while baffling them with barrages of medical jargon. Faced with defendants who mostly couldn’t afford competitive attorneys, their bullshit went substantially unchallenged. Hayne and West gave lip service to justice and evidence, but built their careers carrying the prosecution’s water, and got paid well for it.

Balko and Carrington describe a death investigation system driven by convictions, not justice. Most coroners, prosecutors, and (in Mississippi) judges are elected, not appointed. Therefore being perceived as “soft on crime” can kill otherwise promising careers. Prosecutors choose expert witnesses based on their ability to deliver convictions, not their dedication to truth. And if those convicted are disproportionately Black, well whoopsie-daisy, I guess.

Worse, these problems aren’t limited to Mississippi. The lingering legacy of tough-on-crime politics has provided defendants with limited recourse at the federal level. Even when persuasive evidence exists that exculpates those found guilty, judges often feign helplessness. This means the innocent remain imprisoned, but equally awful, the guilty go unindicted, and often, as in Brooks and Brewer’s case, are free to kill again, because the justice system just stops looking.

These authors tell a gripping story of two innocent men, two charismatic experts, and the fatal dance tying them together. But it also describes a justice system that, in many ways, has advanced little. Expert witnesses serve the same role in modern trials that theologians served in colonial witch trials. The outcomes are heartbreakingly similar for those who believe that justice exists, and we have a duty to find it.