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Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were sent to prison for the worst crimes imaginable—the sexual assaults and murders of two 3-year-old girls in Noxubee County, Mississippi.
Brooks was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 for the murder of Courtney Smith, and Brewer was sentenced to death for the murder of Christine Jackson in 1995.
Both were both convicted on just one piece of physical evidence: alleged bite marks found on the girls’ bodies that supposedly matched each man.
It wasn’t until 2007, after 16 years in prison for Brooks and 13 years on death row for Brewer, that DNA testing would reveal that one man, Justin Albert Johnson, was actually responsible for the crimes.
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, by Washington Post reporter Radley Balko and Mississippi Innocence Project director Tucker Carrington, focuses on the two men who provided the “science” used to convict both Brooks and Brewer, while painting a picture of racism and corruption in rural Mississippi throughout the state’s history.
The Cadaver King—Prosecutors’ Flawed Favorite
Steven Hayne was not Mississippi’s official state medical examiner for most of his career, but between 1987 and 2008, he was performing the vast majority of the state’s autopsies. According to the authors, that was over 1,000 autopsies per year, which greatly exceeded the 250 yearly amount recommended...