The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington.

  Foreword © John Grisham, 2018

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  First Edition: February 2018

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

  Names: Balko, Radley, author. | Carrington, Tucker (W. Tucker), author.

  Title: The cadaver king and the country dentist : a true story of injustice in the American South / Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington.

  Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017009508 (print) | LCCN 2017011704 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610396929 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610396912 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hayne, Steven (Forensic pathologist) | West, Michael (Dentist) | Criminal justice, Administration of—Mississippi. | Judicial error—Mississippi. | Brooks, Levon, 1959—Trials, litigation, etc. | Brewer, Kennedy—Trials, litigation, etc. | Trials (Rape)—Mississippi. | Trials (Murder)—Mississippi.

  Classification: LCC RA1025.H38 (ebook) | LCC RA1025.H38 B35 2017 (print) | DDC 614/.109762—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009508

  ISBNs: 978-1-61039-691-2 (hardcover); 978-1-61039-692-9 (e-book)

  E3-20180130-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by John Grisham

  Authors’ Note

  1 The Murder of Courtney Smith

  2 The Murder of Christine Jackson

  3 Investigating the Dead

  4 At the Hands of Persons Unknown

  5 Setting the Stage for the Cadaver King

  6 Rise of a Fiefdom

  7 The West Phenomenon

  8 Entrenchment

  9 The Trial of Levon Brooks

  10 Keep that Woman Under Control

  11 Vessels of Wrath, Fitted for Destruction

  12 Prayers for Relief

  13 The Unraveling

  14 Redemption and Insurrection

  15 No Reckoning

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  To Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, and to the memories of Courtney Smith and Christine Jackson

  Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

  —Seneca

  FOREWORD

  It is relatively easy to convict an innocent person. Millions of defendants are processed through our courts each year, so it becomes nearly impossible to determine how many are actually innocent once they’ve been convicted. No one has the time or resources to examine the facts and backgrounds of those claiming to be wrongfully convicted. Actual wrongful conviction estimates range from 2 percent to 10 percent, but no one really knows. These numbers may sound low, but when applied to a prison population of 2.3 million, they become staggering. Can there really be between 46,000 and 230,000 innocent people locked away? Those of us who are involved in innocence work firmly believe so.

  And, practically speaking, once an innocent person is convicted, it is virtually impossible to get them out of prison. I serve on the board of directors of the Innocence Project in New York. In the past twenty-five years, we have secured through DNA testing the release of 349 innocent men and women, 20 of whom had been sent to death row. All told, over 2,000 exonerations, including 200 from death row and including those not involving DNA, have occurred in the United States during that same period. While we are proud of our work, we’ve only scratched the surface.

  Wrongful convictions happen for eight reasons. Not all are neatly defined, and they usually combine with others to produce a bad result. In some of the more egregious cases, the poor defendant unwittingly “hit for the cycle” and got nailed with all eight.

  In no particular order of importance, they are:

  Bad Police Work. Most cops are honest, hard-working professionals who aren’t paid a high salary. However, there are a not insignificant number of cases in which police officers have hidden, altered, or fabricated evidence, lied on the witness stand, cut deals with snitches in return for bogus testimony, intimidated and threatened witnesses, coerced confessions, or manipulated eyewitness identifications.

  Prosecutorial Misconduct. Most prosecutors are honest, hard-working professionals who aren’t paid a high salary—at least not compared to many other lawyers. However, there have been cases in which prosecutors hid exculpatory evidence, encouraged witnesses to commit perjury, lied to jurors, judges, and defense lawyers, used the testimony of bogus experts, or ignored relevant evidence beneficial to the accused.

  False Confessions. Most jurors find it impossible to believe that a suspect would confess to a serious crime he didn’t commit. Yet the average citizen, if taken to a basement room and subjected to ten consecutive hours of abusive interrogation tactics by experienced cops, might be surprised at what they would say under extreme duress. Of the 330 people exonerated by DNA from 1989 to 2015, about 25 percent gave bogus confessions after lengthy interrogations. Virtually every one recanted soon after.

  Faulty Eyewitness Identification. More often than not, those who witness violent acts have trouble accurately recalling the facts and identifying those involved. Yet police regularly use physical and photo lineups, and these are often manipulated in various ways to focus suspicion on favored suspects.

  Jailhouse Snitches. This tactic involves one of the oldest and dirtiest tricks used by police and prosecutors. In every jail there is a career criminal staring at a long sentence. For leniency, he can be persuaded to lie to the jury and describe in great detail the confession overheard from the accused, usually a cell mate. And if he performs well enough on the stand, the authorities might allow him to walk free.

  Bad Lawyering. Those accused of serious crimes rarely have money. Most are represented by good public defenders, but too many get stuck with court-appointed lawyers with little or no experience. Capital cases are complex, the stakes are enormous, and all too often the defense lawyers are in over their heads.

  Sleeping Judges. Judges are supposed to be impartial referees intent on ensuring fair trials. They should exclude confessions that are inconsistent with the physical evidence and obtained by questionable means, exclude the testimony of career felons with dubious motives, require prosecutors to produce exculpatory evidence, and question the credentials and testimony of all experts outside the presence of the jury. Unfortunately, judges do not always do what t
hey should. The reasons are many and varied, but the fact that many judgeships are elected positions doesn’t help. They are conscious of their upcoming reelection and how the decisions they make might affect it. And of those judges who are appointed and not elected, the majority are former prosecutors.

  Junk Science. This is a major reason for wrongful convictions. Over the past five decades, our courtrooms have been flooded with an avalanche of unreliable, even atrocious “science.” Experts of all varieties and with qualifications that were dubious at best and fraudulent at worst have peddled (for a fee, of course) all manner of damning theories of guilt based on their alleged scientific analysis of hair, fibers, bite marks, arson, boot prints, blood spatters, and ballistics. Of the 330 people exonerated by DNA tests from 1989 to 2015, 71 percent were convicted based on forensic testimony, much of which was flawed, unreliable, exaggerated, and sometimes even outright fabricated.

  University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett has studied virtually all of the trial transcripts of wrongful convictions that were later exposed by DNA-based exonerations. He writes: “There is a national epidemic of overstated forensic testimony, with a steady stream of criminal convictions being overturned as the shoddiness of decades’ worth of physical evidence comes to light. The true scope of the problem is only now coming into focus.”

  This book tells the story of two of the most ambitious and daring experts ever allowed in a courtroom. One was a controversial forensic pathologist who once boasted of performing over two thousand autopsies in a single year. The other, his sidekick, was a small-town dentist who brazenly and without formal training or study assumed the role of an expert in many other fields, such as ballistics, gunshot reconstruction, “tool mark” patterns, and the analysis not only of teeth and bite marks but wound patterns, bruises, and fingernail scratches. Together, they tag-teamed their way through rape and murder trials throughout Mississippi and Louisiana, accumulating an impressive string of convictions, several of which have now been overturned. Some are still being litigated. Many others, sadly, seem destined to stand.

  This is a maddening story of a broken system, one in which prosecutors allowed—even encouraged—flawed forensic testimony because it was skillfully molded to fit their theories of guilt. Time and again, over two decades, elected judges permitted these two men to take the stand and convince unsophisticated jurors that science was on the side of the state. As professional testifiers, they honed their performances and became thoroughly convincing.

  While breathtaking in its scope, the work these two men did within the justice system is also heartbreaking in its devastation. No one really knows the true extent of the damage. No one knows how many innocent women and men have been convicted in trials in which these two testified, nor is the truth likely ever to be discovered. And it seems nearly impossible to think the state of Mississippi will investigate, audit, or take responsibility.

  As you turn the pages, you will often be tempted to close this book and either laugh or cry or yell that what happened in Mississippi cannot possibly be true. But it is. It happened in plain view and with the complicity of many who were sworn to uphold the law. It is my hope that this book might inspire those with the necessary will and persistence to finally bring justice for the men and women around the country who have been wrongfully convicted and to fix the system so that nothing like this can ever happen again.

  John Grisham

  PS: In the spirit of full disclosure, I am compelled to accept my share of the responsibility. As an elected member of the Mississippi legislature back in the 1980s, I remember the struggle to establish and fund the Office of the State Medical Examiner. It was a thorny issue that wouldn’t go away, but it was far from the most pressing matters we faced each year. I have no idea how I voted on the various bills, but I do remember being embarrassed by our antiquated system of elected coroners. I recall being frustrated by the state’s inability to find and keep a medical examiner. Its failure to do so was a major reason some of the characters in this story were allowed to amass so much power.

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  The two of us came to this story separately, each after looking into a different case in which we found expert forensic testimony that seemed odd—outside the boundaries of sound science. Then we found other cases with similarly troubling testimony. And then many, many others. It soon became clear that this wasn’t about one case, or even several. It was a sprawling, complex affair that spanned decades, that was rooted in history, politics, and law. The story you’re about to read took place largely in Mississippi and Louisiana, but the component parts—dubious forensics, innocence, the intersection of science and law, and the structural racism built into the criminal justice system—are issues that find their way into just about every courtroom in America.

  RADLEY BALKO

  I first traveled to Mississippi in 2005 to report on the case of Cory Maye, a tragic story about overzealous policing and the drug war—a subject that would later become the focus of my first book. While investigating that case, I stumbled onto this much bigger story, one that covers two decades and thousands of trials, several of them death penalty cases.

  Cory Maye had been convicted the previous year for killing Ron Jones, a Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer, during a drug raid. Maye, who was home with his young daughter when the twelve-thirty-a.m. raid went down, claimed he mistook the cops who broke down his door for criminal intruders.

  The raid on Maye certainly seemed to have been a mistake. Maye lived with his girlfriend and daughter on one side of a duplex. On the other side lived a man named Jamie Smith, who was already facing drug charges. Smith’s name was on the warrant. Maye’s wasn’t, though his address was. The police found a significant quantity of drugs in Smith’s home.

  Cory Maye had no prior criminal record, didn’t know his neighbor, and had no significant quantity of drugs in his home (the police found a single burnt marijuana cigarette in the apartment—which would otherwise have merited a $50 fine). But Maye had just killed a cop. He was black; the cop was white. And this wasn’t just any cop: Ron Jones was also the son of the town’s police chief.

  Maye was arrested and charged with capital murder.

  Medical examiner Steven Hayne performed the autopsy on Jones and later testified at Maye’s trial. Hayne’s testimony was problematic. Based on Hayne’s testimony about the trajectory the bullet took through Jones’s body, the prosecutor argued to the jury that Maye must have been standing when he shot Jones, not lying on the floor in fear, as he had said he was. The claim made it appear as though Maye had been lying in wait to ambush Jones. In truth, a number of variables can affect a bullet’s trajectory through a body, most notably the victim’s position when shot. Moreover, bullets found in the door frame of Maye’s home had a clear upward trajectory. A bullet’s path through a stationary object like a door frame was a much more likely indication of Maye’s position than its path through a moving human being.

  Given that Maye’s guilt or innocence hinged on whether the jury believed him when he said he didn’t know Jones was a police officer, the doubt prosecutors cast on Maye’s story by way of Hayne’s testimony was critical.

  Hayne wasn’t outright wrong in Maye’s case; he was just slippery. He never came right out and said that Maye could only have been standing. Instead, he carefully worded his answers, allowing the prosecutor to weave the testimony into the state’s closing argument for the jury, all while still retaining plausible deniability.

  Maye was convicted and sentenced to death. He was later given a new trial when the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that he should have been permitted to argue that he was defending his daughter’s life on the night of the raid. In 2011, after ten years behind bars, he accepted a plea bargain in which he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He has since been released.

  Given the way prosecutors were able to use Hayne’s testimony to mislead jurors during Maye’s trial, I began to wonder if they had also done so in others. So I as
ked around. I first spoke with Maye’s attorney and public defender, Bob Evans, who recalled the case of Tonya Ward, a woman whose skeletonized remains had been found in a wooded area and had been picked at by animals. Hayne testified she had died from strangulation, an improbable diagnosis when there’s no soft tissue on the body to examine and no way to tell if any trauma done to her body had come before or after her death.

  Other attorneys across Mississippi had similar stories. I called other medical examiners across the South. And then police officials and other forensic analysts. On a couple of occasions, I had barely finished explaining that I was working on a story about a questionable medical examiner before the source would interrupt and ask if I was referring to Hayne. Many wouldn’t talk on the record, citing Hayne’s reputation for litigiousness.

  But some did. Ken Winter, former head of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, told me that he was most troubled by the sheer quantity of autopsies Hayne performed, which he called “way too many to do… in the manner they should be done.” One former state official in Mississippi recalled being pressured by district attorneys to change his opinion based on Hayne’s analysis. And he could think of two specific murder cases in which Hayne’s opinion was “way outside the purview of a forensic pathologist.” The official was also aghast at Hayne’s sloppy practices. “There were frequently test tubes sent to the lab with the wrong name on them,” he said. “I reached a point where we just collected all the trace evidence at the scene.” Former Columbus, Mississippi, police chief J. D. Sanders also had stories. Sanders wrote a weekly column in the local newspaper. After a series of columns in which he criticized Hayne and the death investigation system, he received a flood of feedback—both public and private—from coroners and prosecutors across the state. The anger, virulence, and even death threats in some of the responses convinced Sanders that things were worse than he imagined. “There’s no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne,” Sanders told me. “There may even be some on death row.”