Tucker CarringtonRezensionen

I've lived in the midwest and west and have always leaned conservative. But after reading THE CADAVER KING AND THE COUNTRY DENTIST, I know I'd be a liberal if I lived in Mississippi. What an eye-opening book this is!

The "cadaver king" is Dr. Stephen Hayne, and the "country dentist" is Dr. Michael West. The two of them acted as expert witnesses in the majority of Mississippi's death investigation court cases for nearly 20 years. Hayne performed an impossible number of autopsies and then claimed to see whatever prosecutors suspected. West gave unscientific bite-mark testimony to suit prosecutors' suspicions and also pretended to be an expert in a variety of other unscientific areas. And Mississippi courts accepted it all for many years and sent many, many people to prison as a result.

THE CADAVER KING AND THE COUNTRY DENTIST concentrates on two of those cases in particular, both affected by Hayne's and West's testimony. In each case, a three-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Mississippi. Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were accused of the crimes. They were innocent, but, in large part on the basis of Hayne's and West's testimony, they were convicted and spent many years in jail, Brewer on death row.

So much research went into this very interesting book. I highly recommend it.

Managed to finish this - barely.

I can't believe how recently these horrible people were allowed to control investigations.

Rather timely.

Without a doubt, there is much racial prejudice ingrained within the judicial system, especially in Mississippi. That is what most of this book is about. From reading the jacket blurb I assumed the book was about the murders of the two girls; but in reality, only about 3 chapters were dedicated to that. The remainder of the book was very wide in its scope, even going back to the 1950's lynchings in not only Mississippi, but throughout the South. There were so many cases discussed that I could not keep track of them and sometimes when they switched cases mid-chapter I missed it and was going....huh? I wish the book was more focused on just the two cases of the young girls. I don't think the reader will find too much "new" here except perhaps the specifics of the two girls murdered in 1990 and 1993 and perhaps Emmett Till (if you don't know about him already). 416 pages

As someone who was raised Catholic and taught by nuns, my abiding problem is always figuring out how not to be overwhelmed by shame and guilt. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist explores what happens when you've got a legal system run by people who are seemingly incapable of feeling either emotion. Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington analyse the wrongful murder convictions of two Black men in a small Mississippi town in the early 1990s. Their respective convictions, and the fact that they spent long years behind bars for murders that they didn't commit, is the result of racism, the good ol' boy network, and forensic analysis that was either incompetently carried out, based on junk science, or both. (And much more forensic science is bunk than the average viewer of CSI, etc., might think.)

This is not another prurient installment in the true crime genre. It is, instead, a fairly meticulous indictment of wilful systemic injustice. In other words: Americans, your court system is fucked.

Heavily billed as a Grisham book, it's not. He just writes the "Forward". It was not as interesting as the reviewer made it sound. This book takes on the entire modern-day political, cultural and legal system in rural Mississippi. Thus, it drones on and on and on in excruciating detail. DNF.

Interesting topic. poor execution.

This nonfiction focuses on a coroner in Mississippi and his dentist cohort, and on two major cases of innocent men found guilty of murder because of them. It covers other cases and other people as well, and a great deal about forensics and pseudoscience. The two main cases, both horrible murders of very small children, is heartbreaking, but the authors do not exploit the facts, do not use their murders gratuitously. This book is a great balance of the highly personal and the general. DNA has helped exonerate many innocent, but there are many others where DNA is not available. And the retrial obstructions can be onerous if not impossible to overcome. And if you were accused to a crime against a person in Mississippi, chances are the dentist will determine you bit the victim. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The Innocence Project and others like it have helped many, but it is just a drop on the bucket.

I listened to the Audible edition of this book, and the narrator was excellent. This is not an emotionally easy book to read or listen to, but it is well written, clearly written, fascinating, and necessary for anyone who believes in justice. And if you are ever in Mississippi, especially if you are a poor black man, don't ever get arrested because your chances of being found guilty are remarkably high.½

This is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. While the story focuses on the most prominent corner & forensic dentist in Mississippi, revealing the questionable methods and conclusions of these two forensic experts challenges juries' often easy acceptance of expert testimony in general.

There's a fundamental mismatch between science as a discipline and the legal system that would really like to use scientific evidence to support its conclusions, and this book makes a terrifically thorough case that forensic science as it currently exists and is practiced is the worst of both worlds. By focusing on the egregious case of Stephen Hayne and Michael West (and the Mississippi legal system that enabled their corruption) Balko and Carrington present a very bleak view of the likelihood of justice in our current system.

It was not as interesting as the BookPage reviewer or the back cover blurb made it sound. The title caught my eye because of the part about the dentist (he doesn't show up until Chapter 7 or so). Prior to that, I had to wade through history of coroners/medical examiners and some of the information about Dr. Steven Hayne (the Cadaver King from the title).

The thought that most of the pattern matching aspects were not scientific in origin but more developed as investigative techniques was new to me, and in some cases, I'm sure it does make sense.

I guess I expected a bit more court cases information rather than just a narrative that only sometimes focused on the victims of Hayne and West and their processes.

This book is a comprehensive, incredibly well researched exploration of the intertwining of politics, law, justice/injustice, and racism in the deep south.

I read a lot of true crime and sociology, but I've never read a book that explores corruption within our legal system in regards to our coroners and medical examiners. I'm embarrassed to admit that I never considered this angle. The science, we like to think, should be the trustworthy aspect of our justice system. Radley Balko shows us, without question, that all "facts" can be manipulated, or simply eliminated, when convenient.

What I felt while reading this book was total outrage, disgust, and sorrow. The events portrayed are difficult to align with any conception of justice, even as flawed as I knew the system to be.

While I have immense respect for the author's undertaking, I did have some problems with the way the book was put together. The story revolves around Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, as the title suggests, but really this book takes on the entire modern-day political and legal system in rural Mississippi. We have a whole lot of people moving in and out, including judges, lawyers, politicians, medical examiners, doctors, victims, and the accused.

The scope of this book is enormous and at times lacks focus. This was the crux of the problem for me. The author occasionally takes us wandering into areas that are interesting, but not pertinent. For instance, we're given lengthy education on the history of coroners from the time of the Crusades. Throughout the book, we seem to wobble in and out of the timeline, jumping from one case to another, and then over to a side bit, and then on to something else. Keeping up with all the players, their stories, the cases, and the various tidbits makes for an exhausting reading experience.

In fairness to the author, the magnitude of these events had to be difficult to wrangle into a neat and concise story. This was not one or two people caught in corruption; this was the entire system, from its core on out. The entire mess is so badly entangled that unraveling it to find the core problem demands we pull out all the many threads. And so I recommend reading this book because, until you see all the pieces, you won't believe the whole picture could be real.

*I received an ebook copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.*

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington is a highly recommended account of the corrupt criminal justice system in Mississippi in the 1970s into the 1990s.

This book tells the story of a doctor and a dentist, two of the most audacious and arrogant experts ever allowed in a courtroom. The focus is on collusion of the medical experts with the legal system in Mississippi. Towards that end, the trials of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks are examples of the ineptitude of the status quo. Both men were wrongly convicted of the sexual assault and murder of two three-year-old girls in rural Mississippi in the 1990s. (The two men were exonerated in 2007.) For over two decades the doctor and the dentist had built a career on providing "expert" testimony for prosecutors in Mississippi.

Steven Hayne was the controversial medical examiner who bragged of performing over two thousand autopsies in a single year. His notes were vague enough (and not always correct) that he could often assess the atmosphere at the trial and then tailor his testimony to fit what he was observing. Michael West was a dentist who, with no formal training or peer reviewed studies, "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." These two testified at numerous trials throughout Mississippi and Louisiana. The questionable autopsies of Hayne will frustrate you (he once wrote in his notes that he removed the uterus and ovaries from a male), but the junk forensic science of West is going to infuriate you. The blatant sexism and racism is also distressing.

"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." Reading The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist will truly be an exasperating, maddening experience as you will wonder why this went on for so long.

That question is answered. In the 1970s and into the 1990s the state legislature was unwilling to provide the budget for a modern-day state medical examiner’s office. Adding to this were the coroners, who were a powerful group who fought against reforms and were protective of the authority of their positions. Finally, prosecutors and law enforcement wanted solved murder cases, even though some knew there were legitimate questions about the quality of the expert testimony of the doctor and the dentist.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is an excellent well-written and researched account of the criminal incompetence that was allowed to occur for way-too-long in Mississippi. The strength of this book is also the weakness: the plethora of information, background, and history is exhaustive. Balko and Carrington have been researching and following this for years and the book is a culmination of that comprehensive coverage. The information runs the gamete between inciting anger and indignation to providing rather tiresome background of the history of coroners. The historical notes can be skipped over for those readers who are more concerned with following the prevailing absurdities of the doctor and the dentist and want to know when they finally were retired from providing "expert" testimony. The book includes extensive notes.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of PublicAffairs via Netgalley.
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