The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

A True Story of Injustice in the American South

By: Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington, John Grisham - foreword

Narrated by: Robert Fass

Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives

After two 3-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined 30 years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008.

Meanwhile, the real killer remained free. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades.

Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart. Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system - a relic of the Jim Crow era - failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.

©2017 Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington (P)2017 Hachette Audio

Shocking

This book is a fascinating and painful example of the ongoing miscarriage of justice within the American system. Thank god for the progress made by the Innocence Project programs.

Lack of Justice

interesting but overlong work on miscarriages of justice in Mississippi. sad testament on policy overriding justice

scary how forensics was dominated

excellent book! knowing what happened and how it changed, was an eye-opener. difficult to decide if West and Haynes was playing good cop bad cop! still scary how they dominated.

Excellent book - sheds light on horrific injustice

Would you listen to The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist again? Why?

I don't know that I'd listen to it again, it's not that kind of a book, but it's an excellent book and CLEARLY documents the fallacies and injustices in both Missouri and the larger US legal system.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist?

The end - tying it all together, showing how the legal system votes in their favor with scientific evidence, but votes against defendants consistently. This book exposes just how evil Steven Hayne, Michael West, Jim Hood (still attorney General of Alabama!), & Forrest Allgood (DA) are. How their desire to not look bad has kept innocent men in Jail, how they have said one thing to the press and actually taken actions that repudiate what they just stated. Horrific that we as a society allow this to happen in the US. If you have read this book and not been shocked or disturbed, you've failed to understand its implications.

What does Robert Fass bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Mr. Fass has a good clear voice that is easy to listen to and added to the book

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Mostly cry - it's horrific what happened to these people and how the State of Mississippi has constantly sought to obfuscate or deny justice.

Any additional comments?

If you have an interest in criminal justice reform, read this book.

Infuriating, demoralizing affront to justice

A well researched look at how convoluted political positioning led to placing unqualified people in positions of power which opened the doors to the mishandling of criminal cases that spread throughout the state of Mississippi. Add to this, the rampant racism ingrained in the area combined with an ineptitude within a court system that had little understanding of basic science and we find out how a how a pair of appalling fraudsters were allowed to legally ruin the lives of hundreds of people solely for personal gain and profit.

Sad ...but probably so true!

a lot of history ... slowly changed, but took a long time. disappointing history of how the South used to be!

The most terrifying book!

What makes it worse, is that it's true and still continues to happen. This should be a must read in law school, as well as all the other professions that intersect with the criminal justice field.

American Justice?

This story will make you indeed angry at times. It will make you question how could that even be legitimate? How could, in modern day America, we have our heads stuck in the sand so deep we disregard justice? Disgusting behavior on a scale unimaginable.

infuriating and eye-opening

By 2020 I think most people realize that the justice system is not always just, especially for people of color. What I didn't realize before this book was just how much of that injustice was willfully perpetrated by design. It's a truly infuriating and shocking story-- how a whole state, and a smaller group of men in particular, decided that they somehow held omniscient powers of truth, and that the ends of punishing the "guilty" justified deliberately lying and falsifying information. Innocent people DIED because of their arrogance-- not just innocent people on death row, but further victims who were killed because the real perpetrators were allowed to go free. And to this day, despite irrefutable evidence, they still refuse to admit they were wrong. I will never understand how people like this can live with themselves.

The narrator of this audiobook is great, and conveys both empathy for the victims and incredulity at the ridiculousness of the system. I found his voice compelling, and wanted to keep listening for long stretches.

My single complaint about the book, and why I knocked off one star, is the organization. The book starts by describing the two crimes which serve as the focal point. But then it diverges into several different topics, and surveys each one chronologically before starting the next. So they discuss the history of racial violence and lack of convictions in the South, from reconstruction to the 1970s. Then they discuss the history of the coroner system, from the early republic to present. THEN they follow the careers of several main players, from the 1960s to present. They're all relevant topics and I found the overviews thorough and helpful, but the jumping back in time for each topic made it hard to connect all the pieces. And only after all that background info do they come back to the two cases, by which point I had forgotten most of the details, and confused all the names.

The latter part of the book is more chronologically straightforward, tracking the cases and careers in parallel. Once I got the names straight in my head it got easier to keep it all straight.

This book has opened a doorway of curiosity, and I'm eager to check out more books on all of the topics discussed.

Awesome true story of injustice

Learned a lot about crooked men in our legal system, so many more must be found and fired.