QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It also is a reminder there are many more innocent people in prison than we will ever know because they have given up because they are isolated because they don’t have access to anyone to help them.”
Vanessa Potkin, the Innocence Project attorney who took on Brooks’ case.
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PHOTO CAPTION: "This Feb. 15, 2008 file photo shows Levon Brooks as he speaks to reporters after a circuit court judge released him from jail and granted him a new trial, in Macon, Miss. Brooks, who was imprisoned 16 years for crimes he didn’t commit, has died after an extended illness, a decade after being released. Brooks died Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018, at his home in Columbus, Miss. He was 58."
A Mississippi man who spent 16 years in prison for crimes he
didn’t commit has died after an extended illness, a decade after being
released. Levon Brooks died Wednesday at his home in Columbus,
Mississippi. He was 58. His widow, Dinah Brooks, said he was diagnosed
with colon cancer five years ago. Brooks was convicted in 1992
and sentenced to life in prison for the 1990 rape and killing of
Courtney Smith, the 3-year-old daughter of his former girlfriend. The
conviction was partly based on testimony from Dr. Michael West, a
forensic dentist who came under intense criticism for his testimony in
criminal cases. Brooks was released from prison in February 2008
after DNA evidence pointed to another man, who confessed. At an
exoneration hearing the next month, the prosecutor apologized to Brooks. “I can’t give you your life back, but I want you to know I believed in
what I was doing. For whatever part I played in your prosecution, I’m
truly sorry,” said Forrest Allgood, who was district attorney at the
time. Attorneys for the Innocence
Project, based in New York, began looking into Brooks’ case as they were
challenging the conviction of Kennedy Brewer in a similar killing of
another young girl in the same small community in Noxubee County,
Mississippi. Because Brewer was on death row, he was entitled to
attorneys and appeals. Brooks was not on death row and did not have the
same right to post-conviction appeals.“At some point, being
locked away and isolated without any organization to turn to, he
basically came to accept the cruel fate that life had inflicted upon him
of a life sentence in prison,” Vanessa Potkin, the Innocence Project
attorney who took on Brooks’ case, told The Associated Press on
Thursday. During Brooks’ trial, West testified that bite marks on
the victim’s body were caused by Brooks. Mississippi pathologist Steven
Hayne initially identified the bite marks during his autopsy of the
girl, but defense attorneys in the case said the marks couldn’t have
been caused by human teeth because they occurred after the child had
drowned in the creek where her body was discarded. Potkin
said DNA evidence gathered in the Brewer case pointed to another man
who lived in Noxubee County and had been a suspect in the case in which
Brooks was convicted. She said that man confessed to killing both girls,
which helped clear Brooks and Brewer. Brewer was released on bail in
2007 and exonerated in 2008, after serving 13 years in prison. Dinah
Brooks said she and Levon Brooks met after he was released from prison,
and they married in 2016. She said he was outgoing, loved to be around
people and loved to hunt and fish. She said he read the Bible daily and
was not bitter about his imprisonment. “He didn’t have any animosity,” Dinah Brooks said. “He didn’t have any hatred.” Potkin,
the Innocence Project’s director of post-conviction litigation,
described Brooks as an intuitive, loving person. Speaking of his case,
she said: “It also is a reminder there are many more innocent people in
prison than we will ever know because they have given up because they
are isolated because they don’t have access to anyone to help them.”
The entire story can be read at:
Read U.S. National Registry of Exonerations entry by Alexandra Gross at the link below: (As of today's date the Registry record 2,161 exonerations and more than 18, 750 years lost. HL); "On September 15, 1990, 3-year-old Courtney Smith was taken from her bed in the middle of the night. Her body was found two days later in a pond near her home in Brooksville, Mississippi; she had been raped and murdered. Police investigating the crime interviewed Courtney’s 5-year-old sister, Ashley, who said she saw Levon Brooks, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, take Courtney from her bed. The room was dark, but Ashley said she saw Brooks by the light of the television in the next room. Ashley then identified Brooks from a photo lineup. Brooks swore he had nothing to do with Courtney’s death, but he was arrested and charged with her murder. At Brooks’s trial in 1992, District Attorney Forrest Allgood called witnesses who testified that alleged bite marks found on Courtney’s body connected Brooks to the murder. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Steven Hayne, testified that marks found on Courtney’s wrist were human bites, and a dentist, Dr. Michael West, testified that the bites matched Brooks’s teeth. On January 22, 1992, Brooks was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.In October 1999, Brooks appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, but his conviction was affirmed. For the next nine years, Brooks remained in prison with little hope for a new trial, but in 2007, new evidence in a similar case – the 1992 rape and murder of 3-year-old Christine Jackson – shed light on Courtney’s murder. Kennedy Brewer had been convicted of Christine Jackson’s murder in 1995, also based on bite-mark testimony from Drs. Hayne and West, but was released on bond in 2006 after DNA evidence cleared him. The Mississippi Innocence Project, which was representing Brewer, then took on Brooks’s case as well. In 2007, the Innocence Project’s investigations led them to Justin Albert Johnson, a 51-year-old man with a history of sexual assaults against girls and women, who had been living near both Courtney Smith and Christine Jackson when they were abducted and murdered. DNA testing conducted by the Innocence Project linked Johnson to Christine Jackson’s murder – though evidence from Courtney Smith’s murder was too degraded to be tested. When Johnson was arrested in February 2008, he confessed to both murders and told the authorities that he had committed the crimes on his own. A judge vacated the convictions of both Brewer and Brooks at a hearing on February 15, 2008, and Brooks was released on his own recognizance (Brewer had been out on bond since 2007). Prosecutors dismissed all charges against Brooks on March 13 of that year. The men were each granted $500,000 in statutory compensation from the state of Mississippi. By the time Brewer and Brooks were released, Dr. Hayne and Dr. West had become highly controversial for their shoddy work and inappropriately close relationships with state prosecutors, and they are suspected of providing false medical testimony in numerous cases. The National Association of Medical Examiners says doctors should perform no more than 250 autopsies per year; Dr. Hayne has admitted to performing between 1,200 and 1,800 autopsies annually. Dr. West became particularly infamous for repeatedly providing false bite-mark testimony. He was the subject of investigative reports by 60 Minutes and ABC News; in 1994 he resigned from the American Academy of Forensic Science when the organization began an ethics investigation against him. In 2009, Brewer and Brooks jointly filed a civil lawsuit against West and Hayne for $18 million dollars. That lawsuit was dismissed in 2014 after a judge ruled that West and Haynes were immune from damages. The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in 2017. The state of Mississippi paid Brooks $500,000 in compensation."
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3058
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
