PASSAGE OF THE DAY: (From reviewer's interview with co-author Radley Balko); I
still hope that Mississippi courts or the attorney general can be
shamed into conducting a thorough review of every case [Hayne and West
worked on] and bringing in an outside entity to do it in a fair way. I
think beyond that, it’s just a story that needs to be told thoroughly —
whether satisfying or not. Right now, or you’ll see in the book,
whenever there was criticism of Hayne, [people in the state] would say,
“I don’t know why you’re criticizing Hayne. He was taking on all this
work to help us out. He just stepped in to fill the void. He was a hard
worker.” And, well, no. It was all by design. You had state medical
examiners who tried to come in and change the system to make it better,
and they usually resigned in frustration because the system Mississippi
had was the one [the state] wanted — one that could be easily
manipulated. And Hayne was their stooge who enabled that to happen."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Jeffrey Havard.has been on Mississippi's death row for
15 years. At the heart of the case, according to Circuit Court Judge
Forrest "Al" Johnson, is the now widely discredited so-called
shaken-baby syndrome. (Note the presence in the case of controversial former
medical examiner Steven Hayne who has repudiated his initial opinion);
Think of it, a man's life may be taken by the state of Mississippi
because of a highly disputed theory on which experts are widely
divided, which has been repudiated by the late British Dr. Norman
Guthkelch, the pediatric neurosurgeon, who propagated it in the first
place. The good news is that Judge Forest clearly recognizes the
importance of this decision - not just to Jeffrey Havard, whose life is
in the balance. As Johnson is quoted: ""I don't anticipate sitting in
this too long before I render a
decision," Johnson said. "It's a pretty important case. It's a pretty
big deal." I will continue to monitor developments in this case
closely.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
-----------------------------------------------------------.
REVIEW: "A new book by Radley Balko (and co-author Tucker Carrington) examines Mississippi's criminal justice system," reviewed by Amanda Haggard, published by Nashville Scene on February 25, 2018.
SUB-HEADING: "The cadaver king and the country dentist so-written by Nashville journalist Balko is due Feb. 27."
DESCRIPTION OF BOOK: "The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South is
the nonfiction account of how corrupt medical examiner Steven Hayne and
his associate, a dentist named Michael West, contributed to several
wrongful convictions in Mississippi. The book outlines two cases in
which men were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated of raping and
murdering 3-year-old girls. It details how Hayne, West, the legal system
and the media, among others, often worked against the interest of
justice.
GIST: "It’s
been more than 10 years since journalist Radley Balko started looking
into the shady work of a Mississippi medical examiner. It all started
with the case of Cory Maye, a man convicted of killing an officer after a
police task force mistakenly raided his home instead of their intended
target.
A medical examiner named Steven Hayne gave testimony
during the trial. Maye, whose young daughter was home with him during
the raid, said he shot at the police officer in self-defense after
thinking it was a burglar. At the urging of prosecutors, Hayne testified
that the bullet’s trajectory indicated Maye was lying in wait and had
shot the officer on purpose. “A medical examiner should be able to
say, ‘OK, so these two bullets in the heart are what caused this
death,’ ” says Balko. “But for them to say that they’re certain or
pretty certain they know exactly how a bullet entered a body isn’t
really possible — it’s possible to have two [people] give diametrically
opposing testimonies about it, and for a jury, it often comes down to
who they believe more.” Maye ultimately received the death
penalty, but his conviction was later overturned. He pleaded guilty to
manslaughter in 2011, and was released on time served. “And my
experience was: If you find one example of this sort of thing, it’s not
the only thing you’ll find,” says Balko, who was working for the
libertarian monthly
Reason when he wrote the story on Maye. “So I
started contacting some defense attorneys, and one told me that Hayne
had testified in a case where a woman was totally skeletonized, and he
said she’d been strangled to death, which was just impossible [for him
to determine].” Balko has written extensively about policing — his 2014 book
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces does a deep dive on the subject — and writes and edits The Watch, a blog for
The Washington Post.
Eventually, Balko discovered that Hayne had testified in thousands of
cases in Mississippi. In many of those cases, he brought along a dentist
named Michael West, a so-called expert in bite-mark analysis — a now
debunked field considered junk science. The pair aided in the conviction
of several people in Mississippi, largely using pseudoscience and bluff
in the courtroom to influence jurors. “The depth of deception
was stunning,” says Balko, who moved to Nashville eight years ago. “And
the thing that continues to be infuriating was that the courts and
system continued to sanction these guys.
Tucker CarringtonAfter
Balko wrote the piece on Maye, lawyer Tucker Carrington reached out to
him about Hayne. Carrington is the director of the Mississippi Innocence
Project, a nonprofit with several chapters across the country and
around the world dedicated to exonerating innocent people. The pair
teamed up, deciding to dig deeper into Hayne and West, and the result is
a book due for release on Feb. 27 —
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South. In
the book, Balko and Carrington weave the tragic narratives of Levon
Brooks and Kennedy Brewer — two men wrongfully convicted and later
exonerated in separate cases involving the rape and murder of 3-year-old
girls — into the larger issues facing Mississippi and its court system.
Brooks spent 16 years in prison; Brewer was imprisoned for 13. Their
cases unfold along the same timeline as Hayne and West’s unjust
interference, but the book also looks at how the system allowed them to
thrive and how the history of medical examiners and coroners in
Mississippi led to wrongful convictions. “With these two cases,
there’s no question about how Hayne and West could affect a case,” Balko
says. “[These men] both get exonerated in 2008. Basically by 2008, West
is done testifying. Hayne gets fired later that year. The cases span
the two careers, and along the way we look at court challenges, the
state Supreme Court, the state press and media, and where they failed.” Brewer
is still living in Mississippi, but Brooks didn’t live to see the
book’s publication: He died of cancer in late January, about a month
before the book came out. The
Scene sat down with Balko in his Nashville home ahead of
The Cadaver King’s release. See an excerpt from the book on after the Q&A below."
Did
you know from the beginning when you started encountering stories of
Hayne and West that you might have enough to put a book together? [After
the Maye case] I started calling other medical examiners around the
South, and I could barely even get out “I’m a journalist looking into a
questionable medical examiner” before they would say, “Oh, you’re
talking about Dr. Hayne in Mississippi, right?” It was kind of shocking
to me because nobody had really written about him, but everybody knew
about him. So I posted a couple things on the blog, and one of my
readers was in medical school, and he sent my post to his pathology
teacher in medical school, who sent my post to the American Medical
Examiners Listserv, and they just started talking amongst themselves.
Those people ended up being my sources for five or six years. I knew it
was going to be an ongoing project, because it became clear quickly that
he had done thousands of cases.
What about West? How many
cases are there where people actually get bitten? It seemed so strange
that there were enough instances for him to testify in so many cases. In
the early version of the book, we had a chapter called “The Decade of
Copious Biting.” It was weird: All of a sudden you have this bite-mark
analyst on the scene, and then miraculously there’s an uptick in the
amount of cases with biting. It was really very strange.
Often
the scope of your work is adversarial. You’re going up against law
enforcement or the legal system, et cetera. How do you approach that? I
mean, I’m a journalist, so that’s my job — to be adversarial. But I’ve
given my SWAT talk, my hourlong standard talk, to rooms full of police
officers, and mostly they’re polite. I’ve had a couple say some weird
things before and after — nothing threatening, just the sort of thing
where, like, one guy came up and asked if I actually believed half the
shit I said. But I’ve never felt really threatened in any way. There’s
stuff online sometimes in anonymous police forums, like people saying
that I need to have my ass kicked or whatever, but I don’t really put
any stock into those sorts of things. … I do kind of find that covering
this beat from a national angle is in some ways a little bit easier. I
criticize [beat reporters] a lot, and then kind of feel bad, but
reporters at [daily papers] tend to be deferential to law enforcement
because that’s sort of the nature of covering police in small towns or
cities. There’s a real lack of skepticism because [reporters] rely on
police departments in order to do their jobs every day, and when you
piss them off, it definitely makes your job a lot harder. I don’t
necessarily have to deal with that.
How did you narrow down what you’d include in this book and what you wouldn’t? I’d imagine with these guys being in business for so long, there were things you just didn’t have room for. Originally
the manuscript was 260,000-plus words, and I think the book ended up
being about 110,000. It was tough. There were so many cases. You grow
attached to the stories. You grow attached to the cases and people. You
want to include cases just because you want them to get exposure in the
book. You start thinking, “Which person that got screwed over do we have
to leave out?” And it really just came down to we could only choose the
stories that advanced the narrative that weren’t duplicative of other
things in the book. If it didn’t help us tell the story, I think we
probably ended up leaving it out. I write long anyway, and then legal
vetting, of course, narrowed what we chose to include.
So why this style and not, say, a fictional, John Grisham-style telling of these stories? Well
Grisham himself [who wrote the book’s foreword] said that if this book
were written as fiction his bullshit meter would go off. It’s just too
implausible to write as fiction. This is a story that I thought needed
to be told. And outside of just the narratives, the interesting thing
that’s happened is the general unfolding of problems with forensics in
general. There’s a crime-lab scandal almost every week, it seems like.
There was the hair-fiber scandal with the FBI [where several cases
included misleading information about hair-fiber analysis], and the
general unfolding of bite-mark analysis. This was a way to sort of look
at how all of those things worked together.
At the risk of
sounding rude here, I think this book is kind of unsatisfying — only in
that there’s very little resolution outside of the exonerations. Is the
hope that a book like this causes the system to look into itself? I
still hope that Mississippi courts or the attorney general can be
shamed into conducting a thorough review of every case [Hayne and West
worked on] and bringing in an outside entity to do it in a fair way. I
think beyond that, it’s just a story that needs to be told thoroughly —
whether satisfying or not. Right now, or you’ll see in the book,
whenever there was criticism of Hayne, [people in the state] would say,
“I don’t know why you’re criticizing Hayne. He was taking on all this
work to help us out. He just stepped in to fill the void. He was a hard
worker.” And, well, no. It was all by design. You had state medical
examiners who tried to come in and change the system to make it better,
and they usually resigned in frustration because the system Mississippi
had was the one [the state] wanted — one that could be easily
manipulated. And Hayne was their stooge who enabled that to happen."
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South is
the nonfiction account of how corrupt medical examiner Steven Hayne and
his associate, a dentist named Michael West, contributed to several
wrongful convictions in Mississippi. The book outlines two cases in
which men were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated of raping and
murdering 3-year-old girls. It details how Hayne, West, the legal system
and the media, among others, often worked against the interest of
justice.
The entire review can be found at:
https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/cover-story/article/20992295/a-new-book-cowritten-by-nashville-journalist-and-author-radley-balko-examines-the-mississippi-criminal-justice-system
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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please
send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest
to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy;
Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.