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The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist cover art

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

By: Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington, John Grisham - foreword
Narrated by: Robert Fass
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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

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Fascinating

It’s a slog but a really good one, insanity that this all actually happened! It’s almost frustrating.

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This book shows you why miscarriages of justice are so common in the US

A really important book that shows how two complete charlatans, posing as scientists, were able to send innocent people to death row. It also shows how these frauds were - and continue to be - supported by the US political and judicial establishment. This is one of the most shocking revelations in this book.

As GK Chesterton said: “The horrible thing about ALL legal officials, even the best, about ALL judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policeman, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it.”

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Interesting, but a hard listen

This book is very fact and figures heavy.

It is worth a listen, conversely though it isn’t a page turner. With most books I download I can’t put them down, this was not particularly captivating.

That being said, it is totally shocking that what’s reported in the book actually did happen.

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2 people found this helpful