“The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, by the Washington Post journalist Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, a law professor at the University of Mississippi, avoids these generic problems. There is no murder mystery ... The bigotry in our criminal justice system is one of its key features, not an unfortunate bug. Mississippi wouldn’t allow quack science to convict the wrong people if white citizens primarily bore the burden. The namesake 'bad guys' in this book are allowed to exist because their work puts black men behind bars, not in spite of it.
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a welcome wake-up call, and will likely challenge many people’s CSI-fueled perception of forensic analysts as near-infallible seers of truth ... The intertwined stories of Brooks, Brewer, Hayne, and West are easily whipped up into a clear and devastating narrative. But The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist really shines when it reveals exactly how the system contorts itself to protect convictions made possible by pseudoscience ... Hayne and West might not be representative of the broader forensic community, but the justice system that allowed them to flourish is all too familiar.
...a superb work of investigative reporting ... Messrs. Balko and Carrington combine expertise, industry and outrage into a searing narrative. And while one unreservedly hopes that The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist will spur reform in Mississippi’s system of justice, there is reason to doubt it will.
Through the intensive scrutiny of how the men were speedily tried, convicted, and then released after years in prison, the authors uncover an unholy alliance of racist cops and prosecutors with questionable death investigations and misapplied forensics. This work should spark both admiration and outrage-and, one hopes, reform.
This is a true crime story, but it is more than a report of the tragic murders of two young girls ... Compellingly written, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a chilling reminder of what happens to the rule of law when the law forgets the rules.
The book’s authors have been working the West/Hayne beat for years...and the result is a careful and forceful reckoning. However low your estimation of the U.S. legal system, this book will take it lower ... The book opens with a quote from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: 'Our society has a high degree of confidence in its criminal trials, in no small part because the Constitution offers unparalleled protections against convicting the innocent.' The authors spend the next 300 pages chipping away at this confidence, though their own efforts have begun to repair some of the damage.
...a clear and shocking portrait of the structural failings of the U.S. criminal justice system ... This eminently readable book builds a hard-to-ignore case for comprehensive criminal justice reform.
