This is a blog about writing, and books are writing, so book reviews are on topic here, right? The book in question here is The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. It’s an important book and one that may shock you. If I had more vivid powers of visualization, I might not have been able to get through it.

Before reading this book, I had plenty of reasons to believe the American criminal justice system is broken. Now I have more. The book focuses on Mississippi, which has a long record of being one of the worst states in that respect, especially if the accused is black. It focuses on two individuals, Doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West. Both helped to convict many people with what was believed to be their forensic expertise. Both have been pushed out of that role by the light shed on their work. Radley Balko has played a big role in accomplishing that. But the bigger issue is a legal system that allowed junk science to be used as evidence.

Here I have to be careful. I know next to nothing about forensic medicine. It would be easy for someone to lead me by the nose on that subject. If I were reviewing a book about computer crime, I’d have a strong sense of what was plausible and what wasn’t. I’d find nits to pick, no matter how good I thought it was. I’m far outside my expertise with this book. But I trust Balko’s honesty, having followed him for years on the Internet and in Reason magazine. There are facts on record which support the book’s conclusions. Among the biggest is that two men whom Hayne and West helped to convict were released years later after DNA evidence cleared them and another person confessed to both murders.

I do have one rather big nitpick, though: The book doesn’t have an index. That’s annoying as I’m trying to find specific points for this review.

Loading the scales of justice

A lot of jurors are inclined to believe the testimony of children, but it’s easy to manipulate them into saying whatever suits the lawyer who has recruited them. They can be coaxed or pressured into believing something that they didn’t previously believe, or at least into saying that they believe it. When the child’s story is inconsistent, that ought to provide a clue, but many people don’t notice.

Ashley Smith, a major witness in the Levon Brooks trial, was seven years old at the time. Her answers to questions “sounded like a confused and frightened seven-year-old.” At one point the prosecuting attorney, Forrest Allgood, asked her, “What did I tell you to tell these people?” to which she replied, “I forgot.”

What personally outrages me the most is the concerted and successful campaign in 1994 to drive state medical examiner Emily Ward out of office. Her offense? She didn’t withhold evidence from defendants. Forty-two state coroners signed a petition calling for her resignation. That’s a crooked system that takes pride in being crooked. The office remained vacant for over ten years.

Scientific and legal thinking

An interesting general topic is the different ways scientists and lawyers think about things. Courts need to arrive at a verdict. A defendant is guilty or not guilty. A piece of evidence is acceptable or unacceptable. There are time limits on motions and appeals. Science works by a series of refinements. It accumulates evidence and reasoning, and there’s rarely a definite point in time at which a theory is pronounced valid or invalid. This inherently creates problems when courts rely on scientific testimony. Judges aren’t normally scientific experts, and they have to rely on “expert witnesses” whose qualifications can be hard for non-experts to evaluate.

Dr. West specialized in bite-mark evidence. He claimed to be able to identify marks on a body with a set of teeth by visual inspection, not using much special technology beyond ultraviolet light. According to the book, there’s little support in the scientific community for the validity of the technique. I don’t know nearly enough to reach a personal conclusion, but even Dr. West eventually said, “I no longer believe in bite mark analysis.” I’d think a blind test could shed light on its validity. Get volunteers to bite into a pig’s skin or something like it. Present a cast of their teeth, along with several other people’s casts, to supposed bite-mark experts. See whether they do better than chance in identifying the right teeth with the bite. I don’t know if this has ever been done.

The book can be painful reading. There are clinical but graphic descriptions of what was done to child victims. But it’s important to know whether criminal justice really deserves the name “justice.” It’s too easy to think that justice for the victim’s family is served if someone is convicted and imprisoned or executed; but if it’s the wrong person, then the actual killer gets off and may kill again. If people pay attention to the failures of justice in Mississippi, they may happen less often in the future.