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A review by jeffburns
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South by Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington
5.0
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South. Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. Public Affairs, 2018. 416 pages.
I want to start by saying that I know some very, very fine people from Mississippi. I really don't want to offend my friends from Mississippi. They really are good people --- great people. However, I know enough about Mississippi that it is absolutely impossible to hear the word without thinking of Nina Simone's song, "Mississippi G***am." Seriously. The level of inhumanity, hatred, stupidity, and pure evil present in Mississippi rivals any other political entity in the history of the world. Sadly, not much has changed in the 21st century.
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a hard book to read. It's about the broken American legal system. And there is no disputing that it is broken, on all levels from law enforcement to attorneys, to judges, and to politicians. As author John Grisham points out in his introduction to the book, innocent people are jailed and executed in America. If there are 2.3 million people in prison and just .5% of them (half of one percent) are innocent, that’s 11,500 people serving time in jail for something they didn’t do. I think we can agree that 1 person is too many, but 11,500? The American legal system is broken, but is there a better one in the world?
This book is specifically about Mississippi, beginning in 1995, and specifically about two men, Steven Hayne and Michael West, a doctor and dentist respectively, who became high-paid medical examiners for hire. The book argues that they presented evidence and testimony that resulted in convictions of many people for horrific crimes that they had nothing to do with. Some of those people were sentenced to life in prison or death row. The authors focus on two men in particular who have been freed because new evidence and investigations have vindicated them, but there are other men still on death row. At the very least, the doctors are incompetent, but it's more likely that they routinely created false evidence that was used to convict innocent people. They were aided and abetted at every turn by Mississippi law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and politicians. To date, those involved in fraudulently convicting dozens and dozens of innocent people, including Hayne and West, have neither admitted wrongdoing or been punished.
My blood boiled as I read this book. Also, the two crimes that are the focus of the book are terrible crimes against toddlers which makes it even harder to read. However, this dysfunction needs to be exposed to sunlight --- not that anything changes, it is Mississippi. The book is also worth reading because of the first few chapters in which the authors discuss the history of the office of coroner, coroners' roles in the Jim Crow South, and the development of pathology as a medical field in the US. For those of the "CSI" generation (and for older people like me, "Quincy"), readers are in for a shock. Autopsies and forensic investigation are incredibly new developments, really only beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and moving slowly across the country.
I want to start by saying that I know some very, very fine people from Mississippi. I really don't want to offend my friends from Mississippi. They really are good people --- great people. However, I know enough about Mississippi that it is absolutely impossible to hear the word without thinking of Nina Simone's song, "Mississippi G***am." Seriously. The level of inhumanity, hatred, stupidity, and pure evil present in Mississippi rivals any other political entity in the history of the world. Sadly, not much has changed in the 21st century.
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a hard book to read. It's about the broken American legal system. And there is no disputing that it is broken, on all levels from law enforcement to attorneys, to judges, and to politicians. As author John Grisham points out in his introduction to the book, innocent people are jailed and executed in America. If there are 2.3 million people in prison and just .5% of them (half of one percent) are innocent, that’s 11,500 people serving time in jail for something they didn’t do. I think we can agree that 1 person is too many, but 11,500? The American legal system is broken, but is there a better one in the world?
This book is specifically about Mississippi, beginning in 1995, and specifically about two men, Steven Hayne and Michael West, a doctor and dentist respectively, who became high-paid medical examiners for hire. The book argues that they presented evidence and testimony that resulted in convictions of many people for horrific crimes that they had nothing to do with. Some of those people were sentenced to life in prison or death row. The authors focus on two men in particular who have been freed because new evidence and investigations have vindicated them, but there are other men still on death row. At the very least, the doctors are incompetent, but it's more likely that they routinely created false evidence that was used to convict innocent people. They were aided and abetted at every turn by Mississippi law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and politicians. To date, those involved in fraudulently convicting dozens and dozens of innocent people, including Hayne and West, have neither admitted wrongdoing or been punished.
My blood boiled as I read this book. Also, the two crimes that are the focus of the book are terrible crimes against toddlers which makes it even harder to read. However, this dysfunction needs to be exposed to sunlight --- not that anything changes, it is Mississippi. The book is also worth reading because of the first few chapters in which the authors discuss the history of the office of coroner, coroners' roles in the Jim Crow South, and the development of pathology as a medical field in the US. For those of the "CSI" generation (and for older people like me, "Quincy"), readers are in for a shock. Autopsies and forensic investigation are incredibly new developments, really only beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and moving slowly across the country.