The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  What makes it all especially cynical, though, is that no one really believed what the courts were saying. Not even the courts themselves. By the time Shannon Rayner was prosecuted for killing his wife in 2013, Hayne had already been fired and was now freelancing for defense attorneys. At Rayner’s trial, Hayne not only testified for the defense, but testified in opposition to the physicians in the state medical examiner’s office—an office that for all intents and purposes he and his supporters had worked to keep vacant.

  During a lunch break, Hayne and the prosecutor exchanged pleasantries. After the break, Hayne resumed his testimony. During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked Hayne: “You told me during lunch the reason you have to carry around that big notebook with you is you have to defend yourself nowadays for all the reversals you’ve had in the Mississippi Supreme Court. Is that correct?”

  Rayner’s lawyer objected. The trial court overruled, finding that the question spoke to Hayne’s credibility. The prosecutor proceeded to question Hayne about those former cases, including the fact that in many of them the basis for the reversal was that Hayne had testified outside his area of expertise. In his closing argument, the prosecutor then referred to Hayne as “discredited.” Rayner appealed his conviction, arguing that the state’s questioning of Hayne was improper, particularly given that the state was still defending Hayne’s credibility in countless other cases. The Mississippi Court of Appeals didn’t agree. The court found the questioning entirely proper.

  That was probably the correct ruling under the law. But it was also another indication that the system is utterly incapable of distinguishing good expertise from bad, and the protocols in place for making those decisions are a farce.

  When defense attorneys would simultaneously argue that the practice of bite mark matching was illegitimate while citing their own bite mark analyst’s specific criticisms of West, the appeals court would smack their hands. You could argue one or the other, but not both. Yet they had no problem when the state of Mississippi simultaneously took the position that Steven Hayne was both credible and not credible, depending whether he was testifying for the state or for the defense.

  “I’m happy,” says Levon Brooks. He’s sipping from a Sprite bottle filled with rum. “For the first time since I can remember, I’m happy.”

  It’s a cool afternoon in December 2015. Levon and Dinah Brooks live in a trailer home between Brooksville and Columbus. They met while he was in prison. She worked in the cafeteria. Brooks had proposed years ago, but he never seemed interested in setting a date. Dinah ribbed him for that.

  Behind their house a menagerie of hunting dogs, chickens, rabbits, and other animals bark, cluck, bay, and scurry around in their coops. Friends and neighbors stop by, sometimes stay a while to chat. The place bustles with life.

  Most who meet Brooks are immediately struck by his presence. Ed Blake, the DNA analyst in California who worked on Brooks’s and Brewer’s cases, recalls the first time he met Brooks. “He’s not a big man,” Blake says. “There are some people that simply have a look about them that commands one’s attention, and Levon Brooks is one of those individuals. He hardly has to talk to you before you’re drawn to him to engage in a conversation—and then once you engage in that conversation his charisma, his dignity simply flow.”

  Brooks’s declaration of happiness becomes all the more poignant a few minutes later, when he lifts his shirt to reveal the pump that’s sending chemotherapy through his body. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2014. But he has good doctors in Mississippi, and the Innocence Project put him in touch with a leading oncologist in New York. His prognosis is good.

  On this chilly afternoon, Brooks is dressed in a T-shirt and camouflage pants, and his hair is in braids. He offers his guests some deer jerky, then shows off his new rifle.

  “Did you hear about Allgood?” he asks. “I campaigned for the new guy. I think I like him,” he says. He flashes a Cheshire smile.

  When asked if he holds any resentment for the men who convicted him, Brooks points out that Allgood apologized to him on the day he was released. But the two haven’t spoken since. Not that they necessarily would have been friends under different circumstances. Noxubee County is a small, close-knit community, but it’s also largely segregated.

  So what about former Deputy Eichelberger. Has he apologized?

  “Not in words,” Brooks says. “But he doesn’t talk much. He gave me a huntin’ dog after I got out. I think it was his way of saying he’s sorry. We hunt deer together sometimes.”

  Within about ten minutes of meeting Brooks, odds are pretty good that he’ll ask if you’d like to go hunting with him. He just assumes you’ll love it as much as he does.

  Since he got out, Brooks has also been on the receiving end of more than a few such invitations. One came from his old childhood friend Boswell “Bos” Stevens, the foreperson of the jury that convicted him, who lets Brooks hunt and fish on the family farm. Stevens has since come full circle. In a way, so has the plantation where he and Brooks grew up. Stevens’s mother died a few years ago. Since then, the farm has been rented out to contract farmers.

  In an interview several years earlier, just before Christmas, Stevens pondered his role in Brooks’s trial. He stood in his yard, just outside the cabin that Brooks’s aunt and uncle called home, back when they were some of the last tenant workers on the farm. For certain, he said, he regretted what happened. He was happy that he and Brooks were on friendly terms again, though he wishes there were some way to make things whole. Asked to reflect on his heritage, the trial, and what had happened since, he leaned up against his pickup truck and thought for a moment.

  “I’m not my grandfather, I guess,” he said. He added after a pause, “And he wasn’t me.”

  Shortly after Brooks was released, Ashley Smith apologized to him too, for identifying him as the man who abducted her sister. She didn’t need to, of course. He never blamed her. Courtney Smith’s father, Rocky Allen, also apologized, though he too had no real reason to. “It troubled me all this time,” he told Brooks.

  Some twenty-five years ago, Brooks left the job he loved at the Santa Barbara Club to clear up any misunderstanding with the Noxubee County Sheriff’s Department. He told his friends he’d be right back. He never returned. Now, with some of his wrongful conviction money, he’s back in the entertainment business: he and Dinah opened a café behind his house. They named it D&T’s Hill City Hide Away. The modest, cozy spot serves up fried foods, sodas, and beer. Baseball caps and saggy pants aren’t allowed. On Saturday afternoons they show college football. At night, they dance.

  Early last summer the Hill City Hide Away hosted a wedding—that of its owners. Levon had finally come around. A photographer from New York who had become a good friend drove down to shoot the affair. The weather was hot. The dress was casual. Dinah wore a peach chiffon dress. Levon wore white, head to toe—a white hat, white linen shirt, white jeans, and white leather cowboy boots. There was a lot of dancing.

  Michael West seems to have given up. He gave up on bite mark analysis. In 2012, he said in a deposition, “I no longer believe in bite mark analysis,” and then later said to a reporter, “The science is not as exact as I had hoped.” West also gave up his private dental practice.

  But West has hardly been chastened. In the years since the Mississippi Supreme Court’s Howard decision in 2006, Eddie Lee Howard’s attorneys were able to get DNA testing done on the knife allegedly used to kill Georgia Kemp. The tests revealed male DNA but excluded Howard as the source. That meant that not only was Michael West’s bite mark testimony the only physical evidence linking Howard to the crime scene, but there was also DNA from another man on the murder weapon. That wasn’t enough to get Howard a new trial, but it was enough to get him an evidentiary hearing. In preparation for that hearing, Howard’s attorneys with the Innocence Project deposed West in April 2016. It was a confrontation that had been years in the making. And West put on quite a show.

 
During questioning by Chris Fabricant from the Innocence Project of New York, West was belligerent, profane, and petulant. He declined to prepare for the deposition at all. He was asked to bring reams of case records and other documents. He brought a Diet Coke, which he used to produce a loud belch before answering a question.

  West at first answered Fabricant’s questions with pouty, one-word responses, as if he were a child angry at his parents. But he soon loosened up, and those one-word answers turned into insults, defiant accusations, and meandering soliloquies. West frequently told Fabricant that he couldn’t remember cases and had no interest in trying. When Fabricant asked West about the Leigh Stubbs case, he replied, “Was that the case of the two lesbians that bit the girl’s vagina lip off?”

  When Fabricant asked West about fellow bite mark analysts—people West once called colleagues—he described them with words like “idiot,” “whore,” and “fool.”

  When Fabricant continued to ask West about his testimony in old cases, West got angry. “Why are you beating me to death with this?” he demanded. “I told you if it’s in the transcript, I stand by it. If I remembered it—I don’t remember what the fuck I had for breakfast two years ago, but I do believe I ate eggs.”

  West reiterated his belief that both Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were guilty. He speculated, as he did any time DNA testing had proven him wrong, that the tests only proved they didn’t commit the rapes, not that they weren’t involved. Fabricant next asked West why in so many of his cases he found that the assailant only bit the victim with his upper teeth. West answered, “That’s funny—y’all like to cum on that,” referring to the crude term for ejaculation.

  When the deposition finally came to a close, Fabricant asked West if he had any questions. He did. “How do you sleep at night?” West asked. Fabricant answered that he slept very well. West replied, “You’re a sociopath. It’s amazing to me they don’t care what their clients do. They will do anything to get them off, no matter how heinous murdering their clients are.… You’re sitting next to a sociopath. You work for Innocence Project. Every attorney I’ve met with the Innocence Project lies, cheats, steals, and tries to obfuscate the evidence in front of the court. I have no respect for y’all.”

  Fabricant replied, “I see. And so that makes me a sociopath?” West answered, “No. That makes you an ass-wipe. You make yourself a sociopath.” Thus ended the deposition.

  One might think that the attorneys in the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office would be embarrassed by the behavior of their star witness in a death penalty case. But Hood’s office had no comment about West’s antics, and the state even asked the trial judge for a hearing to assess the competency of Howard’s legal team.

  It was a brazen move. The motion was based on a rule in Mississippi’s rules of criminal procedure. The intent behind that rule is sound: it gives the state’s courts a mechanism to ensure that defendants in capital cases are getting adequate legal representation in their appeals. But the original language of the rule was vague and sloppily drafted.

  Hood’s office had been using the rule as a weapon. While Hood and his subordinates claim in briefs that they’re merely fulfilling their obligation to protect the rights of criminal defendants, they aren’t filing these motions as a matter of course in every capital case. The sense in Mississippi—a notion backed up by an affidavit filed by the American Bar Association—is that they’ve been using the rule to hassle out-of-state law firms and nonprofit legal aid groups taking Mississippi capital cases on a pro bono basis.

  The attorneys at these firms and aid groups have extensive experience in capital cases. In other words, instead of using the rule to keep unqualified attorneys out of death penalty cases, Hood’s office has been using the rule to attack the most qualified attorneys.

  In the case of Eddie Lee Howard, Hood’s decision to invoke the rule when he did was the legal equivalent of trolling. The particular attorneys had already been representing Howard for years. Three of them had helped win the exonerations of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Moreover, less than a year earlier, Hood’s office had defended the qualifications of Howard’s same attorneys in response to a separate motion.

  A few days after Hood filed his motion, the Mississippi Supreme Court revised the rule to fix the vague language and sloppy drafting. The new language renders the motion from Hood’s office moot. It isn’t clear if the court’s decision to revise the rule was a direct response to the state’s motion, but the timing is certainly suggestive.

  The actual court hearing for Eddie Lee Howard followed a few months later. West was as prickly and pugnacious as ever. As of this writing, the court has yet to rule on the matter, and Eddie Lee Howard still sits on death row.

  All of the criticism and fallout from these cases has isolated Hayne and West from the powerful institutions that once embraced them. They rose up together and are now falling together, although West’s descent began a bit sooner and followed a steeper arc. West still reveres Hayne. He has regularly described him as one of the smartest men he knows. Both saw themselves as victims of unjust persecution, perpetrated mainly by “Project Innocence.” West stopped doing bite mark analyses in 2006. He gave up his private dental practice in 2009 to work for the South Mississippi Correctional Institution near Leakesville. When West’s brother died in February 2016, he called Hayne and told him, “Well, it’s official. You are my number one friend now.”

  Some of their enablers have hit hard times too. Ed Peters, a long-time former district attorney who frequently used Hayne and was among his most vocal defenders (Peters helped lead the charge to oust Emily Ward), was caught up in a statewide bribery scandal. Peters escaped formal charges by striking a deal to cooperate against others.

  In recent years, Forrest Allgood has been chastised by two courts for prosecutorial misconduct. In the November 2015 elections, he was finally defeated at the polls. Scott Colom, a thirty-two-year-old black criminal defense attorney, beat Allgood by 54 percent to 46 percent. Colom ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration and finding alternatives to prison for nonviolent drug offenders. Allgood had been in office for twenty-nine years.

  Life has been better for Jim Hood. In 2014, Hood’s fellow attorneys general elected him president of the National Association of Attorneys General. Hood has also received national press for taking on corporate heavyweights like State Farm, Google, and Facebook. He continues to be one of the few Democrats to win statewide elections in the deep South, largely as a result of his tough-on-crime positions and enthusiasm for the death penalty. In 2015 he was comfortably reelected to his fourth term—by over ten percentage points. He is frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for governor.

  Eddie Lee Howard, Jimmie Duncan, Jeff Havard, and Devin Bennett all remain on death row.

  “I can talk for a while, but I gotta go to work pretty soon,” says Kennedy Brewer. It’s early afternoon in early 2015, but at three p.m., he needs to begin his shift at the chicken plant in Brooksville. Now forty-five, he’s wearing his trademark stocking cap and leaning up against his prized possession, the one thing to which he treated himself with his wrongful conviction money. It’s a late-model Mercury Grand Marquis. It’s parked under a carport next to his house, just down the road from his mother and his sister.

  When Brooks and Brewer were first released, Mississippi did not yet have a law to compensate the wrongly convicted. So when Brewer was released on bail in 2007, a family friend got him a job at the chicken plant. The state finally passed a compensation bill in 2009. It provides for an annual payment of $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, with a cap at $500,000. All things considered, the payout seems paltry, and the payments stop once the exoneree passes away—the benefit isn’t heritable. To receive compensation, the wrongly convicted must also agree not to sue the state. (Brewer and Brooks sued Hayne and West as private citizens.)

  The money is helpful, but Brewer says he’ll never quit his job at the plant. “I work because I wa
nt to,” he says. Already a quiet man, Brewer’s time on death row made him more solitary still. “I’d watch TV and write letters,” he says. “You’re in a one-man cell. You get one hour outside a week. You think a lot. I just spent a lot of time praying the truth would come out.”

  Brewer has a son, twenty-five, and a daughter, twenty-six. When asked what he missed most about his life, after mentioning his kids, Brewer says, “Real food. And cold beer.” For his first meal as a free man, he went to Cracker Barrel.

  Neither Brooks nor Brewer ever knew Justin Johnson, though both knew of him. In February 2012 Brooks and Brewer rode together to attend his sentencing hearing. Brewer initially planned to ask that Johnson be given the death penalty. Brooks talked him out of it. He cited Johnson’s untreated mental illness.

  “I told Kenny that after all that happened to us, we should be merciful,” Brooks says. “There was no point in being mad anymore.”

  Johnson pleaded guilty to both crimes. At the sentencing hearing, he told district court Judge Lee Howard, “I wasn’t in my right mind when I did it.” Howard sentenced him to two terms of life without parole.

  “I don’t hate him now,” Brewer says, referring to Johnson. “But I do feel bad for him.”

  Forrest Allgood has never apologized to Brewer. Neither have any of the state officials involved in his prosecution. Despite Justin Johnson’s confession that he committed both crimes alone, Allgood still insists that Brewer had something to do with Christine Jackson’s death. So does Michael West.