The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South

Filed Under: Books Read

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South by Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington
Published by Public Affairs on February 27, 2018
Format: audiobook
Genres: Criminal Justice, Nonfiction, Politics & Social Sciences
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

This is an account of two tragedies.At the heart of the first is Dr. Steven Hayne, a doctor the State of Mississippi employed as its de facto medical examiner for two decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, he performed anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies a year, five times more than is recommended, performed at night in the basement of a local funeral home. Autopsy reports claimed organs had been observed and weighed when, in reality, they had been surgically removed from the body years before. Hayne, the only game in town, also often brought in local dentist and self-styled "bite-mark specialist" Dr. Michael West, who would discover marks on victim's bodies, at times invisible to the naked eye, and then match those marks-"indeed and without doubt"-to law enforcement's lead suspect.This leads to the second tragic tale: that of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two black men each convicted in separate cases of the brutal rape and murder of young girls. Dr. Hayne's autopsy and Dr. West's bite-mark matching formed the bases for their convictions. Combined, the two men served over thirty years in Parchman Farm, Mississippi's notorious penitentiary, before being exonerated in 2008. Brooks' and Brewer's wrongful convictions lie at the intersection of both the most pressing problem facing this country's criminal justice system-structural injustice built on the historic foundation of race and class-as well as with the much more contemporary but equally egregious problem of invalid forensic science. The old problem is inextricably bound up with and exacerbates the new.In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write a true story of Southern gothic horror-of two innocent men wrongly convicted of vicious crimes and the legally condoned failures that allowed it to happen. Balko and Carrington will shine a light on the institutional and professional failures that allowed this tragic, astonishing story to happen, identify where it may have happened elsewhere, and show how to prevent it from happening again.

The Unquiet Dead

Filed Under: Books Read

The Unquiet Dead

The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan, Peter Ganim
Published by HighBridge Company on January 13, 2015
Series: Rachel Getty & Esa Khattak #1
Format: audiobook
Genres: Police Procedural, Suspense
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Synopsis

Detective Esa Khattak is in the midst of his evening prayers when he receives a phone call asking that he and his partner, Detective Rachel Getty, look into the death of a local man who has fallen off a cliff. At first Christopher Drayton's death--which looks like an accident--doesn't seem to warrant a police investigation, especially not from Khattak and Rachel's team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But it soon comes to light that Drayton might have been living under an assumed name, and he may not have been the upstanding Canadian citizen he appeared to be. In fact, he may have been a Bosnian war criminal with ties to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. And if that's true, any number of people could have had reason to help him to his death.

As Rachel and Khattak dig deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, every question seems to lead only to more questions, and there are no easy answers. Did the specters of Srebrenica return to haunt Drayton at last, or had he been keeping secrets of an entirely different nature? Or, after all, did a man just fall to is death in a tragic accident?

In her spellbinding debut, Ausma Zehanat Kahn has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the cost of justice that will linger with readers long after turning the final page.

West Cork

Filed Under: Books Read

West Cork

West Cork by Sam Bungey
Published by Audible Studios on February 07, 2018
Format: podcast
Genres: True Crime
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Synopsis

This much we do know: Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered days before Christmas in 1996, her broken body discovered at the edge of her property near the town of Schull in West Cork, Ireland. The rest remains a mystery.

Gripping, yet ever elusive, join the real-life hunt for answers in the year’s first not-to-be-missed, true-crime series. Investigative journalist, Sam Bungey, and documentarian, Jennifer Forde, guide listeners through the brutal, unsolved murder and the tangled web of its investigation while introducing an intricate cast of characters, a provocative prime suspect, and a recovering community whose story begs to be heard.