From CNN:
At a small-town courthouse in one of rural Mississippi’s poorest counties, Dr. Michael West swore under oath that a dead girl had bite marks all over her body and that they were made by the two front teeth of the man charged with murdering her.
On the strength of West’s testimony and little else, a jury in 1995 convicted Kennedy Brewer of raping and murdering the 3-year-old girl and sentenced him to death.
Three years earlier, West gave similar testimony in a nearly identical rape-and-murder case involving another 3-year-old girl from the same town. West testified there were bite marks on the victim’s wrist and they were made by Levon Brooks. Brooks, too, was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
Today, more than a decade later, both Brewer and Brooks are out of prison, and prosecutors have all but pronounced them innocent. The reason: A third man confessed to both killings after DNA connected him to one of the rapes, investigators say.
Oh…
But it gets better.
A panel of forensic experts that examined the Brewer case says the wounds on the victim were not human bites at all, but were probably caused by crawfish and insects nibbling on the corpse, decomposition, and rough handling when the body was pulled from the pond where it was found. Brooks’ lawyers say West got it wrong in their case, too, by identifying scrapes as bites.
Not only am I not a dentist, but I avoid going to the dentist unless I really need to (nothing against ‘em; I just hate the sound of the drilling), but something tells me I could distinguish between crawfish bites and human bites.
The turn of events has shocked the community, especially the victims’ families, and led to accusations that West deliberately falsified evidence.
Ya think?
“You have people who engaged in misconduct and manufactured evidence and we’ve proved it,” said Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, which has won the exoneration of more than 200 inmates nationwide and assembled the expert panel that examined the Brewer case.
“These two cases are going to be an eye-opener for the people of Mississippi about some of the problems they have in criminal justice and how easy it will be to make it right,” Neufeld added.
Uh, Peter, you lost me there. This is Mississippi we’re talking about – the state, not the river. Left to its own devices, you know what Mississippi would still be doing…and not doing.
