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

This is a 7-minute clip of a much longer interview of the two authors of a book called The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. The clip will begin at 15:20 in the video – please watch until 22:02. This clip is a discussion of the coroner system in Mississippi - and coroners (like the forensic pathologists you just read about in the Dror study) make decisions about the manner of death.

I think you can understand the authors’ points without knowing to whom they’re referring, but here’s that information: The book is about the wrongful convictions of two Black men in Mississippi, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. (We will learn about the details of this case when we study bite mark evidence.) Their convictions were largely due to (now discredited) testimony about bite mark evidence from two White men: Dr. Steven Hayne, a medical examiner, and Dr. Michael West, a local dentist.