Quick Take
- Narration: Carries the emotional weight of the material without sensationalizing; the historical passages on Mississippi are delivered with appropriate gravity
- Themes: Forensic pseudoscience, racial injustice, systemic corruption in criminal prosecution
- Mood: Methodical and deeply unsettling, without the false catharsis of resolved true crime
- Verdict: Rigorous and important journalism about how bad science and structural racism combine; not for listeners who need their true crime to resolve.
I was halfway through my afternoon walk when this book shifted from investigative journalism into something that felt genuinely upsetting in the way that important nonfiction sometimes does. Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington are not writing a true crime narrative designed to produce dread and resolution. They are writing an indictment of how forensic pseudoscience, racial hierarchy, and institutional corruption combined in Mississippi over decades to send innocent people to prison and to death.
The title refers to two real figures: Steven Hayne, a forensic pathologist who performed an extraordinary number of autopsies for the state with credentials that did not support his self-presentation, and Michael West, a bite-mark analyst whose testimony helped convict defendants in cases where the evidence against them was thin to nonexistent. The book is about what those two men did and how the system allowed and then protected them.
The Forensic Science Problem at the Center of This
Bite-mark analysis has been the subject of sustained scientific criticism for decades. The basic claim, that a particular person’s teeth can be uniquely matched to marks left in skin, lacks the empirical foundation that forensic testimony requires. West not only deployed this technique in high-stakes criminal cases but expanded it into methodologies with no peer-reviewed support whatsoever. What makes the Mississippi cases particularly damning is not that West existed. It is that prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys allowed his testimony to stand without scrutiny for so long, across so many cases, with such devastating consequences for defendants.
Balko’s background as an investigative journalist focused on criminal justice and drug policy gives him a structural understanding of why this happened that goes beyond individual bad actors. The forensic science problem in American courts is systemic: there is no federal oversight mechanism for expert testimony, no requirement that techniques have scientific validation before being admitted into evidence, and significant incentive structures that reward prosecution-friendly experts with repeat business. West and Hayne operated within a system that created them and protected them for years.
Race, Mississippi, and the History That Precedes the Story
The authors are explicit about the racial dimension of the cases they examine, and this is where the book becomes more than an expose of forensic misconduct. The defendants who were most damaged by Hayne and West’s testimony were predominantly Black, poor, and without access to competent legal representation. The history of Mississippi’s criminal justice system, its roots in plantation discipline, convict leasing, and the maintenance of racial hierarchy through legal violence, provides the context in which the modern misconduct makes sense.
The narration carries this historical material with appropriate gravity. The passages on Mississippi’s specific history are not background color. They are part of the argument. The authors are claiming that what happened to Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, two men convicted of child murders they did not commit based substantially on West’s bite-mark testimony, was not aberrant. It was the latest iteration of a very long pattern that the state’s institutions had long since learned to accommodate.
What Listening to This Requires of You
This is not a comfortable audiobook. It is not designed to be. The cases it documents in detail involve the murders of children, and the grief of families, both the families of victims and the families of wrongly convicted men, is present throughout. The authors do not sensationalize this material, but they do not sanitize it either. What they ask of the reader is sustained attention to injustice without the comfort of a tidy resolution.
The resolution available here is partial: Brooks and Brewer were eventually exonerated, and West’s and Hayne’s testimony has been challenged in subsequent cases. But the structural conditions that produced those convictions have not been fundamentally altered. Balko and Carrington know this, and the book ends with that knowledge rather than with false reassurance. Listeners who need their true crime to resolve cleanly will find this frustrating. Listeners who want journalism that does the actual work of accountability will find it essential and worth the discomfort it produces.
Balko’s Prior Work and Why This Book Is His Best
Radley Balko has spent his career as a journalist documenting the specific ways American criminal justice inflicts harm on people who are poor and politically powerless. His earlier book “Rise of the Warrior Cop” examined the militarization of police forces; his journalism for The Washington Post and Reason magazine has covered wrongful convictions, forensic failures, and prosecutorial misconduct with consistent rigor. This book benefits from that accumulated expertise in ways that are visible on every page. He knows what to look for because he has spent years knowing what to look for.
The collaboration with Tucker Carrington, who directs the Mississippi Innocence Project, adds a practitioner’s knowledge of how the defense side of these cases works, or fails to work, within Mississippi’s specific court system. That combination of investigative journalism and legal advocacy gives the book a density of institutional knowledge that a single author working in either mode alone would not produce. It is a genuinely collaborative work in a field where that is rarer than it should be, and the audiobook format carries that density well for listeners willing to give it the sustained attention it requires. The narration does not try to make the material easier than it is, which is the right call for journalism that is specifically about the difficulty of achieving accountability in a system designed to resist it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a narrative true crime book or primarily an investigative journalism account?
Primarily the latter. Balko and Carrington are journalists, not true crime writers, and their approach prioritizes structural analysis over narrative tension. The book builds a case rather than telling a story, and the resolution it offers is partial rather than satisfying. Readers expecting the narrative arc of typical true crime will find a different and more demanding kind of text.
What eventually happened to the defendants whose convictions are examined in the book?
Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, two men convicted of child murders based substantially on Michael West’s bite-mark testimony, were eventually exonerated after DNA evidence pointed to the actual perpetrator. The book covers this, but the exonerations represent a partial resolution rather than a systemic one; the underlying conditions that produced those convictions have not been fundamentally altered.
Do you need prior knowledge of forensic science to follow the critique of bite-mark analysis?
No. The authors explain the scientific objections to bite-mark analysis clearly and accessibly. The core problem, that the technique lacks the empirical foundation that forensic testimony requires, is explained in terms that a general audience can evaluate. The book does not ask you to take the scientific critique on faith; it shows you the evidence.
How does the book handle the history of racial violence in Mississippi without becoming a generalized argument about race rather than a specific account?
By grounding the historical argument in the specific cases and the specific institutional mechanisms that enabled them. The history of Mississippi’s criminal justice system is present as context rather than as a substitute for the journalism. The authors are making a claim about these specific cases and these specific actors, and the historical background explains how the conditions for that misconduct were created and sustained over generations.
