A Conversation with Radley Balko About the "Cadaver King" and Wrongful Convictions
Murder SheetDecember 05, 2023
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00:33:5030.99 MB

A Conversation with Radley Balko About the "Cadaver King" and Wrongful Convictions

We recently got the opportunity to speak with the journalist Radley Balko about how two so called "experts" repeatedly gave evidence in criminal courts which may have led to a slew of wrongful convictions. It is a fascinating story — and one he and Tucker Carrington share in detail in the book Cadaver King And the Country Dentist.

You can find Radley's substack at: https://radleybalko.substack.com/

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Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Cadaver-King-Country-Dentist-Injustice-ebook/dp/B01NCHP7XH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2D71QFMYQOYNR&keywords=the+cadaver+king+and+the+country+dentist&qid=1701378859&sprefix=%252Caps%252C123&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=murdersheet-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=de204b67b7af35f40b32987721665780&camp=1789&creative=9325

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[00:00:00] Content Warning This Episode Contains Discussion of Murder We've all heard the phrase garbage in, garbage out. It means that if you input flawed or garbage data, then you are going to get a flawed or garbage result.

[00:00:14] Generally, the phrase is used in computer science, but it also applies in the criminal court system. When juries hear junk evidence or analysis from experts who truly don't know what they are talking about, then the end result may be a wrongful conviction.

[00:00:32] Journalist Radley Balko believes that is a major problem today. He and Tucker Carrington wrote The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, a book which highlights how two so-called expert witnesses may be responsible for a slew of wrongful convictions.

[00:00:49] We were pleased when Radley agreed to talk with us about his work and the problem of wrongful convictions. My name is Anya Kane, I'm a journalist. And I'm Kevin Greenlee, I'm an attorney. And this is The Murder Sheet.

[00:01:03] We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet. And this is A Conversation with Radley Balko About the Cadaver King and Wrongful Convictions.

[00:02:03] I want to jump into the cadaver king and the country dentist if that's okay. Start off, you know, such a stark first line. It is relatively easy to convict an innocent person from the forward by John Grisham. And I'm curious, why do you think that is?

[00:02:19] What factors make it difficult to identify and help a wrongfully convicted person? Well, I think there are two issues here. The first is the ability to convict an innocent person. And I think the reason why it's relatively easy is that we put so much faith in the kind

[00:02:38] of trust and we put too much faith and trust in the judgment and wisdom of police and prosecutors. And this isn't to say that, you know, all police and prosecutors are bad people or they're trying to put innocent people in prison.

[00:02:50] It's to say that they're human and they suffer from the same. This is also true of crime lab analysts, right? We are all subject to bias. We are all subject to tunnel vision.

[00:03:01] We are all subject to, you know, trying to take shortcuts on our job every now and then. And so we kind of treat these positions, particularly district attorneys and, you know, detectives and police officers as if they're almost infallible, right?

[00:03:17] We put an enormous amount of weight and consideration into the decisions that they make. So, you know, what happens is a conscientious police officer who wants to do the right thing

[00:03:29] and wants to get the right person will focus on a suspect and will sort of hone in on a suspect and then get what we call tunnel vision. And so now instead of collecting all the evidence and seeing what that evidence leads,

[00:03:43] what they tend to do is decide whether to hunch or they just don't like somebody will decide that genuinely and sincerely decided this person, probably the person you did it. And instead of just sort of collecting all the evidence and following our leads, they

[00:03:58] now start looking for evidence that will implicate that person. And we see this over and over again. So then what happens? Well, as our book document in Mississippi, you first take the body to a medical examiner for an autopsy, right?

[00:04:14] Well, in the city you had this really twisted system of perverse incentives where whenever there was a sufficient death, the prosecutor and the coroner got together and they contracted the autopsy out to a private medical exam.

[00:04:28] Well, what happened then is that these medical these private medical examiners are in a position where their judgment is going to be biased in favor of the people who are hiring them to do the autopsy.

[00:04:43] So if a prosecutor comes to me and says, here's the body, here's what I think happened, here's the guy who did it. And we know these conversations happen. In fact, we know that police and prosecutors are often present at these autopsy.

[00:04:53] If I'm a conscientious medical examiner and I come back and say, well, sorry, that's not what happened or more likely, sorry, but there's just not enough evidence for me to say that that's what happened either way, they might not hire me next time.

[00:05:07] They need to shop out an autopsy. And so what happened in what we document in the book is this guy, Steven Hayne, was able to basically monopolize the autopsy business, the lack of a better term in Mississippi by telling prosecutors what they wanted to hear.

[00:05:21] And when other doctors would, in fact, one former prosecutor flat out told me when we're researching the book is that everybody knows that if you don't get the results you want from an autopsy, you can always take the body to Steven Hayne.

[00:05:34] And so you have this system where they're going to get the autopsy results that they want. Well, now what else would help shore up your case? Well, a jailhouse informant would be great. You know, somebody who can say that the defendant admitted to them

[00:05:48] that they committed this crime. And you know, truth be told, I really have my doubts that people are confessing to their crimes to people they just met in jail in a holding cell with nearly the frequency that it apparently, you know, police claim to say it happened.

[00:06:05] But, you know, again, you have twisted incidents. So if you're somebody in one of these cells facing your own drug charges or, you know, something even more serious and the police come to you and say,

[00:06:16] hey, you know, if you can get this guy to confess will not 10 years off your sentence or will release you or, you know, I'm not to down a couple of levels of class of the felony. And, you know, the police may again, the police might be being entirely

[00:06:31] sincere. They probably think the person really did it. And maybe they're just telling this informant to chat with the person and if they can confess, great. But in the perspective of the informant, it's like, well, if I can get this person

[00:06:43] to confess or just say they can fast, I'm going to get 10 years of stop my sentence. Well, then of course, you know, I'm going to get them to confess whether you actually do or not. So basically you have this system where nobody's really sort of checking

[00:06:56] or scrutinizing these hunters, police officers. And you can very quickly build, you know, a very substantive seeming case. You know, you've got testimony from a medical examiner now. Now you've got testimony from a informant who claims there was a confession.

[00:07:11] You know, the read technique, which is the interrogation technique that most police departments around the country use is notorious for producing false confessions. You can even get your actual suspect to confess. You know, and now you have a really formidable case and it doesn't

[00:07:26] really matter that it doesn't. There's no sort of solid ground beneath it. You haven't had to convince the jury. And that's, you know, that's at the conviction stage. Once you get convicted, as I mentioned before, the system now puts a premium on finality.

[00:07:43] The system just does not want to admit that it makes mistakes. And so much your case has DNA that wasn't tested, which, you know, in all likelihood doesn't really happen anymore. Now if there's DNA, it does get tested pretty early on.

[00:07:56] You don't really have much hope once you've been convicted. The system makes it extremely difficult, particularly once you've exhausted your appeals. There's this horrible irony in our system where once you've exhausted your appeals, your case ended up being about post-conviction.

[00:08:13] And this is the phase where you're most likely to get access to the prosecutor's file. It's where it's where you're most likely to find the kinds of violations that lead to wrongful conviction. Unfortunately, it's also the stage when courts are least likely to reopen your case

[00:08:28] and let you back into court. So, you know, you've got these kind of incentive problems, pre-conviction that kind of let police and prosecutors do whatever they want without much scrutiny. And then post-conviction, you've got this system that kind of cements

[00:08:42] what police and prosecutors did under this principle of finality, which makes it really, really difficult to get anyone to look at your case again. You mentioned Stephen Hain. I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about not just him,

[00:08:55] but also about Michael West and the roles we both played in the court system. Yeah, so Stephen Hain, as I mentioned, he was able to kind of monopolize these autopsy referrals in Mississippi over the course of 20 years, about 20 years.

[00:09:10] He did somewhere doing 85% and 90% of the autopsies in criminal cases in the state. Plus, he also worked in Louisiana, so in Alabama, Tennessee, and also did civil cases. According to the National Association of Medical Examiner, it's just kind of the premier professional group for forensic pathologists.

[00:09:29] A medical examiner should do no more than 250 autopsy per year. At most they say 325. If you do more than that, they won't give your lab accreditation. So 325 is the absolute max, they say. Hain, for most of his career, was doing at least 1,200 autopsy per year.

[00:09:51] In his prime, it was somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800, and there were a couple of years when he was over 2,000. If you do the math, divide that by 365 days a year, and you can see why the idea that he was doing all these

[00:10:02] autopsies with any sort of quality control defies any fragility. Not to mention that at the same time, he was testifying in court four or five times a week all over the state. So he was this kind of autopsy assembly line, basically.

[00:10:22] Hain was slick, he was very smart, and so he was very good on the stand. He was able to keep defense attorneys running in circles by, he would claim various accreditation from these groups that sound like the official accrediting groups for medical examiners,

[00:10:39] but actually are online or diploma mill type places where you just pay a fee and they send you an accreditation. And unfortunately, defense attorneys and judges and juries didn't really know the difference. So he was able to kind of claim these credentials that he didn't really have.

[00:10:56] In fact, it took the official accrediting test from the American Board of Pathologists and failed it and walked out about three quarters of the way through. But it took 20 years for him to finally be called out on that. He told Broski what they wanted to hear.

[00:11:13] And a lot of times, you know, the person probably was guilty anyway. Last time is what he said, probably wasn't beyond the realm of legitimate science. But he was willing to say some pretty absurd things when he had to.

[00:11:26] The example I always give is there was a case of a kid named Tyler Edmunds who was arrested when he was 13 years old for killing his sister's husband. And according to the prosecution's theory, they both wanted to kill the husband,

[00:11:41] but neither had the guts to do it themselves. So Tyler and his sister waited until his sister tells them to sleep and they held the gun together and fired the trigger simultaneously. You know, but they both fired the trigger at the same time.

[00:11:55] Well, you know, that may or may not have been true. Who knows? But the Hain got on the limestand and told the jury that he could tell by the bullet wounds in the body that there were two hands on the gun that fired the bullet,

[00:12:07] which is just absolutely absurd. Right? It's like saying you can tell the color of a killer's eyes by the knife wound, you know, in the body. And yet that was upheld by a judge. Again, this is another problem with having judges be the gatekeepers

[00:12:20] of good and bad science in the courtroom. The judge not only when the defense asked for a hearing on the scientific, you know, legitimacy of what Hain had said about the two hands on the gun. And the judge wouldn't even grant a hearing.

[00:12:33] Then Tyler Edmunds had confessed he's 13. You know, the interrogation had all the red flags of a false confession. And the defense wanted to put up an expert on both professions. And this time the prosecution objected and the judge not only granted a hearing, he ruled for the state

[00:12:49] and the defense was not allowed to put a expert on false confessions on the stand because the judge said there was no scientific validity for that. And we now, of course, know that false confessions are common. They're they're multiple, multiple studies showing that they're

[00:13:06] particularly when you use the speed technique of interrogation. So Hain, again, he was able to dominate the system by telling prosecutors what they wanted to hear. He's going to testify in court and say just about anything. But again, Hain was, you know, he was smart.

[00:13:21] He could read a room. You know, he was a very good sort of a very good ability to read people. He could talk his way out of about, you know, any sort of jam he got into on the witness stand. His sidekick is a different story.

[00:13:34] His sidekick is this guy, Michael West. West was rogue. He was brash. He was extremely confident in his ability to fight the fact that they were they were just complete and utter bullshit. So West kind of made his name as a bite mark expert.

[00:13:54] He claimed he could find bites on him and skin that no other person could see by using this technique where he would put on these yellow goggles and shine a fluorescent light on the body. And he said, you know, this would enable him to see bites

[00:14:10] that had been affected months earlier. He modestly called this this technique the West phenomenon. He won over juries by sort of painting himself as just a small time dentist who, you know, had this gift and was just trying to do good and put the bad guy away.

[00:14:27] Now it often contrasts defense witnesses who, you know, were flown in from New York or Miami or California, who could be portrayed as kind of hired guns. But West was, you know, he was a quack. There was nothing to what he claimed.

[00:14:42] And the fact that he repeatedly would match by March to the wrong person put multiple innocent people in prison also allowed lots of guilty people to remain free, several of which went on to commit other murders. He at one point was one of my favorite

[00:14:58] West examples of the guy that there was a triple homicide in Louisiana. These three people were stabbed and the state got their had their hunch on who they thought it was. And West, they hired West to basically to try to match

[00:15:16] the knife to the knife wounds in the body of the knife that they thought was a murder weapon. And, you know, that's already a pretty suspect to say that only one knife could have created these wounds. But West was more than willing to do that.

[00:15:29] But then he went even further and gave them even more. So he went down to the jail, suspecting being held, and did the West phenomenon on this guy's hand and claimed to have found marks on this guy's hand

[00:15:41] that could only have been caused by gripping this one particular knife and stabbing people with it. But that's the only thing that could have caused these marks. Now, nobody else had seen these marks. West claimed he could only see them using his technique.

[00:15:58] He also claimed conveniently that the photos he took of the marks had he had overdeveloped them until they were ruined. So he went back to the jail and photographed this gun pan and drew in the marks that he had found from memory. And this was admitted into court.

[00:16:14] The guy was I think he was held for about four years before finally a Louisiana appeals court throughout West testimony. And the guy had to be released. However, that should have been the end of West's career. That was such a preposterous thing to claim

[00:16:28] and to claim it to put somebody in prison for murder for a triple homicide. You know, that he should have never been anywhere in your courtroom again. Instead, those are at the beginning of his career and he would go on to testify hundreds of times in courtrooms,

[00:16:42] not just in Louisiana, Mississippi, but all over the country. So Hain and West kind of worked together. They West helped out Hain with his autopsy machine and Hain gave West some credibility and change for getting West's help. And so they kind of dominated the death investigation system

[00:17:02] in Mississippi for a really long time. And we know of so far, I believe five people that they helped convicted murder have been exonerated and released. There's another guy, Jimmy Duncan on death row in Louisiana who also should be released.

[00:17:20] There's I think of at least four or five people currently in prison in Mississippi that we know of who should be released, who haven't been. But also, you know, the other thing is it wasn't just that they would help prosecutors get their get their guy

[00:17:36] in these days. A lot of times, you know, prosecutors want to close but they don't want an open murder case. And if they deem, if police and prosecutors deem somebody's life insignificant enough that they don't want to have another open murder case,

[00:17:50] you know, they can find a medical examiner is willing to say that this was a natural death or an accident. That helps them clear those cases and they don't have to, you know, they don't have these open investigations anymore. And Hain was very useful for that, too.

[00:18:05] I wrote about one case with a woman found in her house with blood all over the wall and a neighbor had seen a man running out of the house clutching a bloody rag or bloody shirt. And this is a popperish black woman in rural Mississippi.

[00:18:22] And they took the body to Hain and Hain determined that she died of a stroke. So you know, you can see how these guys could wreak havoc on the criminal justice, not just in terms of convicting the wrong people, but also for allowing actual crimes to go uninvestigated.

[00:18:40] Do you believe very long answer? Well, no, it's we love your long answers because they're they're in depth and rich with detail. So yeah, we appreciate that. I'm curious, do you believe that Hain or West knowingly gave false evidence or does intent even matter in situations like this?

[00:19:00] You know, I mean, it's difficult to say because, you know, I think at some point West had to realize that what he was saying was, you know, complete men under bullshit. In fact, there are times in the lat

[00:19:13] toward the kind of end of his career where it kind of just denounced by Mark testimony entirely. But then later he would say, well, I don't everybody except my own. It's hard to say. I mean, I think West really thought very, very highly actually,

[00:19:28] but they both did in different ways. I mean, Hain sort of fainting melody and trying to kind of just present him as a quiet, thoughtful, you know, expert. You know, I don't think he thought that he could tell

[00:19:39] what is a bullet wound that there were two hands on the gun by the bullets. I do think he thought the state had the right guy. And, you know, you probably thought that's how the murder happened. And so it's hard to say.

[00:19:52] I mean, you have to kind of dig into their motivations. West, I think really believed his own bullshit. I mean, I think he really thought that he was this kind of genius. And, you know, I mean, a lot of people are complicit in this.

[00:20:04] I mean, you have the coroners, which is an elected position, which is not a doctor, political position who enabled these guys. You got the prosecutors enabled them. You have the defense bar who not only sort of didn't do a very good job

[00:20:18] cross examining these guys, but also use them. So in Mississippi, you know, they're most parts of the city, the public defender is not a full time position. So these people have private practices and in the private practice

[00:20:30] that they take on civil case, long for death cases, for example. And they would use Hain in their civil case. So if you're using this guy in the cases where you actually make the bulk of your living,

[00:20:40] you're not going to be as aggressive with them in the criminal case. His needs are helped and he's other ones. So, you know, it was Hain really kind of brilliantly positioned himself the only town in Mississippi if you need an autopsy done.

[00:20:52] And so that allowed him to kind of play all sides. And really the only people who had the power in any of the people at the power to do anything about him had a vested interest in him staying in that position.

[00:21:05] The only people who, you know, were really being screwed over were people who didn't have the power to do anything about it. What happened to these guys in the end to a West and to Hain? Nothing. So Hain, Hain sued the Innocence Project

[00:21:20] because some that they filed a complaint against them with the state medical board and tried to get his license revoked. And in doing so, they arguably may have violated a privacy law that basically says when you challenge somebody's medical license,

[00:21:37] it's not public information and they had to release their report publicly. And they ended up settling with Hain for $100,000. I think it was $100,000, which, you know, isn't very much money at all. I mean, I think what happened was their insurance said, all right,

[00:21:51] well, we can make this go away for less than the cost of litigating it. We need to do that. Unfortunately, allowed Hain to sort of declare victory. Hain also threatened to sue me multiple times. He never did. That's at last. Never any criminal liability for either of them.

[00:22:06] The two cases that kind of drive our book, the narrative Kennedy Brewer and LeBron Brooks, both tried to sue Hain and West and federal court, so rights violations. Federal court found that Hain and West showed extreme negligence or egregious negligence, some extreme form of negligence.

[00:22:26] But in order to win a civil seat against expert witnesses, so they're protected by the stock in a qualified immunity. If you have to show negligence is enough, you have to show that they intentionally violated rights. So you basically had to get them on tape saying, you know,

[00:22:43] I am going to manufacture evidence against this person. And so the federal courts ruled that Brooks and Brewer did not meet that burden. Both were in prison for somewhere between 15 and 20 years. Kennedy Brewer was almost executed on multiple occasions, but they did not get their day in court.

[00:23:00] You know, Hain was eventually, after I did a bunch of investigative pieces, Hain was fired from doing any more autopsies for prosecutors in Mississippi. He then started doing, testifying for the defense in a few cases, which was really interesting. West kind of dropped entirely.

[00:23:17] He became really toxic just because he was so arrogant and cocky and full of himself that he ended up shooting himself a foot a number of times. But you know, there was never really any consequences for either of them, other than there was some damage to their reputation.

[00:23:32] But Hain died in the summer of 2020. Interestingly, there was no, I mean, this guy who was the state medical center for a while did 85 to 90% of the autopsy for 20 years, testified in thousands of cases and who, you know, was a very prominent figure.

[00:23:50] I mean, for a medical examiner, he was very well-known with no coverage of his death anywhere. You can't even find a funeral notice for him. The Jackson paper, which, you know, he's been in hundreds of times over the years. His name appeared in that paper and various articles

[00:24:04] didn't cover him on a local news station's coverage. I found it really interesting. I don't really have information of the why, but I found it, it took me two months after he died to confirm it. And that was only because he was supposed to be

[00:24:18] deposed in several cases. And finally his attorney told the opposing counsel that he actually died. West is still alive. Last I heard, he was the dentist at a prison in Southern Mississippi, which is also really perverse and weird to me given that he probably put some

[00:24:35] of those people in there. But he may be retired at this point. He's not in great health either at this point. But yeah, there's really been no comeuppance, no real consequences for them. And of course, like I mentioned, there are still,

[00:24:51] you know, probably a dozen or so people up to my, you know, I would be confident in saying are innocent or should not be in prison. But these guys also took one thousand cases. We have no idea how much damage they did.

[00:25:03] The only people who are really looking into this are the attorneys at the Mississippi Innocence Project and they have, you know, a staff of two or three. So there's no way they can really get to all of them. But, you know, we haven't yet.

[00:25:15] We probably say at least a dozen that I know of and who knows how many more. In your view, how big of a problem does junk science continue to be in the court system? I know we touched upon that earlier,

[00:25:25] but I also want to ask a sort of a follow up. What can we as a society do to curb this phenomenon? I mean, I think it's a massive and pervasive problem. I mean, you know, any shooting case is probably going to have a forensic firearms expert in.

[00:25:41] And, you know, I just don't think there's enough science court, you know, what they what they try to tell the jury. But so many fields are corrupt or corrupted, I should say. You know, Blood Spatter, Pam Kooff

[00:25:56] of the ProPublica The New York Times magazine has been a lot of missing. There is no science to back up Blood Spatter analysis from this idea that you can tell from Blood Spatter, you know, how a crime was committed. Hey, now also dabbled in that too.

[00:26:10] A shoe print stuff, you know, you can you can tell from a shoe print maybe the size of the shoe and in some cases it's a really good print, maybe the brand. But the experts out there claiming that they can tell

[00:26:21] from shoe prints, you know, how tall a person was or what kind of gate they have. They were a right or left handed. There's no, you know, there's no science to put that. And then we're also now getting, you know, new fields where

[00:26:33] the new field just runs except are also just as dubious. I think it's ProPublica have another report on this 911 sort of call analysis where they claim that they can tell by the addiction and sort of the emotion and the way that the 911 caller talks to the operator,

[00:26:53] you know, whether they may have committed, you know, whatever act they're calling 911 about. I mean, we just have to have good kind of bullshit detectors. And I found that most of these fields that seem pretty dubious

[00:27:09] when you look into them, they are, there's just no science to back them up. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, there aren't ever going to be new fields of forensic. So as I mentioned in my piece on ballistic,

[00:27:22] there are teams right now that are looking at this 3D imaging of bullets. And so they're putting, they're scanning bullets 3D and then putting these images and computers and using algorithms to look at these tiny marks on bullets.

[00:27:35] But you know, the important thing is that the researchers aren't going into the saying we are going to create an algorithm that can identify a bullet and match it through a gun. They're going into saying, is this even possible? Well, let's do what we can.

[00:27:48] Let's create a huge database who put all these images in here and let's see, you know, and then let's test ourselves and let's see how good we are and how accurate we are with the margin for error. And that, you know, even skeptics I've talked to you said

[00:28:01] that that area of research is promising. And maybe we will one day get to the point where we can use computers and algorithms to match a bullet to a gun and provide a margin for error the way we can for DNA. We're just not there yet.

[00:28:17] You know, I'll tell you what, it's a really overwhelming part of this beat. And you know, I love I love my job. It's very rewarding and filling to be able to heavy sometimes. But one of the really overwhelming parts of it is when,

[00:28:30] you know, you're researching some case from the 80s or 90s, you know, some long-form conviction case and you find this little thread where maybe there was a blood spatter expert who testified to, you know, was only sort of by the expert

[00:28:46] because it had taken a 12-hour class on blood spatter or you find somebody like Hain or he find a cop who was weirdly good at extracting confessions and a couple of those confessions where it turned out to be false confession. So you find a little thread like that

[00:29:02] and you start pulling at it right. And so you type that person's name into Lexus and try to find out the cases what they testified. And all of a sudden you find hundreds of cases where that person testified. Then you find out that that person,

[00:29:14] let's say the blood spatter expert, taught a class on blood spatter experts and then certified hundreds of other blood spatter experts who then went and testified and who knows how many cases. It becomes really overwhelming when you start to think particularly go back to the 80s and 90s

[00:29:28] in a lot of these cases where people didn't have adequate defense counsel where, you know, we were in an era that prior to DNA where we still just assumed the courts were always got it right. You know, all of a sudden you're looking at hundreds

[00:29:41] or even thousands or even tens of thousands of cases corrupted, you know, and you got there just by looking at this one case and pulling at a couple of threads, right? And then you start thinking, well, I mean, this is one case I was looking at

[00:29:56] and I found all of this a batch of what was out there and you just start to no wonder the sheer kind of volume of the injustices that must have been perpetrated in that era that we probably will never know about with the bulk of them.

[00:30:12] It can really be overwhelming sometimes. And not to say that everything's perfect now and we don't have a wrong group of convictions now, but I just don't think about all the people, innocent people who may be languishing because they were convicted at the age of 80s and 90s

[00:30:27] where junk science flourished where we had this really kind of punitive view of the criminal justice system and where we just never thought that it could possibly be wrong and it can be pretty depressing when you start to contemplate it all. Yeah, it really and truly can.

[00:30:45] We really appreciate you talking with us before we wrap up. Is there anything about the book or the things we've been discussing in this part of our conversation that we didn't mention that you wanted to address? No, I mean, if you could just mention that,

[00:31:00] you know, I'm a independent journalist now. So I make my living entirely, even though I make everything I write on my subject free, I like make my living almost entirely off of subscriptions from people who want to support my work. So if you're intrigued by this

[00:31:17] or you think this work is important for your readers, but listeners out there, I hope you'll consider subscribing. Yeah, it's a great, it's a great sub stack. I certainly highly recommend it. We really appreciate you talking with us today. Great, thanks for having me. I appreciate the invitation.

[00:31:35] We'd like to thank Bradley again for taking the time to talk with us today. Bradley's sub stack, The Watch, is a great resource which highlights concerns about the criminal justice system. It is well worth checking out. Please check out his book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,

[00:31:51] A True Story of Injustice in the American South. Today, we'll include a link in our show notes. Thanks so much for listening to the murder sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail.com.

[00:32:11] If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities. If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com slash murder sheet. If you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests,

[00:32:33] you can do so at www.buymeacoffee.com slash murder sheet. We very much appreciate any support. Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee who composed the music for the murder sheet and who you can find on the web at kevintg.com. If you're looking to talk with other listeners

[00:32:56] about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet Discussion Group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience

[00:33:11] as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.

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