#levon brooks

[fletchermarple]

A Story of True Injustice

The men you see above are Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer. Both were convicted of pretty much the same horrific crime: the rape and murder of a 3 year old girl. 

Both were innocent.

On September 15, 1990, Courtney Smith (3) was taken from her room in Brooksville Mississipi. Two days later, her body was found in a pond close to her house. Levon Brooks was the ex boyfriend of Courtney’s mother, and he became a suspect when Courtney’s 6 year old sister, who was sleeping in the same room she was abducted from, pointed to him.

Even though Levon’s defense showed at trial he had been working at the time Courtney was taken, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The main piece of evidence the prosecution presented was a couple of bite marks on Courney’s wrist that a forensic dentist called Michael West matched to Levon. The so called match was only of Levon’s two front teeth.

On May 3, 1992, another 3 year old disappeared from her house, which was only a few miles away from Courtney’s. This time it was Christine Jackson, and again her body was found two days later in a pond. Kennedy Brewer was dating Christine’s mother, and they had two other kids together. The night Christine disappeared, Kennedy had been babysitting them. Even though there was a broken window an intruder could have used to get inside the house while Kennedy was asleep, police considered there was no forced entry so they arrested him.

Christine’s body also had bite marks and again Dr. West matched them to the suspect’s two front teeth only. By the time the trial came, in 1995, Dr. West had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology, but his testimony was still allowed. The jury didn’t seem to care that Dr. Richard Souviron, one of the founders and most prominent members of the Board of Forensic Odontology testified the marks had been made by insects while Christine’s body was in the water. They found Kennedy guilty and sentenced him to death.

So two identical crimes, with very similar victims and MO, in the same county... and somehow they managed to convict two different guys for them. Such bad luck to get two monsters living in the exact same area, don’t you think?.

In 2001, the Innocence Project stepped in Kennedy Brewer’s case and had some DNA retested with advanced technology. It excluded him as the person who had raped Christine and his conviction was vacated, but because the prosecution expressed their intention to do a retrial, he had to spend 5 more years in prison waiting. In 2007, after a Special Prosecutor was appointed to the case, Kennedy was let go on bail.

But then, the sample that had been tested in 2001 produced a match. It belonged to a man called Justin Albert Johnson. He confessed to the murder of Christine and Courtney, so Levon and Kennedy were finally exonerated.

Celebrated author John Grisham, who has been deeply involved in the Innocence Project, wrote the foreword of a book about this case called “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South”, written by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. It will be published on February 27, 2018.

[caseremains]

The rape and murder of a young child is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and thankfully a crime that is exceedingly rare. But in early 1990s Mississippi, two such tragedies occurred to two little girls aged just 3-years-old, who lived just three miles apart from one another. The boyfriends of both the girl’s mothers would be convicted of their murders. And almost twenty years later, both men would be proved innocent.

The first crime took place on September 15 1990, when Courtney Smith was taken from her bed in the middle of the night. Two days later she was found in a pond near her home, and Levon Brooks was picked out of a lineup by Courtney’s 5-year-old sister. At trial, he was convicted on the strength of expert testimony that stated bite marks on the little girl were a match to Brooks’s teeth, and he was sentenced to life in prison. 

Just over a year and a half later, Christine Jackson was found under strikingly similar circumstances, this time dumped in a nearby creek. Having babysat Christine and her 2 younger siblings that night, Kennedy Brewer was arrested for her murder. The same medical examiner and dentist who had testified at Brooks’s trial gave evidence at Brewer’s, matching bite marks on the body to Brewer’s dental records. The dentist, who had in fact been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology, made the bizarre claim that all 19 marks had been made using only Brewer’s 2 front teeth (a claim he also made in the trial of Levon Brooks). In spite of this, he was convicted of capital murder and sexual battery on March 24, 1995, and sentenced to death.

In 2001, advanced DNA testing was completed on a semen sample recovered from Christine, which had been deemed insufficient for testing at the time. The tests excluded Brewer, and instead gave the profile of an unknown assailant. The next year his sentence was vacated, but he remained in prison for another 5 years waiting for a retrial to be scheduled. During this time a DNA match was finally made, to original suspect Justin Albert Johnson, a man with a long history of sexual assault. Johnson finally admitted to raping and murdering both Christine and Courtney.

On February 15, 2008, charges against Brewer were officially dropped, and Brooks was released from prison the same day (and subsequently exonerated just one month later). The men filed a joint lawsuit against the medical examiner and dentist that helped secure their convictions, but the suit was dismissed in 2014. For their combined 32 years spent behind bars, the state of Mississipi awarded Brooks and Brewer $500,000 each.