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.










