03/13/08

Wrongly convicted Miss. inmate freed

By Jerry Mitchell
jmitchell@clarionledger.com
The Clarion-Ledger
View original online article here

After nearly two decades in prison for crimes he didn’t commit, Levon Brooks walked free for good today after being exonerated of capital murder and rape charges in Noxubee County.

"I’m incredibly relieved. It’s finally over," Brooks said today after the hearing.

At the request of District Attorney Forrest Allgood, Circuit Judge J. Lee Howard dismissed the indictment against Brooks, who spent 18 years behind bars.

Allgood stood up in the hearing and apologized for any role he had played in Brooks wrongful conviction.

Brooks, 48, who said he was about to study art when he was arrested, was convicted and sentenced to life in the 1990 killing of 3-year-old Courtney Smith. The Mississippi Supreme Court threw out that conviction.

On Feb. 15, Howard dismissed a similar indictment against Kennedy Brewer, 37, who was sentenced in 1995 to die for raping and murdering 3-year-old Christine Jackson until DNA testing confirmed in 2001 he wasn't the rapist.

Justin Albert Johnson, 51, of Brooksville, stands charged with capital murder and sexual battery in the crime Brewer was convicted of committing. Johnson allegedly also has confessed to the one that sent Brooks to prison.

The state Supreme Court granted a postconviction petition for Brooks, which allowed him to state he had discovered new evidence that might win him a new trial.

Brooks and Brewer were convicted in part on the testimony of Dr. Michael West, a Hattiesburg dentist who identified bite marks on Christine's body and testified several were made by Brewer.

At the time of the trial, West had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology and had resigned from the American Academy of Forensic Science and the International Association of Identification, pending expulsion.

A defense expert testified the wounds were not human bite marks — a conclusion backed by a panel of worldwide experts.

Renowned pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded the injuries took place after death.

The Innocence Project, a prisoner-advocacy group, helped push both cases. They are now asking state officials to review all the cases involving state pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, who testified in the cases.

In his motion filed this week in court, Allgood wrote that, during Brooks' trial, Brooks was positively identified by the then-5-year-old sister of the victim, Courtney Smith.

Now that sister is unsure of the identity of that individual, Allgood said. Courtney's mother, Sonya Smith, had dated Brooks in the past. The child was abducted from her grandmother's home, raped and killed and her body tossed in a nearby pond. After two years in prison awaiting trial, Brooks was convicted in 1992.

"Without the positive identification of the victim's sister, the state would be unable to sustain its burden of proof," he wrote. "Further circumstances are indicative of actual innocence; and the state does not feel that the ends of justice would be served in pursuing the indictment."

Brooks' attorney, Peter Neufeld, executive director of the Innocence Project, said Allgood failed to mention the real reason he has no choice to dismiss: "In the first trial, even without the weak eyewitness testimony of the 5-year-old sister, Allgood had state pathologist Steven Hayne and West testify the single post-mortem bruise to Courtney's hand was a bite mark made by Brooks. That alone was enough to get Brewer a death sentence (in his case) and would be sufficient to get a conviction against Brooks.

"But Allgood now knows that West and Hayne have no credibility. Indeed, given the real perpetrator's confession admitting abducting, sexually assaulting and killing the two 3-year-old girls, but most importantly -denying he ever bit either of them."

Neither Brewer nor Brooks is getting compensation from Mississippi for the years they wrongly spent behind bars, but they can bring lawsuits.

Brewer, who was convicted in 1995, was moved off death row in 2002 when the DNA test showed his semen did not match the semen found on the victim, but he remained jailed in Noxubee County five more years because Allgood was seeking the death penalty in the retrial. Brewer was released on bond last September pending a new trial when a specially appointed prosecutor dropped the death penalty.

Christine, the daughter of Brewer's then-girlfriend, was taken from her home near Brooksville in the middle of the night, beaten, raped and strangled.

West has defended his conclusion in the Brewer case: "I never testified he killed her. I never testified he raped her."

But despite the DNA matching someone else, West stuck to his position that the wounds on Christine were human bite marks and that Brewer made them. "Somewhere prior to death, he bit the girl on the arm, leg and face," West said.

Neufeld has derided West's statements as fiction that nearly led to Brewer's execution.

To comment on this story, call Jerry Mitchell at (601) 961-7064.
 

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