This is the first episode of a mini-series about The Innocence Files, a documentary series about wrongful convictions, made in consultation with the Innocence Project. Rebecca Lavoie (Crime Writers On...) speaks with Academy-award winning director, Roger Ross Williams (God Loves Uganda, Music By Prudence). He directed the first three episodes about bite mark evidence and exonerees Levon Brooks, Kennedy Brewer, and Keith Harward.
This is the first episode of a mini-series about The Innocence Files, a documentary series about wrongful convictions, made in consultation with the Innocence Project. Rebecca Lavoie (Crime Writers On...) speaks with Academy-award winning director, Roger Ross Williams (God Loves Uganda, Music By Prudence). He directed the first three episodes about bite mark evidence and exonerees Levon Brooks, Kennedy Brewer, and Keith Harward.
Rebecca Lavoie Welcome to You Can't Make This Up, a companion podcast from Netflix.
I’m Rebecca Lavoie and I’ll be hosting this week’s episode.
Here on You Can’t Make This Up, we go behind the scenes of Netflix Original True Crime Stories with special guests.
We’ve got a special three-part miniseries for you, all about The Innocence Files. This documentary series explores a few causes of wrongful convictions, and was made in consultation with the Innocence Project.
In this episode, we have Academy-award winning director, Roger Ross Williams. He directed the first three episodes of the Innocence Files, which are all about bite mark analysis. Bite marks are considered by some to be “junk” science. But that evidence is what sealed the fates of Levon Brooks, Kennedy Brewer, and Keith Harward.
Roger and I will be talking about how the criminal justice system works in the South, about Mississppi’s former District Attorney Forrest Allgood, and about the controversial dentist, Dr. Michael West. There will be spoilers, so make sure you’ve watched at least the first three episodes of The Innocence Files. And we recorded this interview in our separate homes, so there is a change in our normal audio quality. Thank you for understanding.
Now, here’s my conversation with Roger.
Trailer Clip (Prisoner) The reason I'm writing is to ask can you help me? I am serving a 40 to 60 year sentence. As God is my witness, I am not guilty.
Trailer Clip (Innocence Project) We get flooded with letters small over the country. They're human beings who are claiming to be wrongly convicted. We realized that there were so many things wrong with this system, so we started the Innocence Project.
Rebecca Roger Ross Williams. I'm so excited to talk to you about your episodes of The Innocence Files. Thanks so much for talking with me.
Roger Yeah, it's great to be here.
Rebecca Now you cover two really three cases, but kind of two distinct stories in your three episodes of the Innocence Files. What attracted you to these specific cases?
Roger You know, I'm African-American and I come from a community that has been pretty much ravaged by the mass incarceration crisis in America. I have friends and family members who have been in and out of prison and who are some who are even currently behind bars. And so for me, it's really personal. I came from Philadelphia, but my family originally comes from the south, from Charleston, South Carolina, and I'm really fascinated by that sort of culture in Mississippi. This story took place in a town that is predominantly African-American, that is poor. And, you know, when I first arrived there, first thing I did, I went to this barbecue of one of the exonerated, Kennedy Brewer. His family were playing cards and they were doing line dances. And it was barbecue. And, and we were sitting outside their trailer. And I went up to the, some of them who were playing cards. And I started talking to them and they said, you know, white people make the laws stay out of trouble and steer clear of them.
Clip You know, it's not fair coz white folks make the rules. And that's true. I ain't gonna lie about it.
Roger And I kind of devastated me because they had given up as a community. They really and, they were really living in sort of fear and desperation.
Rebecca Well, you know, not just the laws, but also the junk science that helps convict. You know, you really look, I take a deep look at bite mark evidence. And one of the most notorious perpetrators in the American criminal justice system of junk bite mark evidence, Dr. West. You also got him on camera. What were your impressions of him, being able interview him and how did you get him to do it?
Roger Well, Dr. West is a notorious figure. He's done a lot of television talk shows. He created a lot of media and videos about himself. He, you know, he loves the spotlight. He loves the attention. And he was discredited. He lost his license to practice. And he wanted to tell his side of the story. So, you know, the way we presented to him was that, you know here's a chance for you to have a chance to tell your side of the story. And he really detests he hates the Innocence Project. Yes. I said, you know, you know, they're gonna tell their side. And wouldn't you like to, you know, tell your side? So he totally went along with that. He also, you know, the first time we went to see him, he put his gun on the table in his office surrounded by Confederate flags. And he compared himself to a Confederate statue.
Clip (Dr.West) Erasing history is ignorant. It benefits no one. They wanted to erase me from history.
Roger And I thought that was a just, a sort of a great telling thing.
Rebecca Yes, very, very shortly after insisting that race had no part in any of his work or thinking. You have him sitting in front of that Confederate flag and using a motto of the Confederacy to talk about his sort of philosophy of crime-solving. It was really something. And I just have one detailed question about him. I have to know. Was he drinking scotch during one of those interviews? Cause it looked like he was. And it was just as a viewer calls like this in a curious tableau we're looking at right now.
Roger Absolutely. He was drinking. Not only was he, he was drinking and smoking like mad. Like he would go out and on the porch. He'd be like, let's take a break. And he'd be he would have another cigarette. And he, you know, the scene in the bar where he's sitting on the bar stool is a toilet. All the bar stools are toilets. And the bar had Confederate flags all around. Then it was like he goes, “this is, this is where I feel comfortable. This is where I hang out. This is where my people are”. And he was like, you know, drinking away, drinking beers. So he's a, he's, he's quite the character.
Rebecca Well, it's really unbelievable to imagine the influence he had over, you know, inexorably altering the lives of innocent people who were, you know, put in prison. I mean, it's really extraordinary. The tampering, the ineptitude, the certainty.
Roger Yeah. And the thing about Dr. West is he knows how to razzle dazzle a jury. He's such a character and he puts on a great show. And so you have to like, kind of think that the jury is sort of... they're used to watching shows like CSI that have sort of, you know, that make sort of junk science and fake science. You know, like it's like it's something that's actually real. People want to see that sitting in court. So that sort of razzle dazzle of like a Dr. West works really well. And prosecutors and public defenders call it the CSI effect. So he was really, really good at that. And, you know, even though he was discredited, bite marks are still admissible in 49 states.
Roger So states are still accepting this sort of debunked, discredited junk science of bite mark evidence. They're still accepting that. And I think that's because if they said, you know, this is junk science, then all the people that have been convicted of bite mark evidence, they would have to revisit those cases. They would have a duty to correct. That would open up a massive can of worms and be very expensive to the states. So they just, they continue. And that's the problem with the criminal justice system. It's outdated. And it just keeps getting worse or stays the same.
Rebecca Well, they're incentivized for it to stay the same because it's adversarial. And because winning and closure is the metric that counts in the criminal and justice system, not truth, not, you know, getting to the real bottom, which takes time, which takes care. And sometimes there isn't an answer that's easily found. And that's a huge part of the problem. I want to talk a little bit about the Courtney Smith case. This is the three year old who goes missing after spending the night in the same room as her sisters. And by the way, the interviews with her sister Ashley are just so astonishing. Can you just talk about what it was like revisiting that crime with that family so intimately?
Roger Well, Ashley didn't, really did not want to talk to us. And that took a really long time. You have to realize that this is pretty traumatic for Ashley. You know, she was five years old. She didn't know what she was saying. And she put away her mother's boyfriend, who was nothing, but, you know, sort of nice to her. And, and the guilt she carried with her her whole life is overwhelming that this guy spent 18 years in jail because of, you know, and she testified against him.
So they live in this sort of trailer. And Ashley came out of the bedroom and it's a small trailer. And I'm interviewing her mother in the trailer. Obviously, she could hear every word, even though she's in the next room. And she came out and I asked her if she wanted to do an interview and she said absolutely not. And, you know, and I didn't obviously want to, want to push it. And she saw working at Wal-Mart at the time and she was on her way to her shift.
But I think it was hearing her mother and the emotion and the pain that her mother sort of went through and the guilt her mother had that she feels like she played a role also in convicting her own boyfriend. There was one point where she was arrested, too, and her and Lavon were in cells next to each.
Rebecca Really?
Roger Like that was.
Rebecca Why was Ashley’s mother arrested as well?
Roger Neglect. She was, she was also a suspect. She wasn't there. You know, the night she was, she was that when he was murdered, they were talking to each other through a hole in the wall in cells that were right next to each other. I mean, this is how crazy it was. Imagine you are so distraught. Your daughter, your 3 year old daughter was just murdered and you get arrested.
Rebecca Yeah. The thing that I had to rewind to make sure that I was seeing what was actually seeing is the fact that they had a local television host named Uncle Bunky conducting witness interviews with children and influencing answers as he drew cartoons. That almost seems I mean, it's just something that I can't even wrap my head around, that anybody would think this was a procedure that would and should be used.
Roger Yeah, well, you know, welcome the Mississippi and Uncle Bunky, besides his television show on the side, this is what he did, he worked for the police interviewing kids and crimes. And I mean, he's such a crazy character. Like when we heard about Uncle Bunky, like we couldn't believe it, of course. And then we had to like kind of dig up the old Uncle Bunky video. Lauren, our AP, she would literally be in the basements of these television stations and looking, going through tapes and and and finding to find footage at the time, you know, they didn't really, you know, archive stuff very well. So Uncle Bunky sort of leading her, just this, this 5 year old girl was crazy. It's just it's just, um, it's it's it's unimaginable. Which is why I think that she's so traumatized from the whole experience.
Rebecca Yeah, I don't blame her. And it's so funny because you can hear how the details were, like, sort of moved along. I mean, she said, what? You know, he pulled a quarter out of his ear. It didn't sound like the person was wearing an earring and I mistook it for a quarter.
Clip (Ashley) And Uncle Bunky says, you tell me he had something in his ear. Do you remember what he looked like? I said he had a quarter in his hand. But he says like the earrings there?. And I said, yeah. An earring and a quarter.
Clip (Uncle Bunky) And a quarter. Really?
Roger No, she said he had a quarter in his ear, which is a, which is something that people did. You actually put a quarter in your ear. It was more of like a superstitious thing. And it's probably something she saw someone doing. Growing up in this in the south...My mother was very much like this. She grew up in Charleston which carried all these sort of strange little like sort of customs and rituals and superstitions, but that, you know, you put a quarter in your ear. It'll bring you money. And a lot of it was around like it'll bring you wealth, it'll bring you power, because this community like this, they felt so powerless. And so that was something that was sort of a local sort of, you know, like kind of superstition that people did. And she saw that. And she just. She mentioned that.
Rebecca I mean, there are so many interesting moments in your episodes that just show us what happened. Introduce us to characters that speak to the racial inequality in Mississippi. One of the most fascinating characters to me in the first two episodes is Officer Ernest Eichelberger. He talks about having to sue to get his job as a police officer. But then he's investigating this case and he's very much part of the system that committed an injustice. Can you just talk about him, what he's like and what it was like sort of tracking his part of the story?
Roger Yeah. Eichelberger was a, you know, he's... it’s complicated for him because he came from that community. He, you know, obviously, he knew both Brooks and Brewer. You kind of have to sort of, you know, put yourself in that world of like, you know, complete racial divide. He, you know, yes, he had to sue because they said he was too short. He had to sue to get the job. And he was being pressured by the D.A. and by his bosses. You know, he wanted to deliver something. So he had that sort of pressure that, you know, we've got to go into your community. You've got to bring us someone, anyone..
Roger You know, one of the one of the clearest sort of examples, especially and then the Levon Brooks case of what we're dealing with here, is that the foreman of the jury? Yeah.
Rebecca Yeah, Bos Stevens Yeah.
Roger Bos Stevens' family owned Levon Brooks's family and that Levon Brook’s father was a sharecropper on that point on the plantation of Bos Stevens and that they played together as children. And that sort of sums it all up. I mean, you have this this community where the legacy of slavery hangs heavy in the air. It is everywhere. You feel that pain. And it's still, it's not that different. The black people live in shacks and trailers. And the families that owned these plantations still own these farms and plantations. And the black people live in fear. And it sort of says it all.
Rebecca I have so many questions about Bos Stevens. One is, how the hell do you get on a jury when you know the defendant? I mean, I've served on a jury before. That is the first disqualifying question you get asked in voir dire is do you know the defendant or any of the witnesses? If the answer is yes, you are struck and not allowed to serve on that jury. How does that happen?
Roger Forrest Allgood. Forrest Allgood, who is the district attorney, whose grandfather's great-grandfather’s confederates statues stand in front of the courthouse. Who reads from the Bible in his opening and closing statements. Who was on, almost a mission for both these cases. But in the Levon Brooks, he just, he would not give up. You know, he's emblematic of a lot of sort of district attorneys in the south who have come from, you know, a part of this sort of culture and legacy of racial injustice. And he pushed for Bos Stevens to be on the jury and actually foreman. And the thing is that it's such a small community and the blacks are so powerless. No one even bothered to care or say anything like Levon, Levon Brooks didn't know any better. He didn't know what to do. He was shocked.
Rebecca He thought it would help him. He’s like, “This guy knows me.”
Roger Yeah. Now, you're also you have to realize, Levon was, he couldn't believe it. He was in shock. He's like, I didn't do anything. There's no way they can convict me. I'm gonna get off. And even after he was convicted, when he ended up sitting in that jail cell, that's really when it sort of kicked in for him. And he gave up. He accepted, he said this, this is the fate of black men. And this is the, you know, this happened to so many in his community. And everyone sort of believes that at some point, you know, since one in every three black men go to jail at some point in their life, that they were going to end up put behind bars at some point. And he gave up. He really, really gave up.
Rebecca Well, just months after his conviction, another very similar crime is committed. Christine Jackson, three years old, goes missing again. It's like deja vu, the same play playing out. And nobody really seems to even ask the question, do we have the wrong guy for the first one when this second one happens and it's the same. And they basically, once again, railroad another man for this crime.
Roger Yeah. Kennedy Brewer was also, you know, the boyfriend of the mother. And so, again, it was sort of easy to grab him. And in a way, it's like this is sort of lazy, anyone's, any black person is interchangeable. Just grab him and we'll, you know, we'll bring in Dr. West and we'll get him convicted. And the fact that Forrest Allgood refused to even consider that maybe they had the wrong person was just not an option.
Rebecca Even when DNA evidence ruled him out? I mean, that was another “didI just really see that?” moment. First of all, did you want to talk to Forrest Allgood? Did you try?
Roger Yes, we tried a bit. Yeah. Turned us down. We tried very hard. We almost had him a couple times. And he just, he just wouldn't do it. You know, he was voted out of office. you have to realize that these DAs are elected. So that's an important point. He had, he wants to get reelected so he can be wrong. So people need to realize that, you know, voting on the local level is so important because you get DAs like Forrest Allgood.
Rebecca Yeah. One of the most, like another stunning scene is you sort of really take some time, which I'm really glad you did, because this is something that's come up in other stories involving Parchman Prison, and just the time you spend showing the viewer like this is a plantation. This is this is what it is.
Roger Until very recently, the prisoners at Parchman Prison used to pick cotton.
Rebecca Yeah.
Roger And you are literally going to a plantation and you're picking cotton. I mean, how can anything be more clear than that? This is so obvious. The role that racism in the legacy of slavery has played in these communities, this country. You know, it's not just the South. It's shocking. It's shocking.
Rebecca Right. And the interesting thing, too, about this case is that in addition to the exoneration component of it, they also were able to identify another suspect, Justin Albert Johnson. DNA matched him in both cases. Christine Jackson and Courtney Smith. And he ends up confessing. And part of his confession, of course, is that he did not bite them. And further proving that this bite mark stuff is B.S. I'm curious what happened to Justin Albert Johnson.
Roger Justin Albert Johnson had previously been arrested for sexual assault and he was already in jail for another crime when they did that interview. And he confessed to both murders. I'm not sure if they added additional time to his sentence. I'm not sure how they handled that confession. But he confessed. So there was no trial to be had because he admitted that he had committed both those murders.
Rebecca So we have that guy, Michael Freeman, who used to leave that organization of all the forensic ontologies (The American Bureau of Forensic Odontology), and they decided to do the study to prove that their evidence was good evidence.
Clip (Michael Freeman) I thought going into this research project that we were gonna prove this first step. Then the results started to come in some of the cases or a third of the people say that is absolutely a bite mark. A third of the people say that's absolutely not a bite mark. And a third of the people say, well, that's suggestive of. We are the ABFO. We are the subject matter experts on this. We don't even agree what a bite mark is.
Rebecca It's astonishing because their aim was to prove that their science was good. And this guy used to be the leader of it, Freeman has to acknowledge now that it's bad. And he used to be his job.
Roger And he flips and and he goes to the other side and he actually now fights against bite mark evidence.
Rebecca Yeah. And if that's a great moment, because, you know, you have all these intractable people who, you know, don't believe anything, even when it's facts in their face. And you've this guy who's like yep, I'm just gonna throw out my whole life's work because I was wrong. It's so refreshing.
Yeah, I do. want to talk about the third case in Episode 3, the Keith Harward case, very different kind of case. Keith is quite a character. I mean, the sort of seeing everybody in all these documentaries, all these exonerated men, carries so much weight. And you know, his sort of choices to become an advocate and testify at the Virginia capital and travel around the country and do this testimony to try to change the laws is fascinating. But also even the way I found, just as a viewer, the way he's sort of chooses to live in his post-prison life, you know, he got a settlement and he's like, you know, it's very simple: “I want tractor and a camper and, you know, the ability to just sort of be mobile. I want to grow a beard.” I mean, it really does point to how freedom is...We take it for granted when we are not a person on the margins who can be exploited by police. And these processes like this sort of beautiful simplicity of how he's chosen to live his life really struck me.
Roger Yeah, he's an amazing man. He just came out after 33 years and from the minute he got out, on a mission to change things so that this didn't happen to others. And he you know, he got, I think he got like 1.3 million dollar settlement and he bought that bus and he drives around the country going to trials, bitemark trials and just advocating.
And he's very different than Kennedy. Kennedy Brewer, when he got out, he could not (you see a little bit of this in the film), he just couldn't, couldn't sort of get a grip. He couldn't get a job. He only, him and Levon, only got five hundred thousand dollars spread out over ten years. That's not a lot of money and that, and after that money ran out with Kennedy Brewer, it just ran out. He has nothing now. He has no job. He has, he can't he does not have Social Security. She wasn't he wasn't he didn't work long enough to have Social Security. And he is, you know, depressed. And so very different situation. Keith, you know, got more than twice as much. And he came out with this sort of, you know, attitude that I'm gonna my life was taken from me and I'm gonna make sure that doesn't happen to someone else. That's pretty admirable.
Rebecca Well, it’s clear and it would be dumb not to talk about it. The difference, I mean, Keith, is white. And, you know, Kennedy is still a black man living in the Deep South where I mean, this could happen to him again. I think he probably walks around wondering if it will. It's impossible to not see that. When you look at these cases side by side, I mean, the injustice was the same, but it sort of continues for Kennedy in a way. It also has to do with the laws in the states and the compensation. Every state….You know, listeners may not know this. Every state has a different law regarding compensation. Some states have no compensation. It's actually a statute that there's no compensation. Where I live in New Hampshire, the compensation is capped at $20000. There are very few convictions here overturned. So it's never really been tested, but it's capped there. If this were to happen where I live and somebody were in prison for 20 years and exonerated, they would get $20000 maximum.
And it kind of makes me want to ask you this question, because there's so many threads in your episodes that speak to systemic changes that could be made, whether it's the election of prosecutors or making prosecutors not electable or compensation laws or evidentiary statutes. Is that what you want people to take away from this, that they should work to change the way the system works in their own communities?
Roger Absolutely, 100 percent. You know, I think if you learn anything is that it's all local. It's all about those district attorneys and your elected officials. And, you know, it's, this is a system that is so broken that it's going to take such a massive effort to overhaul it. And that's going to involve millions of Americans waking up and going to the voting booth and being outraged by this.
I don't think anyone on the planet can not watch this series and see that moment where Keith Harwood, where Kenny Brewer, where Levon Brooks is exonerated and not cry with, you know, the pain of what they've gone through. And... but it is an emotional, emotional moment. It is a huge injustice. And so that should inspire people to try to change the system.
Rebecca Well, Roger Ross Williams, the stories you tell in the Innocence Files, they are illuminating. They're beautiful. They're heartbreaking. Thank you so much for telling those stories and talking to me about them.
Roger Thank you. It's great to talk to you, Rebecca.
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Rebecca And that’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you to Roger Ross Williams. Next week, we have director Liz Garbus on to talk about her block of episodes, and the misuse of eyewitness testimony. You can hear more of my thoughts on The Innocence Files, on my other podcast Crime Writers On...
You can find this show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. You Can’t Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Netflix. I'm Rebecca Lavoie, and thanks for listening.