On September 15, 1990, 3-year-old Courtney Smith was taken from her bed in the middle of the night. Her body was found two days later in a pond about a block near her home in Brooksville, Mississippi. She had been raped and murdered.
Police investigating the crime interviewed Courtney’s 5-year-old sister, Ashley, who said she saw 31-year-old Levon Brooks, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, take Courtney from her bed. The room was dark, but Ashley said she saw Brooks by the light of the television in the next room.
Ashley was then shown a photographic lineup, and she identified Brooks.
Brooks said he had nothing to do with Courtney’s death, but on September 17, 1990, he was arrested and charged with sexual battery and capital murder.
Brooks went to trial in January 1992 in Noxubee County Circuit Court. District Attorney Forrest Allgood called witnesses who testified that marks found on Courtney’s body were bitemarks that connected Brooks to the murder.
The pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Steven Hayne, testified that marks found on Courtney’s wrist were human bites. A dentist, Dr. Michael West, testified that the bitemarks matched Brooks’s teeth.
The defense called Dr. Harry Mincer as an expert in forensic odontology. Dr. Mincer testified that he used the same procedures used by West and that he could not say with certainty that Brooks left the bitemarks. However, he said he could not exclude Brooks as the biter.
On January 21, 1992, Brooks was convicted of capital murder and sexual battery. He was sentenced to life in prison. In October 1999, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the convictions and sentence.
In 2007, new evidence in a similar case—the 1992 rape and murder of 3-year-old Christine Jackson in Brooksville—shed light on Courtney’s murder. Kennedy Brewer had been convicted of Christine Jackson’s murder in 1995, also based on bitemark testimony from Hayne and West. The Mississippi Innocence Project, which was representing Brewer, took on Brooks’s case as well.
In 2007, the Innocence Project’s investigations led them to Justin Albert Johnson, a 51-year-old man with a history of sexual assaults against girls and women, who had been living near both Courtney Smith and Christine Jackson when they were abducted and murdered. DNA testing conducted by the Innocence Project linked Johnson to Christine Jackson’s murder and exonerated Brewer. After Johnson was arrested he confessed to both murders. DNA testing could not be performed in Brooks’s case because the evidence was too degraded to be tested.
On February 15, 2008, the prosecution dismissed Brewer’s case (he had been granted a new trial in 2002) and Brooks’s convictions were vacated. Brooks was released on a bond secured by his signature.
The prosecution dismissed Brooks’s charges on March 13, 2008.
By that time, Hayne and West had become highly controversial for their shoddy work and inappropriately close relationships with state prosecutors, and they were suspected of providing false medical testimony in numerous cases.
The National Association of Medical Examiners said doctors should perform no more than 250 autopsies per year. Hayne had admitted to performing between 1,200 and 1,800 autopsies annually. West became particularly infamous for repeatedly providing false bitemark testimony. By 1995, when West testified against Brewer, he 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.
In 2009, Brewer and Brooks jointly filed a civil-rights lawsuit against West and Hayne for $18 million. That same year, Governor Haley Barbour signed compensation legislation. Under the law, the state agreed to pay Brooks $500,000 in compensation.
In 2011, West testified during a deposition in the case of Leigh Stubbs and Tammy Vance that he no longer believed his own testimony regarding bitemark evidence and that the existing science did not support bitemark identification. “When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bitemarks. I no longer believe in that. And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.” Vance and Stubbs were exonerated in 2013.
The lawsuit filed by Brooks and Brewer was dismissed in 2014 after a judge ruled that West and Haynes were immune from damages. The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in 2017.
Brooks died in January 2018 after battling colon cancer for five years.
Three other Mississippi men who were convicted in part based on testimony from Hayne also were exonerated: Tyler Edmonds, Eddie Lee Howard Jr., and LeeVester Brown. West also gave misleading bitemark testimony against Howard.
On August 24, 2021, Sherwood Brown, who had been sentenced to death for a murder in DeSoto County, Mississippi, was exonerated after spending 26 years on death row. He had been convicted based in part on West’s testimony that his teeth left bitemarks on the victim.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 03-30-2026
