Policy

More From Mississippi

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The Clarion-Ledger reports today that Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood has now officially dropped all charges against Levon Brooks, who spent more than a decade in prison for a crime another man now admits he committed. That now makes three people Allgood has convicted of murder who were later exonerated or acquitted. And he kept one of them—Kennedy Brewer—in prison an extra five years after DNA testing cleared him, because Allgood refused to let go of testimony from disgraced bite-mark "expert" Dr. Michael West.

There's not much other news in the article, save for this:

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

Mississippi's legislators will probably want to set up some sort of structured compensation system fairly quickly. I have a feeling federal jurors aren't going to be kind to the state as these exonerations pile up, and it comes out just how ready and willing the state's prosecutors have been to put bad expert testimony into evidence.