'The Innocence Files': How Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer spent years in jail after conviction based on junk science

Three-year-old Courtney Smith was abducted from her house in Noxubee County, Mississippi late night on September 15, 1990. After two days of frantic search, her body was found in a pond nearly 80 yards away from her house. A pathologist, after conducting an autopsy on her body, determined that the child was sodomized, raped and murdered before being thrown into the pond. It was also concluded that she had multiple "bite marks" on her body.

Courtney was sleeping next to her five-year-old sister Ashley Smith the night of the incident; later the sister said she had seen a man walk up to Courtney's bed at night and take her away. Robert Williams, a cartoonist famous among children as "Uncle Bunky" because of his television show, was enrolled to interrogate Ashley about who the abductor could be.

The five-year-old told Uncle Bunky that the man had a quarter in his ear and his name was "Chevon." With that bit of information, officials concluded that the suspect wore an earring on his left ear and began searching for any of the Smith family's acquaintances who might match the description. Levon Brooks, the children's mother Sonja Smith's former boyfriend, was included among the suspect. He had been to their house before. 

After the five-year-old singled him out from a lineup, Brooks was apprehended. A popular forensic odontologist, Dr. Michael West, was hired to take a bite cast of Brooks to match the bite mark on Courtney's body. After the analysis, West ruled that the marks were "indeed and without a doubt" inflicted by Brooks' teeth. With the bite mark being the only piece of concrete evidence, the jury was convinced that Brooks was the murderer and handed him a life sentence in 1992.

Nearly four months after Brooks' incarceration at Parchman Penitentiary, Mississippi, another three-year-old, Christina Jackson, went missing from the same neighborhood. The girl was found days later in a nearby river - raped, and murdered, with multiple lacerations on her.

This could not have been Brooks who was behind bars. Officials assumed it was a copycat case and began hunting for the suspect. However, this time they did not have to look far. The house was completely shut the night of the incident in May 1992, barring a broken window. With the child's mother's boyfriend, Kennedy Brewer, the only person inside the house apart from Christina's mother, officials apprehended Brewer. 

The same routine was followed in Christina's murder case, and Dr. West being called in to examine the "bite marks". The expert, again, ruled that Brewer's teeth matched the bite marks on the victim's body "indeed and without a doubt."

Brewer's defense team, convinced of his innocence, decided to call another odontology expert, the famous Dr. Richard Souviron, who had worked on serial killer Ted Bundy's case. After viewing the marks on Christina's body, the famous doctor stated in court that the lacerations on the victim's body were not bite marks at all. The jury, however, remained uninfluenced by the doctor and Brewer was sentenced to death for raping and murdering the three-year-old.

Years after his incarceration and with little to no hope of his release, Brewer decided to write to The Innocence Project about his case. That is when Brewer and Brooks' lives changed.

Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck of the nonprofit legal organization decided to pursue Brewer's case because they found the bite mark evidence absurd. They approached the Mississippi authorities and asked to run a DNA check on the semen sample collected in Christina Jackson's murder case. DNA tests were not conducted in the 1990s. The results came back negative for Brewer. Someone else was behind the murder. 

The District Attorney at the time, Forrest Allgood, however, refused to release Brewer, and claimed the DNA test only revealed that someone else was also involved in the crime. This led the Innocence Project attorneys to probe further and look for similar cases in the region to find more evidence.

That is when they became aware of Levon Brooks.

By this time, Brooks had been incarcerated for 16 years. The attorneys were astonished to find the eery similarities between the two cases: both the victims were 3-year-olds, both were abducted at night, both were sexually assaulted and thrown in a water body. They could not believe that officials had not pursued this case further. After checking the Brooks case, they came across the audiotape of Ashley's interview by Uncle Bucky. 

They found out that the little girl had said outlandish things in the interview, and her responses were prompted by Uncle Bucky. She had reportedly said that the man had a quarter in his ear and drew one quarter from her sister's ear. He was wearing a Halloween mask and left the house on an airplane. The jury, at the time, was not handed the tape. 

The attorneys eventually sent all the samples of the suspects in Christina Jackson's case to the foresnsics and one came back with a match — Justin Albert Johnson. Officials, in 1992, had taken in Johnson, an acquaintance of the family with a history of child sexual assault, as a suspect, but had eventually released him.

Johnson was apprehended and he confessed to his crime, saying that he took Christina from the broken window of the house. The attorneys also found that Johnson was a common link between the Brewer and Brooks cases, and also knew Courtney Smith's family and had been in their house before. He eventually confessed to Courtney's murder too. 

Johnson, however, revealed that he had not bitten any of his victims and was surprised to know that both of them had bite marks on them. He reportedly believed that someone must have taken them out of the water body to bite them, which was absurd. After analysis, it was found out that the bite marks were lacerations made by a crawfish attack. The only piece of evidence which led to Brooks and Brewer's sentencing was no evidence at all. Brewer and Brooks were both freed on February 15, 2008. 

Netflix's new docu-series, 'The Innocence Files'. discusses the two landmark cases by the now-famous Innocence Project, and how Brook and Brewer's cases led them to crack down on convictions based on faulty forensic science.

The series releases on April 15 on Netflix.