With Spring MVC 4.2.1.RELEASE, you need to use the new Jackson2 dependencies as below for the Deserializer to work.
Dont use this
<dependency>
<groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-mapper-asl</artifactId>
<version>1.9.12</version>
</dependency>
Use this instead.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-annotations</artifactId>
<version>2.2.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
<version>2.2.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
<version>2.2.2</version>
</dependency>
Also use com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonDeserializer
and com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.annotation.JsonDeserialize
for the deserialization and not the classes from org.codehaus.jackson