Even now, as a free man, Keith Harward finds it difficult to explain what it was like to sit in a courtroom, on trial for a rape and murder he knew he didn’t commit, watching him someone considered an expert testifies with certainty to that bite. The marks on the victim’s leg matched his teeth.
“I still wonder to this day what the hell happened,” he told NBC News from his home in North Carolina. “Sometimes I break down and cry because I can’t explain it to you or anyone else except people who have been in my situation.”
There is no evidence linking Harward to the gruesome 1982 crime, but he happened to be among a group of sailors from a Navy ship in dry dock in Newport News, Virginia, who had to take teeth marks since the attacker was wearing a Navy uniform . . Two forensic dentists told two separate juries that Harward’s teeth matched “to scientific certainty” a bite mark on the rape victim’s skin. Harward spent 33 years in prison until, with the help of the Innocence Project, he was exonerated in 2016 by DNA evidence that pointed to another sailor as the killer.
The Innocence Project says Harward is one of at least 36 people exonerated after being wrongly convicted based on now-debunked bite mark comparisons. One of them, Eddie Lee Howard, was on death row in Mississippi when he was released in 2021 after DNA from the crime scene was linked to someone else.
Four separate government scientific bodies have concluded that bite wound analysis has no scientific basis. That includes the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which said in 2016 that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that researchers not only cannot identify the source of the bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree whether an injury is a human bite mark.” .” The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the gold standard of measurement science, said in 2022 that the forensic examination of bite marks “lacks a sufficient scientific basis” because “human tooth patterns have not been shown to be unique at the individual level.”
A 2016 study found that self-described experts could not distinguish between human and animal bite marks. Others have documented how spots in human skin change over time through healing or decomposition.
“People who were certified didn’t agree on what a bite mark was,” says Adam Freeman, a forensic dentist who once “drank the Kool-Aid” of bite mark analysis but has since become one of the profession’s fiercest critics has become. “If a science is not science, is not reproducible and is not reliable, courts should not allow it, period.”
Yet bite mark analysis has been used in thousands of cases. And although it is increasingly being successfully challenged by lawyers, no court has declared it inadmissible.
“There are still a lot of people — and we don’t even know how many — still in jail because of bite mark testimonies,” Freeman said. “It’s truly horrifying that this is still being used in courts where these are issues of life and liberty.”
Chris Fabricant, an attorney with the Innocence Project and author of “Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System,” said his team has consistently blocked the introduction of bite mark evidence in courts across the country, even as it continues to seek the acquittal of suspects in custody. based on the discredited discipline. But he said none of the forensic dentists who testified using what are now discredited methods have been held accountable.
“My sense of outrage is what gets me out of bed every day,” he said.
Freeman said, “I can tell you that literally thousands of people have spent years in prison,” based on flawed testimony.
There are no data showing how often bite marks have been used in prosecutions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that numbers have plummeted, but prosecutors still sometimes try to introduce bite marks during the trial.
Professional associations of forensic odontologists responded to the NIST report by saying that while they agree with “many details” in the report and “know the issues surrounding bite marks and acknowledge past concerns,” NIST’s rejection of evidence of bite marks are too wide.
“Critics continue to overlook the progress forensic dentistry has made to address these concerns. It is crucial to reiterate that the cases in which dentists incorrectly identified the perpetrators of biting occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Today’s dentists do not adhere to the standards that applied at the time, yet we are still judged by them.”
‘It’s a nasty place’
Charles McCrory spends his 38th year behind bars, convicted of murdering his wife. The bite mark expert in his case recanted his testimony, saying he now knows he cannot say whether a bite mark on the victim matched McCrory’s teeth. Yet Alabama courts have refused to release McCrory.
Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals ruled earlier this year that the jury was able to decide for itself whether the bite marks matched, a finding that ignores the science that suggests such perceived visual similarities cannot be valid. The court also cited other evidence in the case, including a witness who said he saw McCrory’s truck at the house during the murder. There is no physical or forensic evidence linking him to the crime.
Three years ago, after the evidence in his case collapsed, McCrory was offered a deal: plead guilty and walk free. He refused.
“I refused to take it because I didn’t kill her,” McCrory told NBC News from prison. “I didn’t kill my wife.”
The Innocence Project is now appealing to the federal courts.
“Prison is hard — many of the stories you see on the news about prisons, especially those in Alabama, are true,” McCrory said. “It’s a bad place, and it’s not a place I would wish on anyone.”
“I’m not giving up hope,” he said. “And there are certainly days of disappointment and days where you’re down… but I just believe that there’s a truth in there that’s going to come out, and that you can’t give up. That’s just not an option.”
Released in 2016, Harward is living proof that a second act is possible after decades of being wrongfully incarcerated. The 67-year-old, who has been awarded $1 million in compensation by Virginia, lives quietly in rural North Carolina, taking occasional RV trips with his girlfriend and doing puzzles on smartphones and social media.
But he also continues to speak out about evidence of bite marks that caused him to lose half his life and prevented him from attending his parents’ funerals.
“It’s trash. It is nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
A few years ago he traveled to a conference of forensic dentists in New Orleans to confront them about bite marks. Many were sympathetic, he said, but there is an old guard clinging to the past.
“How many times do you have to be told you’re wrong before you give up?” he said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com