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John,
One of my first clients when I started at the Innocence Project was a man named Keith Harward. He was a 26-year-old sailor stationed in Newport News, Virginia, when he was accused and wrongfully convicted of raping a woman and murdering her husband.
Mr. Harward was convicted primarily on the testimony of two forensic dentists who said that his teeth matched marks left on the rape victim, and even though bite mark evidence has never been scientifically validated, he was sentenced to life in prison. But in 2016, new DNA evidence definitively proved Mr. Harward’s innocence and pointed to Jerry Crotty as the real assailant — and after more than 33 years, Mr. Harward was finally exonerated and freed.
Keith Harward. (Photo: Alicia Maule)
Unfortunately, Mr. Harward’s story is not an anomaly. He was at least the 32nd person to have been wrongly convicted or indicted based on discredited bite mark evidence that we know of. And in my years at the Innocence Project, we’ve worked with so many clients who are behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit, all based on junk science like bite mark evidence. Every day my team is fighting for victims of junk science in prison, including our client Jimmie “Chris” Duncan who is currently on death row in Louisiana.
In fact, misapplied forensic science has contributed to more than half of our wrongful conviction cases and nearly a quarter of all wrongful conviction cases since 1989.
That’s why a huge part of our mission is to educate judges, attorneys, forensic experts, and other system actors on the limitations of certain forensic methods, and urge them to examine scientific evidence for accuracy and reliability — and with your support, we can go even further with our efforts in 2024.
Our big end-of-year fundraising deadline is coming up. Will you make a donation right now so that we can reach even more people in our advocacy work around the dangers of junk science and continue to fight for the freedom of those wrongly incarcerated?
Thank you so much for your support,
Chris Fabricant
Director of Strategic Litigation
Innocence Project
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