In 1994, a Black man named Eddie Lee Howard was wrongfully convicted for the murder of an elderly white woman in Columbus, Mississippi and sentenced to death, based almost entirely on now discredited bite mark evidence.
Last week, after spending 26 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit, Eddie Lee Howard was finally exonerated with the help of the Innocence Project and Mississippi Innocence Project.
Eddie Lee Howard following his release from prison in December 2020 (Image: Courtesy of the Mississippi Innocence Project).
“I want to say many thanks to the many people who are responsible for helping to make my dream of freedom a reality,” Eddie said. “I thank you with all my heart, because without your hard work on my behalf, I would still be confined in that terrible place called the Mississippi Department of Corrections, on death row, waiting to be executed.”
Today, bite mark evidence is widely viewed as a pseudoscience, obliterating the evidence which was the basis of his conviction. Powerful alibi witnesses and DNA testing of crime scene evidence also pointed to his innocence, and Eddie was finally able to walk free.
Eddie’s case is a stark example of how racial bias and the use of invalid forensic methods like bite mark comparison can lead to wrongful conviction.
The Lowndes County police lacked any credible suspects and arrested Eddie without any documented, reasonable suspicion, despite the fact that he had several alibi witnesses.
Unfortunately, cases like this aren’t that uncommon. Eddie is the 28th person convicted based on bite mark evidence to be exonerated in the United States. Of the 375 people exonerated based on DNA evidence since 1989, 225 are Black.
Black defendants are more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder when the victim or victims are white, according to National Registry of Exonerations. And the Death Penalty Information Center reports that defendants convicted of killing white people are more than four times more likely to be executed than those convicted of killing Black people.
Eddie’s case highlights the deep inequities and racial disparities in the administration of justice in our country and reminds us that there is still much work to be done to fight for innocent people like him.
The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
