Monday, March 27, 2017

Keith Harward: Prof. Brandon L. Garrett (University of Virginia law school) explains in 'The Baffler' how forensic dentistry nearly cost Keith Harward his life...."Throughout the case’s long trek through the appeals system, the bite-mark testimony retained a tenacious hold on jurists. On appeal, the Virginia court said: “Both forensic dentists testified that all gross characteristics of spacing, width, and alignment of Harward’s teeth ‘fit on the money’ the photographs of bite marks.” Harward was released last year, aged sixty, after spending thirty-three years in prison. DNA testing cleared his name and definitively matched another person, Jerry L. Crotty, who died in prison in Ohio over a decade ago, while serving time for burglary and kidnapping. What went wrong? The dentists provided a story that fit what the prosecutors wanted—a conviction. “It’s just heartbreaking to think that more than half of his life was spent behind bars when he didn’t belong there,” state attorney general Mark Herring said after Harward’s release. “The Commonwealth can’t give him back those years, but we can say that we got it wrong, that we’re sorry and that we’re working to make it right.” But what, exactly, has been done to make it right? The attorney general and the courts all promptly released Harward. The State of Virginia will probably offer him compensation. But so far, Virginia law enforcement and prosecutors have not banned the use of unreliable forensics like bite-mark testimony, as the Texas Forensic Science Commission has done."... Issue 34. (2017):


STORY "Inside the great forensic-science boondoggle," by Brandon L.  Garrett, published in Issue 34 of The Baffler. (2017); (Thanks to Mike Bowers at CSIDDS (Forensic In Focus) for bringing this important commentary to our attention.)

GIST: "As the broad echoes of the same basic story of expert hubris and misguided evidence-handling play out in the transcripts, over and over again, I re-experience some of the initial shock of my first in-depth review of a forensics-driven miscarriage of justice: the death-penalty case of Keith Harward, convicted on rape and murder charges in 1982, chiefly on testimony from two dentists about bite marks left on a victim’s legs. It is no exaggeration to say that forensic dentistry nearly cost Keith Harward his life. Starting in the 1970s, dentists versed in the basics of dental identification started to develop a lucrative sideline: offering expert forensic testimony in criminal cases. Criminal scientists had long had the ability to pursue basic mouth-related inquiries, such as matching pristine molds of teeth to identify remains. But these new experts, known as “forensic odontologists,” claimed to be able to match a suspect’s teeth to human bite marks, in the macabre kinds of assault and murder cases where such evidence looms large. The two dentists who testified in Harward’s case, Lowell Levine and Alvin Kagey, couldn’t have been more confident in their conclusions. They said Harward’s teeth had to have made the marks. Levine, in particular, was nationally known as an expert in forensic bite-mark analysis and in the forensic sciences more generally. When I briefly noted in an article I wrote in 2009 that there were invalid forensic findings in the Harward case, I had no idea that Harward was still in prison and that he had claimed his innocence for decades. In fact, right around the time I came across his trial records, he had written to the Innocence Project seeking new DNA testing to prove those dentists wrong. The results of the DNA testing would upend a battery of expert forensic evidence that had seemed to pin him down as the biter. Harward was twenty-six when the crime occurred, in 1982, in Newport News, Virginia. In the early morning, a man broke into a family’s home near the Navy yards, beat the husband to death with a crowbar, and raped his wife. During the assault, he bit her thighs and calves repeatedly. After the victim was able to summon the police to the scene, they recovered sperm from her T-shirt, and they also swabbed and photographed the bite marks on her legs. She was never able to identify the person who assaulted her, but described him as a white male who was wearing a white sailor’s uniform that had a symbol on it with three nested V’s. That symbol sounded a lot like the insignia of an E-3 Naval sailor. The USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was at the Navy yards, and it had thousands of sailors on board.
A hunt for viable Navy suspects rapidly ensued, in what local media dubbed “the bite-mark case.” The police did a bite-mark dragnet of all the E-3 sailors. Harward was one of more than 1,000 E-3 sailors stationed on the Vinson. Apparently between 1,100 and 3,000 sailors on the Vinson were asked to provide dental records for comparison. In fact, one of those sailors was the actual culprit, but the bite experts didn’t detect him. Nor did they find evidence linking the crime to Harward. The bite-mark case remained unsolved for months, for sound scientific reasons. Comparing bite marks is not easy. People with a full set of teeth have thirty-two teeth, each with multiple surfaces. Each set of teeth carries a great deal of forensic information, which is why postmortem dental plates can be effective in identifying a corpse. However, a bite mark has a lot less information. We bite only with our front teeth: maybe four or eight teeth, and just the edges of those, are used to bite. What’s more, a bite mark in human skin may not preserve much information. To put things euphemistically, a biting situation may be “dynamic.” The parties in a biting encounter are typically moving around, struggling to either inflict or avoid a bite. To complicate matters further, skin is highly elastic and does not perfectly preserve information like a plaster dental mold would. Skin also reacts to injuries, by swelling and bruising. It can be hard to tell whether bite marks were made by a human at all. Decomposition, for one thing, greatly affects skin. In the Mississippi case of Kennedy Brewer, convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1995, an odontologist who testified frequently in Mississippi claimed that only Brewer could have made bite marks. In fact, the marks turned out to be insect bites on the victim’s body, which was, after all, found in a creek. In 2008, new DNA testing exonerated Brewer. Such fundamental uncertainty “may severely limit the validity of forensic odontology,” as the National Academy of Sciences concluded in its landmark 2009 report. This finding, crucially, doesn’t apply only to bite marks; all crime scene forensics can lack the information that pristine lab conditions might permit. Fingerprints may be smudged or partial. DNA may be mixed with several people’s genetic material, or degraded. But bite marks were always known to be especially difficult to compare. Months after the crime in Newport News, police came across what they believed was a pivotal break in the case. Harward was in court because a fight with his girlfriend had turned violent—she reported that he had bit her during the fight. Now the police thought they had their biter. They brought the victim in the bite-mark case to the courtroom in Harward’s domestic dispute—but she could not identify him. So they tried to get Harward to confess. He wouldn’t. “The detectives, all through the whole situation, tried their best to convince me to admit to something I didn’t do,” Harward said. The cops were so determined to link Harward to the crime that they hypnotized a security guard at the Navy base—and a full seven months after the crime, he identified Harward’s mugshot as that of the person whom he saw returning to the shipyard in the early morning after the murder. Enter forensic odontology. The two dentists, Kagey and Levine, testified that the bite mark matched Harward’s teeth. They told the jury that they were totally certain. Levine testified to a “very, very, very high degree of probability” that Harward’s teeth left the bite mark. Kagey testified that “there is just not anyone else that would have this unique dentition.” It was, Levine said, a “practical impossibility”—yes—“that someone else would have all [the] characteristics in combination.” They described all this in detail. They explained how they compared Polaroid images from the victim to Harward’s dental mold. They said Harward had unusual and distinctive characteristics on his teeth. One of his teeth “canted sideways” and there was a “hook type area” that seemed to match the bite mark. There was a “chipped area” and a “breakage” that aligned perfectly, they said. There were “no discrepancies.” Could that be true? Could no one else in the world have left those bite marks? How high a degree of probability is “very, very, very high”? Does that mean one in a million? One in a billion? One in a thousand? The dentists couldn’t have answered those questions, because no one knows. There were not, and still are not, any databases of bite marks. Tracing the configuration of bite marks is nothing like DNA testing, where demographic studies and statistical analysis can, with great precision, identify what segments of the population share certain genetic markers. Statistics can be used to express a DNA comparison result, but not a bite comparison. There are no population studies on bite marks, nor are there any statistics that can offer airtight identifications from other forensics far more commonly used today, such as fingerprints or ballistics. In an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch after Harward’s exoneration, Kagey explained, “At that time, bite-mark analysis was new, relatively, and there was a lot of publicity about it,” adding that “I never say about a bite mark [now], ‘He or she is the only person that could have done this.’” As a result of cases such as Harward’s, along with the West Memphis Three conviction, which also hinged on bite-mark testimony that has since been thoroughly discredited, the American Board of Forensic Odontology no longer recognizes the validity of testimony that claims total certainty. For years, the board’s guidelines allowed examiners to say that this set of teeth made that bite, to the exclusion of all other sets of teeth in the world. It was only after the National Academy of Sciences issued its 2009 report discrediting such claims that the board members changed their tune. In one important win for scientific rigor, forensic odontologists have conceded that the word “match” should not be used. Today they say, “Terms assuring unconditional identification of a perpetrator, or identification ‘without doubt,’ are not sanctioned as a final conclusions.” Instead, the dentist can say that the person “could have” created the bite marks. Nevertheless, the overall effect of the revised, and exasperatingly vague, odontologist guidelines is to continue offering cover to a multitude of sins. There are simply no standards for how much evidence it takes to conclude that bite marks “match” or even are “generally similar.” What makes the marks generally similar? What are the criteria? There are none in the field. As the Innocence Project later asserted in connection with the Harward case: “Despite the fact that for decades courts have permitted forensic dentists to testify in criminal trials, there is a complete lack of scientific support for claims that a suspect can be identified from an injury on a victim’s skin.” And this was but a restatement of the National Academy of Science’s 2009 declaration: “The scientific basis is insufficient to conclude that bite-mark comparisons can result in a conclusive match. There was more in the way of forensics in Harward’s case—and none of it implicated the suspect. None of the fingerprints that police lifted from the scene matched Harward. An expert from the Virginia crime lab also testified that blood typing on the semen evidence was inconclusive, and blood types on cigarette butts found at the scene did not match Harward. None of the hairs found in the house matched Harward. The victim could not identify Harward as her attacker. Nor had the victim described a person with a moustache, which Harward wore at the time.
But the bite marks impressed the jury, which convicted Harward of capital murder. When an appeals court later reversed Harward’s conviction on technical grounds concerning the interpretation of Virginia’s death penalty statute, a new jury sentenced Harward to life in prison. Throughout the case’s long trek through the appeals system, the bite-mark testimony retained a tenacious hold on jurists. On appeal, the Virginia court said: “Both forensic dentists testified that all gross characteristics of spacing, width, and alignment of Harward’s teeth ‘fit on the money’ the photographs of bite marks.” Harward was released last year, aged sixty, after spending thirty-three years in prison. DNA testing cleared his name and definitively matched another person, Jerry L. Crotty, who died in prison in Ohio over a decade ago, while serving time for burglary and kidnapping. What went wrong? The dentists provided a story that fit what the prosecutors wanted—a conviction. “It’s just heartbreaking to think that more than half of his life was spent behind bars when he didn’t belong there,” state attorney general Mark Herring said after Harward’s release. “The Commonwealth can’t give him back those years, but we can say that we got it wrong, that we’re sorry and that we’re working to make it right.” But what, exactly, has been done to make it right? The attorney general and the courts all promptly released Harward. The State of Virginia will probably offer him compensation. But so far, Virginia law enforcement and prosecutors have not banned the use of unreliable forensics like bite-mark testimony, as the Texas Forensic Science Commission has done.".........Meanwhile, scientists and researchers have started to make strides to improve forensics and how they are used in courtrooms. But as the White House report concluded, this isn’t a question of mere incremental tinkering. The present, scandalously unreliable state of forensic inquiry is unlikely to change unless and until the relevant pseudo-authorities are held truly accountable for the consequences of their actions. “They weren’t looking for the truth. They were looking for a conviction,” Keith Harward said after he was exonerated. No one could be bothered to listen to Harward during his 1982 trial, when it counted most for him. It is high time that we heed the lesson of his ordeal now. [*] You can read this testimony in an online archive I’ve constructed at convictingtheinnocent.com."

The entire commentary can be found at:

 https://thebaffler.com/salvos/trials-and-errors-garrett

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.