Junk Science Wrongfully Convicted This Man For 33 Years | Bite Mark Analysis

**Sanitized Transcript:**

[Music] Forensic science begins at the end of someone else’s story, scrutinizing a violent moment in time. Samples are collected and preserved, the scene exhaustively photographed, and evidence prepared for forensic experts to examine. Television and movies fuel blind faith in the power of crime scene investigations, or CSI. However, since the emergence of DNA analysis, a disturbing trend has emerged: DNA pulled from evidence that spent decades gathering dust has revealed wrongful convictions. In fact, in hundreds of exoneration cases, DNA did more than free the innocent; it proved that the forensic evidence that convicted them was wrong. It’s time to put CSI on trial to find out what’s real science, what has scientific potential, and what’s just junk. The stakes couldn’t be higher. My name is Keith Harward. I was wrongly convicted for 33 years. These expert witnesses were willing to have me put to death based on what they said.

On September 14, 1982, a man wearing a U.S. Navy whites service uniform broke into the Newport News, Virginia home of the Peron family. He bludgeoned 30-year-old Jesse Peron to death, then sexually assaulted 22-year-old Teresa, threatening to kill her three children if she made a sound. An hour later, he made his escape, leaving behind a horrific calling card: she had been bitten all over her legs. A police photographer came and took photographs of the bite marks. Kenny Murov was a young defense attorney in Newport News at the time. Teresa could not identify the man; she heard his voice and knew he was a Caucasian male. She thought he was clean-shaven and wore a sailor’s uniform. Teresa was able to describe the insignia on the sleeve: three upside-down V’s. She also recalled seeing a sailor acting suspiciously outside her home the afternoon before the attack. The Peron home was located just down the street from a shipyard where a Navy vessel, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, was docked.

The police conducted an unusual search in the mess halls. They lined everybody up and examined their mouths for teeth that matched the bite marks in the photographs of Teresa Peron’s legs. Several hundred sailors were singled out to give their dental impressions to the authorities, but Harward was excluded. Several months passed, and the police were no closer to solving the crime. Then they thought they had a break in another bite mark case. Keith Harward had a girlfriend named Nam Glattus, who reported that she had a fight with her boyfriend and, in the course of making that report, said he bit her. It was a true tussle. Roy Lazarus was a defense attorney in Newport News. He noted that the nature of the bite was defensive, not aggressive. The police, however, viewed a bite as a savage and unusual act and figured Harward must be their man.

The authorities sent casts of Harward’s teeth to a dental expert, Lella LaVine, who claimed that Harward’s teeth matched the marks on Peron’s legs. The police began building their case around him. They kept telling me they had eyewitnesses and fingerprints, but I kept telling them they didn’t know what they were talking about. There was an eyewitness, a shipyard guard named Donald Wade, who observed someone in the early morning hours of the crime—a Navy person coming through his gate with blood on his uniform. The police showed Wade a series of photographs, and he identified Keith as the person who came through the gate. However, the victim couldn’t pick Keith out; she couldn’t identify him as her attacker. His mustache didn’t line up with her recollection of a clean-shaven attacker, nor did his uniform insignia look like the upside-down V’s. The investigation was a torturous process leading to what we call a direct indictment of Keith Harward, despite the weak and contradictory evidence.

The case went to trial. Murov represented Harward, who testified in his own defense. It’s somewhat unusual for a defendant charged with such a serious crime to testify, but from the first time I met him, Keith said he didn’t commit this offense, so I had to respect his request. He made himself a real person, not some evil ogre. The testimony of bite mark analysts was equally powerful. LaVine told the jury that everybody has a set of teeth that are unique and individual, and with reasonable medical certainty, Mr. Harward caused the bite marks on the leg. A second expert echoed LaVine’s testimony. The defense challenged both experts, noting that they based their statements on a single photograph. There was no hair evidence, no fingerprint evidence, no blood evidence, and no semen samples that implicated him.

In October 1983, Keith Harward awaited his fate. He felt numb; he didn’t hear much of what was going on. He knew it was coming. In the case of first-degree capital murder, he was found guilty. The jury sentenced him to life in prison. What convicted me, I don’t think, and others don’t think, was the actual bite marks; it was the background and the list of credentials of the so-called experts. They made claims without a basis for making that claim. Bite mark practitioners were, by and large, regular dentists with an interest in crime solving. We attempted to discredit the process of bite mark identification, but when you have a unique fraternity of dentists assisting law enforcement, it has instant credibility that is hard to overcome.

In 1983, LaVine had gained notoriety for being one of the dentists who gave bite mark testimony at the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. If he had said to the jury in the middle of October that it was snowing outside, I think they would have believed him. If the expert appears to be well-trained and has sufficient experience, jurors will defer to the expert’s conclusions. After Harward’s trial, it came to light that the state used a controversial investigative technique: they had hypnotized Donald Wade. Investigators used this highly suggestible technique to help refresh the guard’s memory. It wasn’t only used on the guard; they also hypnotized Teresa Peron before they interviewed her and before her testimony. This is highly irregular and highly improper, not to have disclosed this to defense counsel.

Harward served three years in prison before the state supreme court reversed his conviction on an illegal technicality. However, his second trial was much like the first; nothing pointed to Keith, and everything pointed away from him. Roy Lazarus represented Harward in the retrial, but Keith wasn’t holding out hope for a different verdict. He faced reality, feeling he was being railroaded again. The jury pronounced him guilty and sentenced him for a second time to life. Keith set out to make a life behind bars. He accepted his fate and kept busy doing little things. He was always optimistic, not in terms of getting out, but just in terms of life dealing him what it would.

When another inmate suggested he contact the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted, Keith figured he had nothing to lose. Two years later, Chris Fabricant joined the Innocence Project as director of strategic litigation. He learned about the leading contributing factors to wrongful conviction, and bite marks rose to the top. Keith’s case wasn’t the only one, so they started looking for every single case they could find. Fabricant received a letter from the Innocence Project stating they wanted to take up his case. After three decades, the evidence box for Harward’s case was still sitting on a shelf. Upon examination, they discovered a piece of potentially exonerating evidence: the forensic examiner on the blood noted that certain types of secretions would not have been consistent with Keith’s blood type, and they hadn’t disclosed that.

His new defense team obtained a court order for DNA testing—science that hadn’t existed at the time of his original trial. The analysis definitively excluded Harward as the source of blood and semen from the crime scene, just as he had always claimed he was innocent. But the DNA did more than exonerate Harward; it identified the actual culprit, a very bad criminal named Jerry Cate, who was a multiple offender. There was a solid match on him as being the perpetrator. He was a crew member with Keith on the Vinson. Cate died in an Ohio prison in 2006. In 2016, the Virginia Supreme Court issued Harward a writ of actual innocence. The writ of innocence was granted on a 7-0 vote. There was no dissent. He walked out of prison a free man for the first time in 33 years.

You’re like in a coma; I’ve never done this before. You all have to give me a break; this is all new to me. I was awakened on April 7, 2016. I’m not the criminal they were looking for. They weren’t looking for the truth; they were looking for a conviction. They knew the DNA that proved Keith was innocent also proved that all of the bite mark testimony in the case had to be wrong. They were wrong because bite mark evidence has no basis in science whatsoever. The story of this discipline is older than America itself. The earliest reporting of bite mark evidence in court dates back to the Salem witch trials in 1692. The Reverend George Burroughs stood accused of witchcraft and conspiracy with the devil. Several young girls claimed the possessed Burroughs had bitten them. He was forced to let the court examine his teeth; they decreed that his bite matched the bite marks, and he was hanged.

It wasn’t until 300 years later that bite marks entered the modern justice system. In 1974, prosecutors exhumed the body of a murder victim to examine bite marks on her nose—evidence that led to a conviction. This set the precedent for the legal rule that allowed bite mark testimony into U.S. courtrooms. Then the serial killer case that shocked the nation made bite mark evidence famous. In 1978, police arrested Theodore Bundy, a clean-cut former law student, for numerous kidnappings, rapes, and murders. It was the first nationally broadcast live criminal trial. Bite mark analysis took the spotlight at trial when forensic odontologists matched Bundy’s teeth to the bite marks on one of his victims, making the dentists stars in practice.

Bite mark analysts match a suspect’s dental impressions to marks of an injury on a victim’s skin. It’s based on two fundamental assumptions: that skin can reliably record tooth marks and that the arrangement and condition of an individual’s teeth are unique, like a fingerprint. However, these fundamental principles have never been proven, and for four decades, bite mark analysis has been used in court without scientific validation of its basic assumptions. Bite marks fall under the umbrella of forensic odontology, a discipline mostly known for victim identification.

Peter Bush is a research scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He demonstrates how a tooth fragment is used to identify remains. This is a piece of human tooth that’s been incinerated. He explains that dental records reveal the individual’s treatment history. There is no dispute about this branch of forensic odontology. However, bite mark evidence is another story. Mary Bush is a dentist, researcher, and teacher at SUNY Buffalo Dental School. In 2007, the husband-and-wife team was prodded by one of Mary’s graduate students to test the reliability of bite mark evidence. They decided to start with some basic research on how skin responds when bitten.

They built a sensitive mechanical device using a dental mold that mimicked the force of a human jaw, but they didn’t get reliable matches. They found that skin distorts and stretches, and when it stretches, it moves differently in different directions. They discovered that all of the bite marks they tested looked different from the set of teeth that created those bites. The stunning results showed that no two sets of bite marks made by the same set of teeth looked the same. A basic tenet of bite mark analysis was completely wrong: the nature of the skin is not a good recording medium; it does not capture that detail with fidelity.

Bite mark analysis has always been performed by odontologists—dental experts—who are not experts on skin. The Bushes’ results revealed that weakness as they delved deeper. Their findings would fly in the face of another basic tenet: that the arrangement or condition of teeth, known as dentition, is unique to each individual. They found that in reasonably sized data sets, you could find one or two individuals who had a match within the population, meaning you couldn’t tell their teeth apart. This defies another tenet of bite mark analysis: that an individual’s teeth are unique.

The bottom line is that skin doesn’t record bite marks with any reliability or accuracy, and many individuals share a similar bite. The Bushes began publishing their results in scientific journals in 2009. Soon after, they were being asked to testify. Prosecutors and bite mark analysts pushed back, claiming their research didn’t reflect real-world circumstances. Their primary critics were from the organization that certifies forensic dentists, the American Board of Forensic Odontology (ABFO), allied with the National District Attorneys Association. Both are powerful organizations, but scientists and legal scholars supported the Bushes’ findings.

The same year they began testifying, the National Academy of Sciences issued a groundbreaking report that found substantial rates of erroneous results in bite mark analysis. The Bushes were not the first scientists to sound the alarm about the fundamental flaws of bite mark analysis. In the 1990s, a study conducted by one of its members found that bite mark analysts were incorrect 50% of the time. The ABFO dismissed the findings, and when the researcher went public, the organization retaliated with an ethics complaint and meritless lawsuits.

States continued to allow bite mark evidence even as scientific studies failed to validate it until one Texas case forced a state agency to take action. Steven Cheney was wrongfully convicted in Texas and served 28 years in prison for a homicide he did not commit. During his trial, two bite mark analysts from the ABFO testified that a bite mark on the victim was a match for Cheney. Nearly three decades later, a team from the Innocence Project, including Chris Fabricant, took on the case. One of the original bite mark experts had passed away, but the other recanted his statement, admitting his conclusions were scientifically unsound. Cheney was acquitted and formally exonerated in 2019.

In conjunction with representing Cheney, the Innocence Project filed a complaint with the Texas Forensic Science Commission, asking for a deep dive into the literature and assumptions surrounding bite mark evidence. The commission, made up of scientists and lawyers, created licensing for forensic science disciplines and policies for crime labs. Dr. Jasmine Drake, a forensic chemist, emphasized the importance of quality and reliability in analysis. The commission conducted a six-month investigation into the evidence supporting bite mark analysis.

The commission heard testimony about a study done within the ABFO, where analysts were asked to match bite marks to the dentitions that made them. Out of 100 case studies, the analysts reached a unanimous agreement on just four. This was very disturbing; it indicated that there was no science in it. The commission issued a report affirming that there is no scientific basis for stating that a particular patterned injury can be associated with an individual’s dentition. The ABFO faced criticism for its slow pace in publishing critical data and allowing overstatements of science to go unchecked for decades.

In 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) issued a report on forensics, advising against devoting significant resources to developing bite mark analysis into a scientifically valid method. The National District Attorneys Association rejected the report. Keith Harward has lent his voice to the conversation, reminding us that bad science has a human cost. The trauma of wrongful convictions is not reserved solely for those imprisoned. In 1985, three-year-old Chad McRo was asleep in his bed when his 24-year-old mother was murdered just down the hall. Several months later, he lost another parent when his father, Charles McRo, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Chad was raised by his grandparents, who encouraged him to make his own decisions about the case. There was never anything actually tying Mr. McRo to the crime; there was no witness, no confession, no forensic evidence, and no motive—just a bite mark, or at least something prosecutors claimed was a bite mark. 34 years later, the case came to the attention of Chris Fabricant at the Innocence Project and Mark Lowden Brown at the Southern Center for Human Rights. They reviewed the file and transcript and concluded that there was no way this conviction should stand.

In 1985, Charles McRo was a 26-year-old computer programmer in Andalusia, Alabama. He had recently separated from his wife, Julie, who had been his high school sweetheart. The night of May 30, 1985, Charles was at Julie’s house, watching TV with her and doing laundry. He left at some point in the evening. The next morning, he called Julie from work to ask her to drop off his breakfast, but he didn’t get an answer. Worried, he called his parents, who found Julie’s body. She had been savagely beaten and stabbed multiple times. Charles was the only suspect, despite a lack of evidence connecting him to the murder.

After becoming a suspect, the police began trying to develop evidence against him. They found a neighbor who claimed to have seen Charles’s truck in the driveway all night, but investigators later determined that the neighbor’s testimony was unreliable. The prosecution’s smoking gun was an injury on Julie’s body that looked like a bite mark. Dr. Richard Suon, a prominent forensic dentist, testified that it was a bite mark and matched it to Charles. Charles was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

For more than 30 years, his family stood by him. They sought help from various organizations, but DNA evidence had disappeared. Eventually, they found forensic dentists who examined the bite mark and concluded it was not a bite mark at all. In 2018, the ABFO made significant restrictions to its standards, no longer allowing members to express conclusions unconditionally linking a bite mark to a dentition. However, they are still allowed to testify whether or not someone can be excluded, which poses a potential danger.

In the spring of 2021, McRo’s legal team met with the prosecutor, who offered a plea deal. Charles refused, unwilling to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. The defense presented their case, arguing that the bite mark evidence was unreliable. However, overturning a wrongful conviction is an uphill battle, with legislative and political roadblocks. The judge ultimately ruled against McRo, stating that the jury could have seen his teeth as a match for the bite mark, despite the lack of evidence.

The defense team plans to appeal the decision, but the process will likely take years. The challenge of setting the record straight on bite marks is enormous. We cannot rely on courts to separate nonsense from science; we need scientists to do that. The law relies on precedent, making it nearly impossible to overturn poorly reasoned precedents embedded in the system. To date, bite mark comparison evidence has been used to secure at least 33 indictments and convictions that have later been overturned, and it remains admissible in all 50 states.

After his release, Steven Cheney became a prison missionary and played gospel music. He passed away