GIST: "It wasn’t patriotism that compelled him to
enlist. “I just got tired of waking up drunk in the morning,” said
Harward, whose North Carolina twang and quick sense of humor survived
three decades behind bars in Virginia prisons. By 1982, he was a tailor and dry cleaner on the
USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with a crew of
thousands that was dry-docked at the Newport News shipyard. He was
living with his girlfriend in Norfolk and commuting to the ship on his
motorcycle. Unknown to him, early on the morning of Sept. 14,
1982, a man was beaten to death and his wife raped in a home near the
shipyard by a killer wearing a sailor’s uniform and believed to be part
of the Vinson’s crew. Harward never had been to the scene of the crime,
nor ever met the victims. The killer, he would learn decades later, was
a shipmate he did not know. Police, however, soon came to believe the killer was Harward. He recalls lining up in a chow hall with other
sailors while dentists examined their teeth with penlights, trying to
identify the attacker who left bite marks on the rape victim’s legs. “Nothing was said then. I wasn’t pulled aside till later on,” Harward said. “I did not put it together. I did not know what it was for,” he said. On March 16, 1983, he received a general
discharge under honorable conditions from the Navy. “I liked to smoke
marijuana, and I kept getting dirty urines,” he said. He went to live with his parents in Floyd County,
where they had retired on 70 acres that included an old farmhouse with a
tin roof, a small pond and a garden. The next month, his parents drove him back to
Newport News for a court hearing over an assault case stemming from a
fight with his former girlfriend who later would drop the charge.
Harward said they both had been drinking and that he bit her defensively
during the struggle. The biting got the attention of Newport News
police. The rape victim was in the courtroom that day but
could not identify Harward. A detective approached him and said, “We’d
like to talk to you.” At the request of police, his parents drove him to
a dentist’s office on Mercury Boulevard, where impressions were made of
his teeth. “I didn’t do it. So I wasn’t concerned, because I
thought this was the United States of America and people are treated
fair,” he said. “I was cooperating fully because I didn’t do it, so what
did I have to hide?” But, he said, “next thing I know I’m sitting in jail.” He was arrested by detectives one evening at his
parents’ home not long after the dental impressions were taken. He said
the state police, the Floyd Sheriff’s Office and an ambulance stood by
down the driveway, out of sight. “Mama and Daddy was worried to death,” Harward
said. “And I kept saying, ‘It’s nothing. I didn’t do anything. You all
ain’t got nothing to worry about.’ Little did I know. “When they came and arrested me that night ...
Mama and Daddy, they just broke down,” Harward said. “Me being the baby
of the family, they depended on me to do a lot of the stuff. When I got
locked up, that disappeared.” The days that followed, he said, were a blur. He was held for trial at the Newport News jail.
“We’re in there, we got TVs and get newspapers and stuff, so I could
read and see all about it,” Harward said. “It was all on the news —
that’s when I knew it was starting to look bad for me. ‘The suspect has
been caught,’ and all this kind of stuff.” He was charged with capital murder, and the state sought the death penalty for the horrific crimes. No transcript survives of Harward’s first trial in 1983. When the guilty verdict was announced, he was crushed. “I didn’t think it was going to happen. I
didn’t,” Harward said. “Now my parents, they were worried to death and
they were scared to death. They were smarter, older and wiser, so they
know how things could go wrong easily. “But I still felt like I didn’t do it — they can’t find me guilty.” After the verdict, his parents took the stand and
asked the jury to spare their son’s life. “That’s the first time we
ever saw my father cry,” Harward said. “It killed them. It did. I don’t care what
anybody says. It broke their hearts, and it killed them. Their health
started going down. I mean they were old and stuff, but people do die of
a broken heart.” To his parents, Harward said, “I was the baby.
Even when I was 24 years old, she would introduce me to people as ‘This
is the baby.’ ” ‘Bogus science, smoke and mirrors ... and it worked’ Despite the brutality of the crime — the murdered
man was beaten with a crowbar in his bed and his wife repeatedly raped
as he was dying — the jury sentenced Harward to life, an outcome that he
and his lawyers took to mean that some on the panel had doubts. In 1985, the capital murder verdict was
overturned on technical grounds, and he was retried the following year
on a charge of first-degree murder. The principal evidence against Harward was
testimony from two forensic dentists who concluded that his teeth
matched bite marks left on the rape victim’s legs. One of the dentists was Dr. Lowell Levine, a
pioneer in the field who had helped convict serial killer Ted Bundy and
assisted in identifying the remains of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. “That Levine character, he was a Svengali,”
Harward said. By the time Levine was done telling the jury about his
background, “they were eating out of his hand,” Harward recalled.
Levine, who is from New York, did not respond to requests for comment. “Bogus science, smoke and mirrors ... and it worked,” Harward said of the dentists’ testimony. He was resigned to being convicted again, so it
did not come as a surprise.
“We were outnumbered,” he said. “And now we
know we didn’t get half the evidence we were supposed to have been
given.” The Innocence Project since has alleged that
Harward’s trial lawyers never were told that witnesses had been
hypnotized or that simple blood typing soon after the crimes excluded
him as the assailant — no DNA was needed. For the second time, Harward was sentenced to life.‘But I knew ... I didn’t do anything wrong’......... ‘Hey, why don’t you write the Innocence Project?’ Harward didn’t seek help from the Innocence Project until 2007. “I knew nothing about courts and stuff. I just
figured I was in — they done convicted me. I was beat. I done give up.
It never occurred to me to try that. It just never did, and one of the
guys when I was at Sussex II said, ‘Hey, why don’t you write the
Innocence Project?’ ” The Innocence Project’s waiting list is long, and
he did not hear back until a letter arrived in August 2014, asking
whether he still wanted the group to pursue his case. Harward moved up in the line because he was
convicted on bite-mark testimony, a now highly controversial forensic
technique that has contributed to two dozen wrongful convictions. The
Innocence Project wants a moratorium on bite-mark analysis until its
validity can be proved scientifically. DNA testing was not available at the time of his
1983 and 1986 trials. Innocence Project lawyers explained to him that
they would look for evidence such as seminal fluid left at the scene of
the crime and have it tested to see whether a DNA profile could be
identified. They cautioned that the evidence was old and may not yield
suitable results. On Jan. 8, 2016, he was told to report to his
counselor’s office to take a telephone call. It was some good news from
the Innocence Project — his genetic profile was not found on any of the
evidence, and he was told that more testing of evidence would be done. Harward was certain the testing would not find his DNA but knew the Innocence Project would have to prove that to be sure. “Once that happened, they were all in,” he said. “We all kind of celebrated.” Armed with the test results, his lawyers filed a
petition for a writ of actual innocence with the Virginia Supreme Court
in early March. On March 18, he got another call. Not only did
the further testing exclude him, but the Virginia Department of Forensic
Science also had a cold hit: The genetic profile in sperm left at the
scene was from Jerry L. Crotty, a former shipmate and a career criminal
who died in an Ohio prison in 2006. Harward sympathizes with the rape victim and her loss; he said he knew she had nothing to do with his wrongful conviction. ‘You’re a free man’ Things started happening fast after the cold hit. The original innocence petition to the Virginia
Supreme Court was amended. On April 6, Virginia Attorney General Mark R.
Herring announced it was clear after studying the court files, petition
and DNA results that Harward was innocent and that a tragic mistake had
been made. The Supreme Court usually takes weeks if not
months to consider such requests before acting. But on April 7, less
than 24 hours after Herring announced his office was joining the
petition to exonerate Harward, the justices granted the writ and caught
everyone by surprise. Harward’s lawyers and others had to scramble to get to the prison for his release set for 1 p.m. the next day..........While thrilled to be cleared of the heinous
crimes and free, Harward said he remains upset about what happened to
him in Newport News so many years ago. “I’m angry at those people that locked me up,
that I call the criminals: the detectives and that serologist, the judge
and the prosecutor,” he said. Harward has outlived the judge, the prosecutor
and the lead detective. And the Virginia Department of Forensic Science
has begun a review of the cases handled by the serologist who left the
department after more than 30 years on the job."
The entire story can be found at:
http://www.dailyprogress.com/starexponent/news/wrongly-imprisoned-man-adjusts-to-freedom-family-technology/article_6d02709e-0a49-11e6-851a-cf8ac019e065.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses
several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of
the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this
powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and
myself get more out of the site.
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;
