Ervin Harris

The Crime 

At 5:35 p.m. on Nov. 16, 1974, 21-year-old D.D arrived at the Western Hills Mall in Fairfield, Alabama, where she worked part-time at a furniture store while attending college. After she got out of her car, a Black man approached and ordered her back into the vehicle at gunpoint.

She slid over to the front passenger seat and the man got behind the wheel and began to drive. D.D. slumped down so that she could only see tree tops as they drove along. As they drove, the man kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand held the gun pointed at her. D.D. said they discussed her age, whether she was in school, whether she had a boyfriend, her favorite song, her favorite album, where she went to school, and what her major was. He also asked if she had ever had sex before. The man told her that he had been in trouble with the police, but that “didn’t matter” because the money he got from her would be enough for him to buy a bus ticket to Anniston, Alabama. 

Eventually, the driver stopped alongside a road. He pulled off her clothing and raped her. He then drove to Ensley, Alabama where he parked the car, got out, and walked away after telling D.D. that if she went to the police, “I’ll kill you.”

D.D. walked home, arriving shortly before 9 p.m. She told her mother she had been raped. Her mother called the police and then called D.D.’s father. They took D.D. to the hospital, arriving after midnight. Her clothes were taken as evidence. 

D.D. told the police her attacker was a Black man, 24 or 25 years old, skinny, 5 feet 7 or 5 feet 8 inches tall, clean shaven and had sideburns that stopped about half-way down his ears. She said he spoke “very clear.” 

The Investigation

On Nov. 20, 1974, Fairfield police showed D.D. a photographic lineup. She reviewed the photographs for two to three minutes. One of the photographs showed a man with a mustache or goatee even though she described the perpetrator as being clean-shaven. She narrowed her examination to two photographs that she said were “similar.” After further study, she picked the photograph of 19-year-old Ervin Harris because the eyes of the other photographs “weren’t big enough.”

After she chose Mr. Harris’ photograph, the police told her that they were “fixing to go get him.” 

Later that day, Mr. Harris was arrested in his father’s home. No gun was found. He was taken to the Fairfield police department where his underwear was seized. Mr. Harris denied involvement in the crime and said he had been with family and friends playing cards and shooting pool during the afternoon and into the evening past the time of the abduction and rape. He also told the police that he had a bad case of a sexually-transmitted disease for which he had been prescribed medication.

The police did not investigate Mr. Harris’ claims. The following day, he was placed in a live lineup. Mr. Harris was the only person who had been in the photographic lineup. The four fillers ranged in height from 5 feet 4 inches to 5 feet 8 inches tall. Two were chubbier than D.D.’s description of her attacker and one had a lighter complexion. She would later testify that the other two fillers had no resemblance to her attacker. She immediately picked Mr. Harris.

Mr. Harris was indicted on a charge of rape, though he bore little resemblance to D.D.’s description of her attacker. Mr. Harris was 5 feet 5 inches tall, and had hair on his chin and bushy sideburns that stretched below his ears. He also had two distinct marks on his forehead. He had dropped out of school after the fifth grade, had a pronounced stutter, and had no driver’s license.

The Trial

In November 1975, Mr. Harris went to trial in Jefferson County Circuit Court. The prosecution’s case relied almost solely on D.D.’s testimony and her identification in court of Mr. Harris as her attacker. 

An analyst from the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation testified that D.D.’s clothing and Mr. Harris’s underwear had been analyzed. Semen and blood were identified on some of D.D’s clothing, including her underwear, but there was no further testing to determine blood type. Tests on Mr. Harris’ underwear were negative for semen and blood, the analyst said.

Mr. Harris testified and denied he committed the crime. He said that he had played pool in the afternoon of the day of the crime, then was driven first to a cousin’s home, then to his sister’s home where he made himself a sandwich, and then to his mother’s home where he played cards until he was driven back to his cousin’s home where he spent the night. He admitted that had two prior burglary convictions and was facing a third burglary charge with he was charged with rape.

Mr. Harris’ cousin as well as his sister, Mary Jewett, corroborated that account. Ms. Jewett said that Mr. Harris had stuttered “all of his life…he can’t talk long without stuttering.”

Gregory Hunt testified that he saw Mr. Harris playing cards at Mr. Harris’ mother’s house. Mr. Hunt said that he once saw Mr. Harris try to drive a car for two blocks, but had never seen Mr. Harris successfully drive anywhere. Mr. Hunt confirmed that Mr. Harris stuttered when he spoke.

On Nov. 6, 1975, the jury convicted Mr. Harris of rape. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. 

In 1976, the Alabama Court of Appeals upheld the conviction and sentence.

On May 10, 1978, Mr. Harris filed a petition for writ of error coram nobis, asserting that his trial defense attorney  was ineffective for failing to present evidence that he had a sexually-transmitted disease at the time of the rape. After an evidentiary hearing, the trial on June 28, 1978 denied the petition. The Alabama Court of Appeals affirmed the denial.

Mr. Harris filed other petitions over the next several years seeking to overturn his conviction, but all were denied. In 2017, more than 41 years after his conviction, Mr. Harris was released on parole and required to register as a sex offender.

The Exoneration

In 2018, the Innocence Project contacted the Jefferson County Bessemer Division District Attorney’s office about locating the physical evidence in the case to conduct DNA testing on the evidence. The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) attempted to locate the evidence by contacting the Fairfield Police Department, Cooper Green Hospital, and the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences. However, none had the evidence. 

On June 25, 2020, the CIU’s lead investigator, Chris Anderson, interviewed Mr. Harris, who denied committing the crime and recounted his whereabouts on the night of the assault. 

Mr. Anderson also interviewed D.D. She maintained that Mr. Harris committed the assault. When Mr. Anderson asked what she would think if DNA testing were performed and excluded Mr. Harris, D.D. replied, “Well, I must have gotten it wrong then.”

On Nov. 15, 2021, following a request from the CIU, the Jefferson County Clerk’s Office turned over a brown envelope of paper documents, which included an evidence index that identified multiple items of evidence believed to have been introduced as evidence at trial and had been given to the Circuit Court Clerk’s office after the trial. Some of these items included items of D.D.’s clothing that could be submitted for DNA testing.

AlthoughCircuit Court Clerk Karen Dunn Burks, said nothing could be found, that was not the end of the search. A legal battle ensued over whether a proper search had been made. 

In May 2023, at a hearing on whether the Clerk’s Office had been diligent, Mr. Anderson, who by then had left the CIU to become chief of police at Talladega College, testified about his review of the case, his reinvestigation, and his efforts to locate the physical evidence. 

Mr. Anderson testified that he believed  there were “questions” about the accuracy of D.D’s identification, which was “the single most important piece of evidence in the case.” After reviewing the police reports and trial transcript, Mr. Anderson said he wished that the police would have put in a “bit more work” into the case.

Mr. Anderson testified that in his experience interviewing people accused of committing a crime, their stories “will change throughout the entire [time] . . . the cases are investigated,” particularly in a case as old as Mr. Harris’ case. Mr. Anderson said that when he interviewed Mr. Harris, he expected some inconsistencies, but instead, Mr. Harris gave “the most consistent statement that I have ever taken. It was consistent from the day that he spoke with the investigators from Fairfield who . . . initially conducted this investigation.”

Mr. Anderson also testified that he reached out to several doctors who told him that since there was evidence of seminal fluid on D.D.’s clothing, “there was a high probability that the STD that Mr. Harris had contracted . . . should have been . . . transfer[ed] to the victim, if she was raped in the manner that she says she was.” In his review of the case, Mr. Anderson said there was never any mention that D.D. had contracted a sexually-transmitted disease.

The battle over the search for the evidence only ended after Judge David Carpenter issued a citation for civil contempt for Ms. Burks for failing to follow court orders. 

On March 6, 2025, the District Attorney’s office filed a notice saying they were “satisfied” that various locations that could have contained the evidence had been “thoroughly searched by the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office Investigative staff.” 

None of the evidence had been found.

In April 2026, Innocence Project attorney Adnan Sultan and attorney Carla Crowder filed a petition to vacate Mr. Harris’ conviction. The petition included a report from Nancy Franklin, an emeritus professor of psychology at Stony Brook University and an expert in eyewitness identification.

After reviewing the evidence and transcript, Ms. Franklin concluded that D.D.’s identifications of Mr. Harris were “highly unreliable and likely the product of identification procedures that were substantially biased toward Mr. Harris. Indeed, the eyewitness-related evidence on the whole, when considered in light of the research, points strongly away from Mr. Harris’s involvement in this attack.”

Ms. Franklin identified the presence of a dozen factors that had been shown to contribute to mistaken witness identification. These included the presence of a weapon, the stress of being raped, and that Mr. Harris was Black and D.D. was white. Cross-race identifications have been shown to be unreliable.

The petition also noted that Mr. Harris “had distinct physical characteristics not shared by the perpetrator. Most notably, he spoke with a pronounced stutter while D.D. repeatedly described the perpetrator’s speech as ‘very clear.’ Given this discrepancy, it is hard to imagine how Mr. Harris could have been the perpetrator,” Ms. Franklin reported.

On June 19, 2026, Judge Carpenter vacated Mr. Harris’ convictions and granted him a new trial. 

Judge Carpenter said that had the modern scientific evidence regarding eyewitness identification been available at Mr. Harris’ trial, “the verdict would likely have been different.”

The judge also noted that the alibi witnesses “presented a consistent account of Mr. Harris’s whereabouts on the night of the crime. Their testimony corroborated Mr. Harris’s own trial testimony. Critically, prosecutors were unable to impeach any aspect of any of the witnesses’ or Mr. Harris’s story, nor did they identify any inconsistencies with their accounts of Mr. Harris’s whereabouts. The existence of this unshaken alibi further suggests that Mr. Harris did not commit this sexual assault.”

The judge noted that District Attorney Lynneice Washington had no objection to the granting of the motion to vacate the conviction.

On July 12, 2026, the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the case was granted.