DNA Database Reveals True Assailant in Decades-Old Rape and Murder Case in Virginia

04.04.16 By Innocence Blog

DNA Database Reveals True Assailant in Decades-Old Rape and Murder Case in Virginia

Last month, the Innocence Blog reported that attorneys from the Innocence Project and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, in collaboration with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, filed a petition for a writ of actual innocence on behalf of Keith Allen Harward, a Virginia man who has spent more than 33 years of a life sentence in prison for rape and murder he did not commit. Results from DNA testing of crime scene evidence excluded Harward from a 1982 rape and murder scene in Newport News.  Now, new DNA evidence and information reveals the identity of the actual perpetrator and further validates Harward’s innocence.

A story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Jerry L. Crotty was the person responsible for killing a local Newport News man and raping the man’s wife in the couple’s home in September of 1982. According to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, DNA from the crime scene was run through the national DNA database—also known as CODIS.  The profile produced a “hit” to Crotty, who, like Harward, was a sailor on the USS Carl Vinson at the time of the crime. Crotty was in the system because he had a criminal background; his last time in prison was a decade ago in Ohio, where he was serving time for “abduction, burglary, theft and firearms violations,” reports the Times-Dispatch. He died in prison in 2006.

Harward was convicted mainly on the testimony of two forensic dentists who said that Harward’s teeth matched marks left on the rape victim. But in recent years, bite mark comparison as a means for linking individuals to crime scenes has come under harsh scrutiny as a rising number of convictions that once hinged upon bite mark evidence have since been overturned. Dana Delger, a lawyer with the strategic litigation team at the Innocence Project, said to the Times-Dispatch last month: “[A] huge body of substantial research has come out that … affirmatively disproves the basis for bite mark analysis.”

That new research, in culmination with the recent DNA results excluding Harward from the crime scene and implicating Crotty, confirms that Harward should be exonerated and freed from prison as soon as possible, say Harward’s attorneys.

“DNA has left no doubt that Mr. Harward was not the man who raped (the victim) and murdered (her husband), just as it has left no doubt about the identity of the actual rapist and murderer,” his lawyers wrote to the Virginia Supreme Court in a supplemental brief filed last week, reports the Times-Dispatch. “Given the irrefutable proof of Mr. Harward’s innocence, Mr. Harward respectfully requests that the court expedite its review of the case so that he can be exonerated as quickly as is feasible and finally be released from his three-decades-long nightmare.”

Read the entire story here.

 

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