Keith Harward

On April 8, 2016, Keith Allen Harward was granted a writ of actual innocence by the Virginia Supreme Court after wrongly spending more than 33 years of a life sentence for a rape and murder he did not commit.

Despite testifying and presenting evidence that he didn’t match the rape survivor’s description, Mr. Harward was wrongly convicted of capital murder in 1982 based on forensic dentists’ testimony that his teeth matched the bite marks on the survivor.

In 2015, the Innocence Project obtained a court order for DNA testing of physical evidence in Mr. Harward’s case, which definitively proved his innocence and pointed to another man as the actual attacker. He is one of eight people whose story is in the Innocence Project-inspired Netflix docuseries The Innocence Files.