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506: #506 Jason Flom with Keith Harward · Wrongful Conviction Podcasts

• 00:00:01 Speaker 1: I came from a beautiful neighborhood. I had a beautiful life. 00:00:07 Speaker 2: I went to sleep because September seventh was the first day of my high school year. 00:00:11 Speaker 1: I was going to be a senior at twenty two, I was set to start college. I woke up and my life was never the same again. Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw freedom ever since after that. It's like roach Mota. Once you get in, you and I can'tnam. 00:00:30 Speaker 2: This is wrongful conviction with Jason Plummer, a true rock star of the Innocence movement, Keith Allen Harward along with one of his attorneys, Salzman, of the Great Firm of Scatting. Keith, you were just a pretty much a regular guy from from the Carolinas serving in the Navy. Uh in Virginia at the time, Is that right? 00:01:11 Speaker 1: Yes, I was stationed in Newport News at the time. I was on aircraft care being built at the shipyard. Is there? And Uh, that's where it all all kind of took place fell apart. 00:01:24 Speaker 2: So Keith was in the navy, had been serving for three years on the ship and uh, it's sort of interesting how you got to that point in the first place. 00:01:32 Speaker 1: You know, at that time, it was six drugs and rock and roll, and I was kind of involved all of them, and who wasn't. Yeah, and I got tired of that lifestyle. It was just it just caught up with me and I needed a change. So I sided. One day I will joined the military. So I went to the old Post officer in Greensboro and I sided. The first door i'd come into recruiting office was going to be the door I was going to walk into. And that's the first door was in the door. So I walked in there and signed up and went pretty quick. You know. They wanted you know, well, we delay you for sixty days. I said, no, I want to go. So the next day I was in Charlotte day Fees taking the test, and the next day I was sitting in Chicago, Illinois at boot camp. So it was a matter of three days I was in it. 00:02:20 Speaker 2: That's some radical fixing going on there. I mean, some people like me would have just walked into AA and been like, hey, you know, change of life, but you decided to take it to the extreme. 00:02:30 Speaker 1: Well, I mean, to be able to get away from everything, you've got to get away from everything, and you know, friends or friends and come on, man, let's go. You know, if I'm away from that, then I can't be influenced. So that was my thinking. I got out of town and started unnew. Well maybe things would work out. 00:02:51 Speaker 2: So there you are, serving in the navy and a horrible crime takes place pretty close to the shipyard. 00:02:55 Speaker 3: Is that right? 00:02:56 Speaker 1: Right? It was just on a few blocks away from the gate to the shipyards. 00:03:01 Speaker 2: And it was it was sort of like what we would call now a home invasion, right, somebody broke into a home. 00:03:06 Speaker 1: The husband was killed, and after he was they were in bed together and he came in and beat the husband with crowbar and just you know, it just tore him up. And when he was done doing that, then he took hold of the wife and sexual assault for several hours. 00:03:25 Speaker 3: Truly horrible situation. 00:03:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, it had to be. 00:03:27 Speaker 2: So they didn't have any information other than that she had said that the perpetrator was wearing a sailor's uniform. 00:03:34 Speaker 3: Is that right? 00:03:34 Speaker 4: Right? 00:03:35 Speaker 1: Right? So that's what clewed them into the the shipyards, you know, because the Newport News shipyards is away from Norfolk, which is normally where you would find sailors and uh, That's what clue the men was the fact that he was wearing a uniform, So apparently he had to be on one of the ships or submarines that were there being repaired or built at the shipyard. 00:03:56 Speaker 3: How many sailors are on the ship. 00:03:58 Speaker 1: Well, the crew of the of aircraft carrier were after air wing somewhere aback three to five, but it was being built, so it's probably two to three thousand guys. 00:04:07 Speaker 2: A lot of guys for the cops that tried to figure this one out, right, it's a tough one. So months had gone by, right, and there's a lot of pressure, right, nobody wants people take it very personally when someone's home is invaded. 00:04:15 Speaker 3: I know I do. 00:04:16 Speaker 2: When I read a story about that in the paper. Everyone can relate because everyone has a home. There's pressure on the cops. There's pressure. They got to solve this, They got to get it there. And there was even some politicians involved. And let's turn to you don for a second. How did they land on Keith? Of these thousands of guys. 00:04:30 Speaker 4: The rape victim had told the police that during the rape, the rapist had bitten her on the leg a few times, and the police took photographs of these bite marks that appeared on her leg, which were essentially bruises from the rapist teeth. And so, because the police suspected that one of the sailors on this ship, the USS Carl Vincent, was the rapist, they started looking at the dental records of hundreds and maybe thousands of these sailors, and they were trying to narrow down this big group of people to a smaller group, and one of the people who's you know, records they looked at was Keith's. But when they looked at his records the first time they even took an impression of his mouth, the dentist excluded Keith. They said he was among the people who didn't match. And so they kept looking for, you know, other suspects, and that went on for a while. 00:05:25 Speaker 2: But then something happened that led to Keith being to them taking a renewed interest in looking at Keith, even though they had had a professional, someone who was supposedly certified and would have been qualified to give this opinion to say that it wasn't him. 00:05:43 Speaker 1: I had a girlfriend and we had gotten into a fight and I bit her own the shoulder, and the police took her to the hospital to check her out, and that's apparently when the light bulb went off that you know, hey, we gotta bite or here. You know, they were looking for somebody for a long time, and then when the police found out and work got to the detectives or whoever, that's when the light came home for them and went on me. They pushed it so I would show up at court for two reasons. One the victim was in the audience, whatever you call it, and also they wanted to get more impressions of my teeth. I didn't know either one of these. 00:06:25 Speaker 2: After having brought in on the charge in the first place, you couldn't go back home where you were living with her because you had just had this altercation and she was an alcoholic and the whole situation was crazy. 00:06:34 Speaker 3: So where'd you so tell the story about where'd you go to sleep? 00:06:38 Speaker 1: That I had no place to go, So I slept in a dumpster. 00:06:41 Speaker 3: But it was a particular dumpster, yeah it was. 00:06:43 Speaker 4: It was a high end dumpster. 00:06:44 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:06:44 Speaker 1: Yeah. There was a hat manufacturer and made baseball caps, and they had a dumpster was filling nothing but material. It was no food or anything in it. It was all styur foam and foam, rubber and cloth and that kind of stuff. So it was, you know, right outside the shipyard gate. I would walk by and I would notice all this material laying on the ground, and I'd stopped one time because on cheap hats, it got the little plastic things that you popped the size with and I saw them on the ground and mine had broke on my hat, so I went over and picked one up. I just opened the dumpstrup look and said, man, this place is nice. I wonder why there's nobody else living here, you know kind of thing. So that night I thought, well, you know, that was a close place to go. It was close to the shipyard. It was pueening the house where I was living, that apartment in the shipyard. So that's where I stayed. 00:07:34 Speaker 4: Even though Keith now became a suspect because of this, you know, this fight with his girlfriend. During a fight, he really didn't match the the descript description of the that the victim gave because she said that the rapist was nineteen years old, nineteen twenty years old, clean shaven, baby faced. Keith was twenty six years old, had a mustache, and he had a not a beard like but he had a heavy, you know, five o'clock shadow type, you know. 00:08:08 Speaker 1: And hair she said his hair was radish. The mom was brown. 00:08:13 Speaker 4: So Keith didn't he didn't match the description. But in a lot of these cases, once the police and law enforcement, you know, focus on somebody, they they don't pay attention to the things that suggests that they got the wrong person. And Keith, he did not meet the description of the rapist. 00:08:33 Speaker 2: In this case, They've decided they want Keith locked up. They're going to solve this case. We had this bad science, right, We had bitemark evidence, which we now know has been completely discredited. There was a recent study of dentists, forensic dentist and odeontologists in which they found that the error raid was ninety one percent junk science. Really, we had also another element, which was which involved hypnosis, which sounds I'm sure to the audience are going, no. 00:09:04 Speaker 3: We can't, that's ridiculous. 00:09:06 Speaker 2: You can't have hypnosis in a capital murder case, because yours was a capital murder case. Is that right? So let's talk a little bit about that and the element that this hypnotism played. 00:09:16 Speaker 4: This crime got a lot of publicity and actually, you know, the news media published, you know, it was on TV and radio, and this this shipyard security guard heard the story about a murder and a rape that had happened just a couple of blocks away from the shipyard. And he actually was eating dinner at his home that night and heard it on the radio and he said to his wife, I think I saw someone suspicious. So he went down to the police and they interviewed him, and he told the police that he saw a guy who looked like he was drunk, came to the gate to pass through, you know, had to show a badge, but the guy didn't. The guard didn't remember, you know, the name, or didn't look at the name. 00:09:53 Speaker 3: But that the guy. 00:09:54 Speaker 4: He remembered the guy because he had blood splat would look like blood splattered all over his uniform. Later on six months, during the next couple months, they hypnotized this guy to try to get more information. And it was not uncommon back in the day for the police to hypnotize witnesses to see if they could remember more. The problem is that that can really ruin someone's memory. It can change someone's memory the hypnotism. It can have them fill in gaps say things that they didn't actually remember, and so it's really unreliable and it can corrupt the whole process. So the shipyard security guard had given a description that was vague, but he was shown a composite drawing that the victim, the rape victim, had done with a police you know, artist, and she had said that that person looked ninety she was ninety five percent sure that that's what the rapists looked like, or some very high percentage. And they showed it to the shipyard security guard and he said, yeah, that looks like seventy five percent like the guy I saw walking into the shipyard. That composite drawing had no mustache, because the victim has said that the rapist was babyfaced. But after this guy was hypnotized, he changed his story. He changed the time that he said that he saw the guy. Now it was closer to five o'clock, which matched, you know, with the time that the rapists might have been coming back on the ship's convenient And then he later was shown a photograph or maybe a series of photos, including Keith's photo, after the police focused on Keith, and he picked Keith's photograph out and said that was the guy that I saw. 00:11:31 Speaker 1: They didn't have anything to go with. There was really no evidence in this trial. You know, there was no finger branch, there were you know, there was there was hardly nothing to go other than this bike mark stuff. That's what they you know, that's what they were relying on, and you know, like you said, it was unreliable. 00:11:50 Speaker 4: Keith actually had sort of an alibi because the victim had told the police that earlier in the day. You know, she was tacked at two o'clock in the morning, but the day before she had taken her kids to the swimming pool because this was in September, and there was a guy that she saw when she was getting in the car with her kids who was hitch hiking, and he was a sailor and he was angry that she didn't pick him up hitch hiking, so he swore at her and flipped her off. And she then said when she got home from swimming with her kids later, she saw what she thought was the same guy looking over her fence in her backyard. And when she told the police the next day, when you know, when they were interviewing her after the rape, she said she was pretty sure that the sailor she had seen the day before was her rapist and at the time that she saw the guy the second time looking over her back fence was at six pm. That's what she told the police. And at six pm Keith had an alibi. He was at an alcohol at education course he had signed in. The person who ran the course remembered Keith and verified that he was there in Norfolk, not in Newport News in Norfolk at the time that she saw the guy who looked like her rapist. Researchers who look at wrongful conviction cases they identify the same problems that happen in these cases over and over and over again, and there's about six of them that commonly occur, and one of them is poor representation by defense lawyers. In Keith's case, he actually hit the trifecta in a bad way because he had three of the common problems that arise in these wrongful conviction cases happened in his case junk science, misidentification, and the third one is prosecutorial and police misconduct that happens in a lot of cases, and in keith case, we haven't talked about that yet except for the hypnosis, but there was misconduct by law enforcement in his case, right. 00:14:00 Speaker 2: So he did certainly hit the wrong kind of try fact that you can't hit it any worse, and ended up serving thirty three years in prison. And let's let's talk about that, Keith. Every day's got to be held. But I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth because you share it. 00:14:15 Speaker 1: No, no, And people always say that, you know, they can't imagine, and it's with a good heart they say that, but truly they can't. You know, unless you've been there, you just don't. You just don't know. But what got me through was the fact that I knew I was innocent from day one, and I had hoped that they would discover it because, like I told you before, this is the United States of America. People don't get convicted for crimes they did not do. But they do, and I'm one of them. So all through the process of a trial, and even until I was in prison for a while, I was thinking, well, they're gonna figure this out. You know, they made a mistake, They're gonna figure this out. It didn't happen. But what got me through was was the fact that Okay, they already convicted me. They put me in prison, but I wasn't gonna allow those criminals. And when I speak of criminals, I'm talking about the the police officers and the prosecutors, the actual criminals of this case, besides a fellow that did it. I wasn't gonna let them exact another second from me. They had me, but they weren't gonna get my mind. And if I allowed them to make me punish myself even farther or do anything disruptive in my life, even though I was in prison, I was given them more, and I wasn't gonna give no more. I wasn't gonna do it. 00:15:43 Speaker 3: That's like a very spiritual approach. 00:15:46 Speaker 1: Well, it's a lot of staring at walls and wondering, Wow, what what just happened? I mean again, you can't you can't fathom what it's like. It's like, what was this happened? It's like a car wreck, you know, once all the movement is stopped and you're sitting there behind the wheel with the airbag under your chin, you're thinking wow. 00:16:18 Speaker 4: So Keith wrote to The Innocence Project. I think it might have been sometime in like two thousand and eight or something like that. 00:16:25 Speaker 1: I didn't know the existed. I was in prison. I didn't know these outfits existed. In another inmates said, hey, man, your story is so crazy. What'd you give the Insurance Project to try and write them a letter? So I wrote them a letter and said, hey, you know, there was no evidence. They convicted me on blite mark evidence alone. I didn't do it, you know, And that basically what the letter was, you know, you know, will you think right? 00:16:50 Speaker 4: So his letter got to the Innocence Project in New York. But they get letters from inmates all over the country, thousands of. 00:16:57 Speaker 3: Letters at least two months. 00:16:59 Speaker 4: Yeah, they have a backlog of several thousand inmates, you know, who've written to them, who they haven't yet had a chance or at that point hadn't had a chance to look at. The Innocence Project was looking at bitemark cases because it is junk science, and there have been twenty four now with Keith, twenty five people who had been indicted based on bitemark evidence and were later exonerated. So they were looking for cases that involved bite marks. So Keith's file got plucked from the middle or somewhere in the stack and put up to the top for someone to look at. And one of the law students I think or interns discovered that the evidence from Keith's case was still in existence, you know, the physical evidence like that. 00:17:46 Speaker 1: Which is the great marriage. 00:17:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, now you've gotten engaged. The Innocence Project has gone to scatt and right. 00:17:53 Speaker 4: Yeah, they reached out to me because. 00:17:55 Speaker 3: Which is like bringing in the big guns exactly I mean. 00:17:57 Speaker 4: And we put together this team and we started working with the Innocence Project because they'd found the evidence. It was this little box called a rape kit that has you know, swabs from the victim, you know, and and other evidence that the crime scene folks had taken and had been taken from the autopsy and the rape exam. And they were in the process of arranging to have that tested, and to their credit, the prosecutor or, the current prosecutor down in Newport News, agreed to have the evidence tested. 00:18:31 Speaker 3: That's good to hear. 00:18:32 Speaker 2: When you were first made aware of Keith's case by the NISS Project, how long did it take before you realized that you had an innocent man on your hands? 00:18:41 Speaker 4: You know, I've done a lot of this kind of work. And when we started looking into his case and we read the transcripts and we realized how weak a case of you know, the evidence was. The only evidence that the prosecutors used against Keith was this bitemark expert testimony, which at the time was thought to be an actual science that had validity, that was reliable, and you know a bunch of experts. There were two experts who testified in court and said. 00:19:12 Speaker 3: That there are four others. I think about that, right. 00:19:15 Speaker 2: If you're in a jury and you're sitting there and you go, wow, this guy's a forensic diss and he's got that. But we know now that it's it's really an unregulated, uh sort of practice. It's not certified by any particular You can be a forensic. 00:19:31 Speaker 3: Od on tolologist, but basically you get certified by your friends pretty much. 00:19:36 Speaker 1: Show up at the Shart and Old Friday, you know, Sunday to give you a diploma. 00:19:40 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's really well, here's the thing, you know, it's terrible. 00:19:43 Speaker 4: This science was actually developed not for use in court, like in a case for Keith, but when there's like a mass disaster and they find the remains of victims and included in the remains or you know, the teeth and the jaw, and then they want to try to identify that person. So they think they know who the victims are, but they're not sure who's who. Then they can look at dental records, but that's looking at, you know, someone's full set of teeth, like thirty two teeth in a john comparing that to X rays or other dental records. It's very different doing that, which is noble work. You know people who do that. But it's very different when you try to say, based on a blurry photograph of a woman's shin, to look at that where you know, if someone bites another person, maybe only four teeth make the bite mark six or two or whatever. Then to say with almost certainty that the person who bit that victim's leg was Keith Harwood is a very different matter. 00:20:49 Speaker 2: No, I've seen a case where they the bite bark evidence was the primary cause of the conviction, and it turned out later on that it wasn't even a human it was animal bibars. 00:20:59 Speaker 3: The victim had been thrown. 00:21:00 Speaker 1: In a scar inver a scar. One of the guys testified that it was a bite martin to turn out to be a scar from But that's what swayed that jury. So is when that character. Levine is his name. When he started getting up and giving all his props, he helped go. He went to Argentina for the mingle at, you know, the Nazi criminal guy when they found the skull and tried to identify that he was involved with that. There was an airplane crash in Hawaii, I think in seventy nine. He went to identify remains there. So he's up there and his arms are waving around, and the smoke starts to come and the lights and stuff, and you think, wow, we're not in Kansas anymore. I e. The Wizard of Oz. The jury is like, you know, they're sopping up the drool. Sure, and he says so the state brought him in. Sure. If he say so, he's got to be And. 00:21:58 Speaker 4: He said it with almost near certain He said that there was a very very very very high probability that Keith was the person who caused those bite marks. And another expert came in and said, there's nobody else in the world, or there's maybe he didn't say the world, but there's nobody else who could have caused these bite marks rather than other than Keith's dental impressions, which means it was Keith. I said before that there was you know, misconduct by law enforcement on the rape kit. At the time of this trial, and at the time of the crime, they had a rologist, someone who specializes in analyzing blood and other body fluids, examined the samples from the rape victim, including you know, vaginal samples, and they found semen on the victim's thoughts and on the vaginal swabs and other swabs that were taken, and they tested it for blood blood type. Because at the time there was no DNA testing. This was nineteen eighty three, his first trial, and then nineteen eighty six, his second trial, there was no DNA evidence report. So the roologist examined the evidence and issued a report, and the report said that on the swabs from the rape kit that it was inconclusive that they couldn't identify on the critical swabs the blood type and therefore it could have been Keith or it might not have been Keith. And that's what he testified to at trial. Well, when the Innocence Project in Scadden got involved in the case, we asked for records and among the records that we asked for, and again to the credit of the prosecutor. He was agreed to turn over information that had never been turned over before. We got the lab notes from the analyst. So he had issued a like a three page official report that essentially said no blood typing could be done on those critical swabs. But in his notes, in his lab notes, it showed that he did get a blood type that. 00:24:12 Speaker 1: Was not Keith's. 00:24:13 Speaker 4: It was Type old blood and Keith is Type A blood. 00:24:17 Speaker 1: So he I just got the chills if that would have been brought up at court, but it wouldn't have been a court, wouldn't been a trial. 00:24:23 Speaker 2: So now you've got your you've got your evidence, you've done you've done the digging, right, you and your team, the Innocence Project and their team. You've met with Keith play now right, and anybody that would meet him knows that he might be capable of telling a bad joke, but that's probably the worst crime that he's going to commit, you know. So, So now take us to that moment of. 00:24:49 Speaker 3: Justice finally being served. 00:24:50 Speaker 4: Sure, so, we had DNA testing done on the evidence that the Innocence Project had found, and the DNA results came back. First, they showed that the the rape sample evidence didn't match Keith, that there was an unknown male profile that didn't match Keith. Then we needed to do more testing because the victim was married and her husband was murdered, and we needed to make sure that the semen samples that were DNA tested didn't belong to him. And there was more DNA testing done, so we knew we had an innocent guy all along. Now we had DNA evidence, which I think you know, pretty much conclusively proved that, but we needed to make sure it wasn't matching the husband. And we got the test results back right as we had just filed the petition saying we had, you know, preliminary results, and the new testing not only showed that it wasn't Keith's DNA, it wasn't the victim's husband's DNA, but it showed whose DNA it was. The police originally suspected that a sailor on the USS Carl Vincent committed this crime. They were right about that because the DNA matched a guy who was a sailor on the USS Carl Vincent. His name is Jerry Kroty, and after he left the Navy, he went on with his life. Keith was in prison and He ended up Jerry Krotty committing other crimes, and he was in prison in Ohio for an abduction, which is another word for a kidnapping. He also had convictions for breaking into houses and he died in prison in two thousand and six, ten years before. His DNA was matched in multiple places on the victim from the rape kit, on her clothing she put on a T shirt after the rape. His DNA was found on the T shirt. His DNA was found on a towel that she wrapped around her after the rape. When the police came, she was wearing a towel and the rapist had put karate. Now we know his name is Karate. He had put a diaper, one of her children's diapers over her face when he was raping her, and his DNA was found on that daper. So there's absolutely no doubt that he was the rapist. 00:27:10 Speaker 1: Now consider her situation. Now she thinks the rapist is in prison me, so she can relax a little bit because he's not going to come back. Years later, thirty four years later, she finds out no, he was still out there running around and could have come back at any time, and she's got to relive this because those criminals in Newport News wanted a conviction, not the truth. So now all these years later, it comes back up, it's brought. It's like scrabbing a scab. She's got to relive that whole rape thing because it's on the news. It's everywhere that I'm being exonerated that I didn't do it. 00:27:57 Speaker 2: Right now, a guy who did this horrible thing to her family. 00:28:01 Speaker 1: Right could have still been out there and done more, and he did, but he could have come back. And for that woman, I feel for her. She was revictimized by those criminals in Newport News, by them short cutting and taking the easy way out, by not trying to find the right person. The guy Karate that did it was a wall when all his testing was going on about the bike marks and stuff. So what they do, Well, he's gone. We ain't got time to look for him. We got the guy here he is. 00:28:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, So and that's that's what happens. 00:28:31 Speaker 1: They're dead, all of them, but the sorologists are gone now, the prosecutor you know, and it's all about ego with them, you know. They get a hold of something. The detective in my case, Spinner, after that I was convicted. He took one of the moles and went to a foundry and had brass a brass mold of my teethmaide to make a paperweight wow for his desk. Now, how is that knowing what he did that I didn't do it? He had to know, Keith. 00:29:04 Speaker 2: You know, I'm a big fan of yours and I just I listened to you talk and I'm frankly in awe. Is there anything else, any closing thoughts you want to share with the audience. 00:29:15 Speaker 1: These organizations exist and the Innocent Projects and people don't know about them. I mean, you turn the TV on and they want Sally Scruthers want you to give dog money for dogs and stuff like that. But these organizations are no. I was in prison and didn't know about the Innocent Project. I had no clue and I was in prison of all places. We should know about these things. So the word needs to get out and people need to help. Because my heroes they get up every day, they washed their face, they brush their teeth and then put the caps on and they go out saving people. And that's the kind of people that we all should be about it. 00:29:56 Speaker 2: Don't forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you get your podcasts. 00:30:00 Speaker 1: It really helps. 00:30:01 Speaker 2: And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time Oscar nominade composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one