2017/02/16
The Roanoke Times February 14, 2017: Keith Harward lashes out at field of forensic dentistry that helped wrongly convict him
NEW ORLEANS — If you are innocent, three decades in prison is a long time to think about the people who put you there.
Keith Allen Harward had a lot bottled up, and he let it loose Monday at the largest annual gathering of its kind in the world, the 69th annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
“I’m not here to make any friends,” began Harward, who was sent behind bars for rape and murder largely on the erroneous testimony of two forensic dentists, known as forensic odontologists.
At a conference workshop Monday with a number of forensic dentists listening, Harward, his voice rising, said, “This stuff is all crap. It’s bogus. This bite mark stuff is bogus. Why even continue with it? It just doesn’t make sense.
“Thirty-four years thinking, ‘Wow, what just happened?’ ” he said of his convictions.
“You’re taking people’s lives in your hands and guessing, ‘Well, I say it is so, so it’s got to be.’ There’s no Gods in here. So why do it?”
He said the only motives he could think of were “money and ego.”
The workshop, “Taking a Bite Out of Crime and Other Hairy Situations,” concerned shortcomings in forensic bite mark and hair analysis exposed by DNA exonerations and outside studies in recent years. more