the reason that we are here this afternoon, we're here to hear from mr. chris fabricant. who is the director of strategic litigation for the innocence project and one of the nation's leading experts on forensic sciences and the criminal justice system. mr. fabricant's book junk science and the american criminal justice system chronicles the prosecution of individuals who were found guilty of capital murder. and the fight to overturn those wrongful convictions he weaves together the courtroom battles from mississippi to texas to new york. and beyond and mr. fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken racist justice justice system and the role that forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. and joining mr. fabricant for this conversation and moderating. it is allison leota montgomery county's own. she is a former federal prosecutor turned author who has been dubbed the female john grisham and also serves on the board of directors for the mystery writers of america and what i actually enjoy about listening to them in a few moments and the journeys that they have been on before becoming a lawmaker here in montgomery county. i used to be a journalist. i worked at cnn for 12 years and it's conversations like this that help inform me and help inform the public about what we need to do better to make our community a more fair and equitable place and to build the movements to make that change possible and so without further ado i would like to turn over the conversation to these two. so, thank you very much. thank you evan, and i would like to just add that i'm working on making john grisham called the awesome leota. i'm really excited to be here today with chris fabricant. he has written not just an important book and when i think you should all read because of what it talks about and how it critiques our system. but also it's a thriller it reads like a thriller like all of my colleagues are trying to make happen. i listen to it on tape with my 15 year old son. it was appropriate for him. it's it's a little graphic, but it's good. i recommend you all buy it. i am gonna give a little content warning there are tents out there that have ponies and sparkles. this is not that tent we're gonna be talking about capital punishments death penalty bite marks rapes murders. so buckle up chris welcome to dc. thank you to be here you have you do such important work. and your book hold me in from the very. moment you start with the story of keith allen harward and you start with every woman's worst nightmare scenario. tell us what happened to teresa perron. yes, teresa perron in the summer of 1982 was living with her husband jesse in newport news virginia near the navy shipyard that's there. he jesse parone was a welder on the ships. he was working on the uss carl vinson, which was dry docked in newport news at the time and she was 22 year old mother of three. she had three kids. they're all under five years old. she spent a late sunday afternoon in september. taking your kids to the pool doing laundry and during the course of that day. she was in a car and she passed a sailor hitchhiking on the side of the road, which wasn't unusual at that time. there were a lot of sailors in newport news or in fact thousands of sailors in newport news. and she didn't start to give him a ride and he yelled -- at her and threw the window and it was kind of unsettling and but she didn't think much more about it when i'm through the course of her day. later that night. she put her children to bed and she went to bed upstairs and then down the hall she went to bed in her own room, and she felt uneasy and she was kind of had this memory of what had happened earlier in the day and also let me go back a little bit and later that afternoon. there had been a moment where she was out in her backyard, and she was hanging up the laundry to dry. and another sailor suddenly was in at her back gate making eye contact with her kind of staring at her and her instincts told her that this was not a friendly stare. and so she called her children back in the house and then later that night. she was having these memories of the day and it was making your own settle so she went downstairs. and she bolted the back door with the two by four. just slid that over and that was her husband's usual entry into the house. and she went to lay down on the couch and just kind of wait for jesse to come home and he doesn't come home until around midnight. he works the late shift. here's or not. she hears a knock on the door around one in the morning and she runs the door and it is jesse. she's relieved he spent some time together. they go upstairs to bed. she finally falls asleep. sometime between one in the morning and two maybe three in the morning. she's woken again by the sound of a loud thumping or noise and a sailor standing over their bed. with the crowbar waved above his hand above his shoulder and he brought it down on jesse peron's head and beat him to death of the crowbar while she was lying on the floor next to him and he had his boots under she was under his boots and he held her down why he killed her husband. and then spent the next three hours actually torturing her on various locations around the house and warranted that if she made any sound that her children would be next. so she never made a noise she endured this torture both upstairs next to her dying husband and then downstairs in their living room on the couch and on the couch with the final assault occurred the perpetrator had bitten up and down her thighs very painful deep injuries. finally, he was finished he put her in the bottom of a sleeping bag and asked her for directions to norfolk. he rummaged through her purse stole whatever money she had. and left the teresa went back upstairs. she got her rifle and called the police her children had slept through the entire ordeal. and then at the hospital they took what's known parochially as a rape kit and many many photographs of the the bite marks on. but during the course as assault the sailor had put a diaper over her head to prevent her from looking at his face and when he walked around the house he held her from behind and so she couldn't see his face. and downstairs it was dark and so she really never got to look at him so she couldn't identify the person who had done this except for that. he was a sailor apparently of low ranking judging from the chevrons on his sleeve. and there were no fingerprints. there was no blood evidence of any to speak of there was no eyewitnesses. there was no particular suspect other than somebody that was white was about five ten weighed about 170 pounds, and that was really the only evidence that they had half the guys in this right and at the time it just accurately described generally about 3,000 sailors on the uss carl vinson at the time. so, where do you go from here? right is that they have one of the most sensational rape murders in the history of our news they have no suspects. well, they have a thousands of suspects. and so what they did is that they decided that they would bite mark evidence had just been introduced in the american criminal legal system made very famous by the ted bundy trial and something else that i go into at some length in the book is how ted bundy really made bite marks, you know a mainstream science. and they decided what they were going to do is they were going to flag everybody every sailor on the uss carl vinson who matched the description generally they were going to get outlines of their teeth their dentition. and they're going to try to compare those teeth to the bite marks on teresa peron's thighs. so a dental dragnet if you will which had never been accomplished before and never been tried before and this is really the only lead that they thought that they had to go on. and keep that one heartward was stationed. he was a sailor in the us navy he served on honorably. he was 27 years old. his teeth were flagged as a potential biter, but the two dentists that examinated at that time had excluded him as a potential source of the bite marks. another month went by us senators two us senators including the senator from virginia and senator from new york alfons tomato, some of you my age and older would remember who he is putting pressure on newport news in the navy to make an arrest. so there was a tent activity in this investigation, but it really wasn't getting anywhere until you see this in a lot of wrongful conviction cases is that there'll be one fact one thing that will change the course of an investigation and suddenly you have a suspect and suddenly you start painting a bull's eye around the target and that's what happened to keith harword. keith harword was in a drunken dispute with his girlfriend. he she hit him with a frying pan and he bit her on the shoulder and ended up getting arrested. so the police get wind of this sailor roughly matching. corruption, they ignore the fact that keith harward had a mustache at the time and the perpetrator was clean shaven, but apart from that. he looked good for it because he was a known biter now and so what they did is they get a very famous forensic dentist and ascendant celebrity at the time who had also testified in the ted bundy case. to come down to newport news and see what's what see if we can match this this sailor who was the biter and probable killer to this bite mark low, levine did after about 24 hours of study then he contacted another forensic dentist to concurred. the prosecution went back to the original dentist who had excluded him and they had all this new information right that these two other, you know board certified forensic odontologist, which is what the forensic dentist called themselves when they're in court because it sounds sciencey. they both changed their minds and decided that keith harward was good for the biter. the defense went to two more experts and because those experts also knew that four forensic dentists had all come to the same conclusion. they agreed with the prosecution experts. so keith owen harword went to trial for capital murder and had no defense expert not that it would have mattered and many many most almost all the wrongful convictions that i talked about there were defense experts that were disputing the prosecuting experts, but the defense experts are usually not credited and they weren't or they weren't available and mr. hardware space. and really the only reason that he was an executed was because his parents got on the witness stand and begged for his life, and it was the only time that keith allen harwood had ever seen his father weak in his entire life and then he went away for the next 34 years. fast forward i started at the innocence project in 2012. and the strategic litigation department, and i think we're going to talk about some of the beginnings of this department at the innocence project a little bit. later. was tasked with litigating the leading contributing factors to wrongful conviction. so what we know from dna exonerations is that eyewitness misidentification is the leading contributing factor and number two right behind that is the missed of forensic sciences. junk science if you will. and so what we decided when we were going to begin this type of litigation because we'd always done only dna litigation right that we're going to take cases and if we could find biological evidence and test it at that would prove innocence then we would take the case. that was our soul criteria. no matter how many witnesses there might be or confessions or whatever just that dna was this truth serum that peter newfell been very shack recognized and when they started the innocence project here we're going to do something a little bit different. we're going to look for prisoners that have been convicted on junk science, and i tasked my paralegals my brilliant paralegals with finding every case in the country where bite mark evidence had been used and so we took capital cases. we took misdem. cases, we took pretrial cases. we took posthumous cases and during the course of that search, which was nationwide and continues to this day because we're still finding them. a my paralegal came across keith owen hard words appeal to the virginia supreme court you could look up this appeal on online if you wish and he put it on my desk at the innocence project when we're looking for these cases and i read this, you know most appeals and you would be familiar with this too. is that if they're affirming it conviction particularly a brutal crime like this they tended to dwell on the suffering of the victim and just all how obvious it is that the defendant is guilty and dismissing these claims and this wasn't that it was strange in that it wasn't this full-throated endorsement of his conviction and if you were skeptical about bite mark evidence, which of course i was he seemed innocent just from reading the appeal that affirmed his conviction. he seemed like there was almost evidence against him teresa never identified him as the perpetrator. she in a very suggestive context in a courtroom. there had been nothing else tying him to the scene except for those bite marks. is it fair to say he was convicted almost entirely based on the bike mark testimony entirely, you know, i mean there was one you know and you see this in a lot of the cases that i write about and a lot of the work that i do is that they'll be the main component which will be something like by marx and then they'll have some extra some throw in and in this case what they did and is they hypnotized a they hit tries teresa perron and they hit in the ties the night watchman outside of the uss carl vinson. because he had seen a sailor coming back from the it was saturday night. no sunday night. there was a came back late and a blood spattered uniform. and so to make this but the timing hadn't worked the first time they went for him like that. that sailor was probably not. the perpetrator because it would have been too early. so they hypnotized him after hypnosis the time train the frame changed. he identified keith harward as somebody that was coming back from a very late night out in a blood spattered uniform and they had used dog sent evidence, which has been implicated in a bunch of wrongful convictions, too to track the perpetrator from the house to the uss. carl vinson said the convince him that it was probably this person and that that was keith howard. and so those were that was it, you know me and that was enough to do it. you know, i mean, and and i think that had we not found dna evidence he be in prison still today and dead. so let's back up then and talk about the bite mark evidence. this thing that i think was presented almost like fingerprints like we've made a match we can tell i think they use the term to a reasonable degree of dental certainty. whatever like that means he's right. what does that mean? that keith harwood is the guy who bit teresa from thighs. tell us about what does that mean and how tell us about the guild of dentists? who? came forward and were presenting themselves as experts who could use bite marks the same way that fingerprint analysts use fingerprints. yeah. so one of the both in for litigation and for writing this book, i was very interested in the kind of the origin of bite mark evidence. like where did this come from who invented it? how did it get into the criminal justice system to begin with? i actually had to file a lawsuit against the department of justice to get into the american board of forensic odin talaji's archive, which is in silver spring, maryland. because they weren't gonna let me in and because i'm a critic right and so they i filed the first amendment claim to get into the archive and i found a trove of documents that kind of illuminated what they were doing and what was happening. or in the 70s is that forensic scientists were becoming celebrities? becoming a field that you could aspire to be forensic scientist. that didn't really exist before there wasn't really an organized effort to have a guild, you know the structure or a board certification for something like friends that go to intology. but the forensic dentists where always with us, they've been with us for hundreds of years and what they've been doing is identifying dead bodies, right? so if you hear about a body that's burned beyond recognition that's identified by dental records. that's your friendly neighborhood for friends that go to intologist doing good work, you know, basically valid work, you know, identifying human remains. usually it works with notable exceptions where people have showed up alive that were pronounced dead, but the but they weren't and they were working in mortuaries and in medical examiner offices next to forensic pathologists, and the forensic pathologists were becoming stars, right? it was the era of quincy, you know that you know has been the the probably the leading miss. you know the misleading use of forensic. begins with quincy and extends all the way to csi today, but it was becoming something that people wanted to do and the dentist definitely wanted to get into court and be testifying his expert witnesses and they started looking at bite mark evidence as a way to do it that this could be used to identify the bider and therefore the perpetrator we could become expert witnesses and we could be in court, you know solving crimes, you know pursuing justice, you know and making some money and let's set this in time. when did this kind of guild of dentists start? so in 1972 a group of about eight forensic dentists went to a meeting at the american academy of forensic sciences, which is a huge organization that has over 5,000 members worldwide. that's kind of like the aba for lawyers. this is the aba for forensics scientists. and what they managed to do is establish a forensic odontology section. you know me right shoulders shoulder with fingerprint experts and and pathology and all the other, you know leading forensic fields. which gave them an anchor credential? and then they decided they were going to invent something called the american board of forensic odontology and start giving themselves board certifications and you never had to prove that you could identify a bite mark as such or that you could match somebody to a bite mark or demonstrate that you could actually do this. well you had to do is memorize the methodology, right? so, how do we do it? how do we take the mold? how do we match them to teeth? you know, i mean that kind of thing even though there was no evidence any but it worked. but they would start board certifying each other. and so then you would get into court and you're president of the american board of forensicoontology and your board certified forensic dentist, and that you're a member of the american academy of forensic sciences, and that's very impressive sciency sounding credentials. so if you're a judge and you're considering whether or not you're going to emit expert witness testimony like a lot of us they look at credentials. say oh this guy. a board certified forensic gordontologist. member of this organization and that organization. we don't have gone beneath the layer. and so what they did and and two of the forensic dentists were lawyers. so they knew the value of precedent and they found the perfect first case and from that first case they managed to get it into court and then it spread like a virus around the country without any research to back up any of the claims and about four years after the first bite mark case was used ted bundy came along. and the research that i did into the bundy case, which i didn't know that much about of course. i knew who ted was but the i i read every article that had reported on ted bundy's crime spree from seattle to when he got to the coyote omega sorority house in florida state univ