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Thread: Eddie Lee Howard, Jr. - Mississippi

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    Eddie Lee Howard, Jr. - Mississippi




    Summary of Offense:

    Convicted and sentenced to death on two separate occasions by a jury for raping and murdering 84-year-old Georgia Kemp in 1992.

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On January 18, 2007, Howard filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/mis...cv00010/25784/

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    DNA testing ordered in capital murder case

    A Lowndes County Circuit Court judge has signed an order to have DNA evidence collected in a Columbus murder case sent to a lab for further testing.

    The order, dated February 26, 2013, was filed Wednesday as part of a federal habeas appeal for an evidentiary hearing by Eddie Lee Howard, Jr.

    Howard, 59, is on death row after he was convicted of capital murder in the death of Georgia Kemp, 82, in February of 1992.

    Authorities say bite marks on the victim and other evidence linked Howard to her death.

    In 2010, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered the evidence to be tested again as part of a claim by Howard new evidence would prove his innocence.

    The evidence collected is being sent to a lab in Texas for DNA testing and will be compared to new DNA samples collected from Howard.

    The testing will be paid for by the Innocence Project.

    http://www.wtva.com/news/local/story...A2p9w07iA.cspx
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    Mississippi Death Row Case Faults Bite-Mark Forensics

    By ERIK ECKHOLM
    The New York Times

    In one of the country’s first nationally televised criminal trials, of the smirking serial murderer Ted Bundy in Florida in 1979, jurors and viewers alike were transfixed as dental experts showed how Mr. Bundy’s crooked teeth resembled a bite on a 20-year-old victim.

    Mr. Bundy was found guilty and the obscure field of “forensic dentistry” won a place in the public imagination.

    Since then, expert testimony matching body wounds with the dentition of the accused has played a role in hundreds of murder and rape cases, sometimes helping to put defendants on death row.

    But over this same period, mounting evidence has shown that matching body wounds to a suspect’s dentition is prone to bias and unreliable.

    A disputed bite-mark identification is at the center of an appeal that was filed Monday with the Mississippi Supreme Court. Eddie Lee Howard Jr., 61, has been on death row for two decades for the murder and rape of an 84-year-old woman, convicted largely because of what many experts call a far-fetched match of his teeth to purported bite wounds, discerned only after the woman’s body had been buried and exhumed.

    The identification was made by Dr. Michael West, a Mississippi dentist who was sought out by prosecutors across the country in the 1980s and 1990s but whose freewheeling methods “put a huge black eye on bite-mark evidence,” in the words of Dr. Richard Souviron, a Florida-based dental expert who helped identify Mr. Bundy in 1979, in an interview last week.

    Since 2000, at least 17 people convicted of murder or rape based on “expert” bite matches have been exonerated and freed, usually because DNA tests showed they had been wrongfully accused, according to research by The Innocence Project in New York. Dr. West was the expert witness in two of those cases.

    In six additional cases, one involving Dr. West and one involving Dr. Souviron, indictments and arrests linked to bite-mark identifications were dropped after new evidence showed that the matches were wrong.

    Still, without glaring new proof of innocence, courts have been reluctant to reopen cases based on even the most dubious of dental claims, leaving scores more defendants with questionable convictions to languish in prison or on death row, said Chris Fabricant, the Innocence Project’s director of strategic litigation.

    One of them is Mr. Howard. His appeal cites the scientific consensus that bite-mark identifications are unreliable, and questions the methods used by Dr. West. The appeal to reverse his conviction, prepared by the Mississippi Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi, also cites newly completed DNA testing that found no traces of Mr. Howard on the murder weapon, the body or elsewhere at the crime scene.

    Georgia Kemp, a reclusive 84-year-old in Columbus, Miss., had been stabbed to death and was partially dressed when police found her body among smoldering fires in her rundown house in 1992. The medical examiner found bruises “consistent with” rape but no hair or semen to prove it.

    In the absence of fingerprints or witnesses, it was understandable when the police turned to Mr. Howard as a person of interest: Only four months earlier, he had gone to Columbus after spending most of the two previous decades in prison for attempted rapes.

    But soon enough, an arguably shoddy process of justice began.

    Mr. Howard had a history of mental illness and he made a series of seemingly incriminating, if contradictory and irrational, statements that made him the prime suspect. Though no confession was recorded or written down, he reportedly told one police officer that “the case is solved” and that “I had a temper and that’s why this happened,” even as he said that six others were involved and he failed to recognize Ms. Kemp’s house.

    Three days after Ms. Kemp was buried, the medical examiner had her exhumed so that Dr. West could look for bite marks using a fluorescent light method he had developed. He said he found three bites and — without showing any photographs or other evidence — testified at trial that Mr. Howard was the biter “to a reasonable medical certainty.”

    Adding to the circumstantial evidence, Mr. Howard’s girlfriend said he had bitten her during sex and that he smelled like smoke the day after the murder.

    Mr. Howard, who steadfastly maintained his innocence after those initial ramblings, defended himself, disastrously, at his trial in 1992, resulting in a speedy guilty verdict and sentence of death.

    He was retried in 2000 after the Mississippi Supreme Court said he had been incompetent to represent himself. But his new court-ordered lawyers hardly did better, failing to call any witnesses at his new trial, not even a forensic expert to counter the prosecutor’s assertion that Dr. West was “a pioneer, a visionary” who had made a positive identification “just like a fingerprint.”

    The death sentence was reimposed and the Supreme Court has refused so far to reopen his conviction. In a 2006 ruling, the court said: “Just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot, does not mean, without something more, that he was wrong here.” The court did agree in 2010 to order DNA testing of the knife and other crime scene objects, with new results described as exculpatory in Mr. Howard’s newest appeal.

    Dr. West retired as an expert witness several years ago to a dental practice in Hattiesburg, after, according to his résumé, investigating more than 5,200 deaths and more than 300 bite marks over 29 years.

    In a deposition in 2012, Dr. West indicated a striking shift in thinking, saying he no longer believed that bite marks were as unique as fingerprints, that bite-mark analysis was open to error and that with the availability of DNA testing it should not be used in court.

    In a telephone interview, Dr. West sought to play down his role in convicting Mr. Howard, saying, “I didn’t put him on death row, the state of Mississippi did.”

    But of his testimony in the case, Dr. West said, “The evidence I collected, the analysis I performed, I still stand on that opinion unless new evidence is given to me.”

    Dr. West added that humans made mistakes and that he opposed the death penalty. “If you’ve got them locked up it’s not possible for them to kill a 3-year-old or an 84-year-old,” he said. “If you kill them, you can’t undo a mistake.”

    The lack of a scientific basis for bite-mark identification was stressed by the National Academy of Sciences in a 2009 report on forensics. The academy said that such analysis could not reliably identify one individual, among all others, as the source of a bite.

    Bite marks on the skin change over time and are easily distorted, the academy said, while there is a huge potential for bias when an expert is asked to match a bite wound with the teeth of a known suspect.

    Dr. Peter W. Loomis, a consultant in dental forensics in Albuquerque and president of the discipline’s professional body, the American Board of Forensic Odontology, did not dispute the academy’s conclusions but said that bite-mark analysis still had a useful role in court.

    The board has begun scientific studies, he said, to establish whether and when it can produce reliable identifications. A narrowing of the pool of likely suspects might be possible, for example, when the bite marks are clear and obvious, when the number of potential biters is known and limited, and if suspects have contrasting dental patterns.

    To combat bias, he said, current guidelines call for “double blind” procedures in which the same expert does not both study the wound and take dental impressions from the suspect, and the suspect’s dental model is mixed among several others before any comparison is made.

    Even so, he said, “actually naming an individual biter to a reasonable degree of certainty should be very limited.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/us...ions.html?_r=0

  5. #5
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    On June 23, 2015, oral argument will be heard in Howard's appeal before the Mississippi Supreme Court.

    https://courts.ms.gov/appellate_cour...r/scs32015.pdf

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    Bite-mark expert dismisses own testimony

    By Jerry Mitchell
    The Clarion-Ledger

    The expert whose bite-mark evidence led a jury to put Eddie Lee Howard Jr. on Mississippi’s death row now believes such evidence should be tossed.

    “I no longer believe in bite-mark analysis,” forensic odontologist Michael West of Hattiesburg testified in a 2012 deposition. “I don’t think it should be used in court. I think you should use DNA. Throw bite marks out.”

    On Tuesday, lawyers from the Mississippi Innocence Project will argue to the state Supreme Court that Howard deserves a new trial. The state says justices have already rejected these arguments in a previous appeal.

    Howard, who turns 62 on Saturday, remains on death row, convicted of the 1992 rape and stabbing death of 84-year-old Georgie Kemp of Columbus.

    Recently performed DNA tests reveal the presence of male DNA (other than Howard) on the bloody knife found at the murder scene. DNA tests on the nightgown and the rape kit have excluded Howard as well.

    There was no DNA evidence presented at his trial. Instead, West became the major witness to link Howard to the crime, testifying a bite mark he found on her body — after it had been exhumed —uniquely matched Howard’s teeth.

    West told jurors he could tell from another mark that Kemp was “fighting for her life” when this bite was inflicted. It was unclear how he supposedly knew this.

    For many years, much of West’s work went unchallenged, and he bragged of his accuracy, once declaring his error rate was “something less than my Savior, Jesus Christ.”

    But in the years since, his work has been discredited. His bite-mark identifications implicating Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer led to their wrongful convictions.

    Together, the two Mississippi men spent a total of more than three decades behind bars until DNA proved them innocent and identified the real culprit, Justin Albert Johnson, now imprisoned for raping and killing the two 3-year-old girls.

    Even after their exonerations in 2008, West insisted to The Clarion-Ledger that his bite-mark identifications of Brooks and Brewer were correct.

    For decades, courts recognized him as an expert in bite marks, wound patterns, gunshot residue, crime scene reconstructions, blood spatters, ultraviolet photography and child abuse.

    In trial after trial, he told jurors dental impressions were as unique as fingerprints, giving jurors the idea crimes could be solved strictly by identifying bite marks on bodies.

    In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, concluding there was no basis in science for forensic odontologists to conclude someone is “the biter,” excluding all other suspects.

    Four years later, the American Board of Forensic Odontology changed its guidelines to bar such testimony.

    A recent study by the group found wide variances in opinions among experts studying photographs of bite marks, many of them disagreeing on patterns and even if they were human bite marks.

    An Associated Press analysis in 2013 found at least two dozen defendants convicted or charged with rape and murder using bite-mark evidence have been exonerated since 2000 — many after spending more than a decade in prison.

    West has told The Clarion-Ledger the science behind bite marks “is not as exact as I had hoped.”

    On Feb. 2, 1992, fire fighters responded to a fire, and when they did, they found Kemp dead and partly undressed in her Columbus home.

    She had been beaten, stabbed to death and the trauma suggested she had been sexually assaulted. A rape kit found no semen.

    Six days later, authorities charged Howard, a sex offender just released from prison, with the crime.

    After sitting in jail a week, Howard, described in documents as having mental issues, wrote a note to a deputy, wanting to be taken to the crime scene, saying it “might bring back some memories to him” and that “the case was solved.”

    But when Howard was taken there, he told the officer that it “did not bring back any memories.” Howard again repeated that “the case was solved” and that “five or six other individuals” had been involved and to “keep investigating the case.”

    An officer testified Howard asked if he thought he was crazy: “I said, ‘No man, I don’t think you’re crazy,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m not. I’m not crazy. I had a temper, and that’s why this happened.’ ”

    The officer testified he believed this was a confession.

    After working with Howard, his court-appointed lawyers talked of their client’s paranoid behavior, one of them telling the judge, “I’m not sure he’s capable of assisting in his own defense much less carrying his own defense out … I do not feel that this defendant is in touch with reality.”

    Despite that, the judge let Howard represent himself at trial, ending in his conviction and death sentence.

    The trial proved such a disaster the state Supreme Court in 1994 ordered a new trial. Justices concluded Howard was incompetent to represent himself and that numerous articles had raised questions about the reliability of bite-mark identification.

    In the second trial, now represented by defense counsel, Howard heard a new witness, his former girlfriend Kayfen Fulgham testify that during sex, he sometimes bit her.

    The day after the murder, she said Howard smelled “like burnt clothes or something, you know, wood, like smoke.”

    When she asked Howard about it, she said “he just brushed it off.”

    None of these claims can be found in her original two-page statement to police.

    In his closing statement, District Attorney Forrest Allgood praised West as a visionary.

    “The progress of mankind has been carried forward on the backs of people like Michael West,” he said. “The church threatened to burn Copernicus (actually Galileo) because he dared to say that the planets didn’t revolve around the earth. So it was with Michael West.”

    The jury convicted Howard, and once again, he was sentenced to death.

    This time on appeal, the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction, rejecting the claim that defense counsel had been incompetent in failing to call a single witness, including a witness to rebut West’s identification.

    Three forensic odontologists, hired by the defense on appeal, concluded three bite marks West pointed out in this case aren’t visible in autopsy photographs, “nor were the alleged bite marks visible by the naked eye or noted in the autopsy report.”

    Instead, West testified he saw the marks by using an ultraviolet light — a technique they questioned.

    At trial, Howard’s defense lawyers failed to call any of his family to ask jurors to spare his life.

    If they had, Howard’s sister, Pearlie Mae Howard, said she would have told jurors she “never knew Eddie to be violent or have a mean streak. … I never saw anything like that out of Eddie.”

    New DNA tests conducted in Kemp’s murder could provide additional clues. The results have never been tested against other possible suspects.

    Between 1996 and 1998, five other senior citizens were killed in their homes in Columbus.

    Authorities discovered the body of 61-year-old Robert Hannah on Oct. 13, 1998, when his house caught on fire — the same as Kemp’s house. Two other victims were stabbed, just as Kemp was.

    No one has ever been prosecuted for the killings.

    If ever called to the witness stand again, West testified he would have to say that bite-mark identifications aren’t reliable enough to be used in court. “I can no longer rely on bite marks as a truth.”

    http://www.clarionledger.com/story/n...mony/29045605/

  7. #7
    Ella
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    Did anyone watch the oral arguments?

    The MSC allowed Tucker Carrington (MIP) to go 20 minutes over time. Very unusual.

    Apparently at issue is the fact that there were no bite marks at all in Howard's case.

    The state doesn't dispute this, their assertion is that it is not "newly discovered evidence".

    Mississippi uses that and "procedurally barred by time" often.

    The state showed once again that they do not care if the condemned is innocent or guilty.

    I think the MSC will overturn Howard and rightfully so. He at least deserves an untainted trial without charlatans like West or Hayne testifying.

  8. #8
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    Lowndes man sentenced to death may get new trial

    A Lowndes County man on death row may go before a trial court that will look at new evidence and determine whether or not the evidence will produce a different result or lead to a different sentence.

    The Mississippi Innocence Project asked the Supreme Court of Mississippi to reexamine the case of convicted killer Eddie Lee Howard, who in 1992 was found guilty of the rape and murder of Columbus woman Georgia Kemp. On Aug. 4, the Supreme Court ruled Howard may file a petition for post-conviction relief in the trial court. The trial court will hold an evidentiary hearing on whether or not newly discovered evidence in Howard's case could lead to a different result or sentencing.

    Howard, now 61, was tried twice in Lowndes County for the 1992 rape and stabbing death of 82-year-old Georgia Kemp of Columbus. Evidence against him included bite marks on the woman's body. Dr. Michael West, a forensic odontologist, testified the bite marks matched impressions of Howard's teeth.

    The Mississippi Supreme Court threw out his 1994 capital murder conviction and death sentence, ruling the prosecutor's reliance on the bite marks was unsound. The court upheld the conviction and death sentence from his second trial, in 2000. Between those trials, the court ruled that bite-mark evidence can be used in Mississippi.

    The bite-mark analysis was the only physical evidence presented in Howard's trial linking him to Kemp's murder.

    Bite-mark evidence is no longer recognized as scientific in many legal circles according to attorneys from the Mississippi Innocence Project, and at least two dozen people convicted of rape and murder as a result of bite-mark analysis have been exonerated in the last 15 years.

    http://www.cdispatch.com/news/articl...#ixzz3i936vQEt
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  9. #9
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    Evidentiary hearings were due to take place Jan. 14 & 15.

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    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Death row inmate challenges bite mark conviction

    A death row inmate is challenging bite mark evidence used to convict him of a 1992 slaying.

    The hearing is ongoing this week after the Mississippi Supreme Court last year instructed a lower court to determine if Howard's arguments justify a new trial.

    Howard, now 62, was convicted and sentenced to death in the slaying of 84-year-old Georgia Kemp of Columbus. Evidence against him included bite marks on her body.

    The Commercial Dispatch reported that Iain Pretty, a professor of dentistry from the University of Manchester in England, testified Wednesday that bite marks are no longer seen as a valid way to identify someone.

    Pretty referenced a 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that bite marks could not be used to reliably identify an individual.

    http://www.wapt.com/news/mississippi...ction/39397732
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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