Convicted by False Forensic Evidence, Eddie Lee Howard, Jr. Exonerated From Mississippi Death Row After 26 Years

Eddie Lee Howard, Jr., con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death based on the false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny of a since dis­graced pros­e­cu­tion expert wit­ness, has been exon­er­at­ed after near­ly 26 years on Mississippi​’s death row. He is the 174^th for­mer death-row pris­on­er exon­er­at­ed in the U.S. since 1973 and the sixth in Mississippi. 

The Mississippi Supreme Court over­turned Howard’s con­vic­tion in August 2020, 26 years after he was first sen­tenced to death for the 1992 mur­der and alleged rape of an 84-year-old white woman. In an 8 – 1 deci­sion, the court held that dis­cred­it­ed bite-mark tes­ti­mo­ny, excul­pa­to­ry DNA evi­dence, ​“and the pauci­ty of oth­er evi­dence link­ing Howard to the mur­der” enti­tled him to a new tri­al. Howard was freed pend­ing retri­al in December 2020 (see picture).

On January 8, 2021, the tri­al court grant­ed a motion by Lowndes County District Attorney Scott Colom to dis­miss all charges against Howard. ​“After read­ing the supreme court’s opin­ion, read­ing the tri­al tran­scripts from the two tri­als, review­ing the inves­tiga­tive files and case files of the case, I decid­ed that we did­n’t have even remote­ly close to suf­fi­cient evi­dence to con­vict Mr. Howard beyond a rea­son­able doubt,” Colom said.

Howard was rep­re­sent­ed by lawyers from the Mississippi Innocence Project and the nation­al Innocence Project. The Mississippi Innocence Project’s found­ing direc­tor, Tucker Carrington, called Howard’s exon­er­a­tion ​“a bit­ter­sweet vic­to­ry.” ​“We’re thrilled that Mr. Howard will final­ly have his free­dom and some sem­blance of jus­tice,” Carrington said, ​“but he has lost near­ly three decades of his life fac­ing exe­cu­tion because the sys­tem failed. His case reminds us that there is still much work to be done to sup­port Mr. Howard and oth­ers like him who have lost pre­cious years of their lives to wrongful convictions.”

Howard was first con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1994 in a tri­al in which he rep­re­sent­ed him­self. The Mississippi Supreme Court over­turned that con­vic­tion in 1997 and ordered a new tri­al. He was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death again in a retri­al in 2000 at which foren­sic odon­tol­o­gist Dr. Michael West tes­ti­fied that Howard was the source of bite marks he claimed to have found on the victim’s body dur­ing a post-autop­sy, post-exhuma­tion exam­i­na­tion of her body. Forensic pathol­o­gist Dr. Steven Hayne con­duct­ed the autop­sy in the case and claimed that the vic­tim had been beat­en, stran­gled, stabbed, and raped. His ini­tial autop­sy report did not men­tion bite marks.

Howard’s lawyers pre­sent­ed DNA evi­dence dur­ing post-con­vic­tion evi­den­tiary hear­ings in 2016 that evis­cer­at­ed the prosecution’s false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny. DNA test­ing showed no evi­dence of semen or male DNA on the victim’s cloth­ing, bed­sheets, or body and no male DNA on the loca­tions on the victim’s body where she sup­pos­ed­ly had been bit­ten. None of the blood or oth­er items test­ed con­tained Howard’s DNA. Male DNA found on the knife used by the mur­der­er exclud­ed Howard as the source. 

Prosecutors had suc­cess­ful­ly opposed Howard’s efforts to over­turn his con­vic­tion in the tri­al court. On appeal, they argued that Howard’s con­vic­tion should stand, despite the false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny and new DNA evi­dence, because Howard alleged­ly had made an incrim­i­nat­ing state­ment to a police detec­tive that ​“the case is solved“ and admit­ting he ​“had a tem­per and that’s why this hap­pened.” The Mississippi Supreme Court agreed that the alleged state­ment was ​“pecu­liar and sus­pi­cious,” but not­ed that the state­ment con­tained no details about the crime, had not been record­ed or heard by any­one else, and the detec­tive did not sub­se­quent­ly ask Howard to put in writ­ing. Viewed in the con­text of all of the new evi­dence, the court said, the state­ment did ​“not amount to a confession.”

In 2018, in their book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Carrington and Washington Post colum­nist Radley Balko exposed the broad impact of junk sci­ence tes­ti­mo­ny from Hayne and West in tri­als in Mississippi and else­where in the South. According to the Mississippi Innocence Project, Howard was the fourth per­son con­vict­ed of cap­i­tal mur­der in Mississippi based upon their false foren­sic tes­ti­mo­ny. In 2008, the Innocence Project exon­er­at­ed death-row pris­on­er Kennedy Brewer and his co-defen­dant Levon Brooks, who had been sen­tenced to life, after DNA test­ing exclud­ed them and iden­ti­fied the actual killer.