<\/p>\n
Alabama attorney Larry Grissett<\/span> was checking Facebook in late September when he saw a news story about a man he represented in a murder trial more than 40 years ago. According to the article<\/a>, a federal judge had just vacated the conviction of that client, Charles McCrory.<\/p>\n Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: \u201cVindication.\u201d<\/p>\n McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent \u2014 and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife\u2019s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory\u2019s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett\u2019s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. \u201cHe says, \u2018There\u2019s no way that guy can say that,\u2019 Grissett recalled. \u201cI mean, anybody with common sense would know that.\u201d<\/p>\n In a September 21 ruling<\/a> describing the case against McCrory as \u201cthin,\u201d Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself \u201cis grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.\u201d<\/p>\n Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.<\/p>\n The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics \u2014 and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody sees this was junk science. You don\u2019t have to be a scientist to understand that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state\u2019s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general\u2019s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state\u2019s appeals will likely drag out McCrory\u2019s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.<\/p>\n In a statement, McCrory\u2019s current legal team praised Huffaker\u2019s \u201cexplicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.\u201d Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project<\/a>, said they are \u201cgrateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 2022<\/span>, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation<\/a> into McCrory\u2019s case, detailing the flaws in the state\u2019s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state\u2019s parole board denied<\/a> McCrory release.<\/p>\n Julie Bond McCrory\u2019s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she\u2019d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple\u2019s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he\u2019d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.<\/p>\n The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie\u2019s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys\u2019 backyard and who, just weeks after Julie\u2019s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie\u2019s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn\u2019t definitively link the two marks on Julie\u2019s arm to McCrory\u2019s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.<\/p>\n Skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there\u2019s no science backing either assertion<\/a>. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite \u2014 that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.<\/p>\n Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and \u201990s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like<\/a> Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.<\/p>\n\n
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