Everybody's talkin' at me...
Posted on 05/28/2016 6:06:07 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A California man serving a 25-to-life prison sentence for the murder of his wife based on bite-mark evidence had his conviction reversed by the state’s supreme court on Thursday.
The reversal comes almost a decade after the forensic odontologist recanted his original testimony, saying he wasn’t even sure if the lesion on the victim’s hand was a human bite mark.
William Richards was convicted of the 1993 murder of his wife Pamela, who was found strangled and beaten with a rock and a cinderblock.
Richards was convicted at a fourth trial, after three mistrials. The 1997 conviction incorporated bite-mark evidence for the first time, which apparently swayed jurors to the conviction, according to court documents.
The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the bite-mark evidence was “false” – and was the sole reason Richards has spent 19 years in prison.
“In assessing the significance of the bite-mark evidence, I think it is also relevant that two previous juries were unable to reach a verdict without this evidence,” wrote one of the justices. “It was only at the final trial, where the false evidence was admitted, that a jury convicted Richards.”
According to the court documents, Richards’ public defenders successfully explained away most of the forensic evidence other than the supposed teeth marks on the right hand of Pamela Richards:
The Richardses lived together on a remote property in the Mojave Desert. According to investigative timelines, the husband would have had to drive 20 mph over the speed limit, kill his wife in eight to 11 minutes, and then answer the phone call of her lover, before calling 9-1-1 about the discovery of his wife’s body. William Richards’ body showed no evidence of a physical altercation, despite the apparently intense struggle between the victim and killer. The husband called the police around midnight, but homicide investigators did not examine the crime scene until 6 a.m. – by which time the couple’s dogs had partially buried the woman’s bashed-in head. No time of death was ever established by investigators, since liver-temperature readings were not standard practice at the coroner’s office at that time. But Richards’ fate came down to the lesion on Pamela Richards’ right hand.
The “bite-mark” evidence came from a single photograph during an autopsy. No saliva swabs were taken of the area where the teeth had supposedly been. Norman Sperber, a forensic odontologist who had been consulted during the murder trials of Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, testified at the fourth trial that the canine teeth made a “pretty good alignment” with the husband’s teeth.
But in a 2007 deposition made at the behest of the California Innocence Project, Sperber completely reversed his take on the hand lesion.
READ MORE: DNA Exonerates Man Convicted on Bite-Mark Evidence, 33 Years Later
“With the benefit of all of the photographs, and with my added experience, I would not now testify as I did in 1997,” Sperber said. “I cannot now say with certainty that the injury on the victim’s hand is a human bite mark injury.”
During follow-up testimony, it was established that the bruising could have instead been left on the hand by fence material on which the body lay.
Sperber told Forensic Magazine in an interview today that ethical considerations led to his change of analysis in 2007. In 1997, he was working with the best materials he had - and he was presented with better materials 10 years later.
"They showed me better photographs," he said. "You've got to go by what the evidence shows you. Unfortunately, it led be down the wrong street in the trial."
Despite the change of testimony, the same California Supreme Court ruled that the evidence was not “false” at the time of trial in 1997.
Instead, it took a 2014 law passed by the state legislature to compel the state’s highest court to unanimously decide to vacate the decision on Thursday.
“Accordingly, with the exception of the bite-mark evidence, the defense had a substantial response to much of the prosecution’s evidence against petitioner,” the court majority wrote. “Under these unique circumstances, it is reasonably probably that the false evidence presented by Dr. Sperber at petitioner’s 1997 jury trial affected the outcome of that proceeding.”
I’m glad we can rule out Vampires
As an old friend of mine would say: Worse case of suicide I ever seen.
So when is his next trial going to start?
I was shooting buddies of him and his wife at the time she was killed.
I read the entire case study on the Innocence Project website and it's clear that the cops and DA fabricated, not only the bite mark evidence, but also the driving time testimony and even planted his shirt fibers under her fingernails before sending her (severed) fingers to the forensics lab for examination.
Bill is a good guy and I'm so very happy to see that he's (finally) seen justice served.
Not many people bash their own heads in with a cinder block after being raped.
Absolute travesty. Nineteen years gone. I hope he gets millions for the hell he’s been through...
whoever gave lying testimony should be surveing a few years for lying about evidence. It would cut down on false testimony
If he was innocent of the murder then a great deal of injustice has been served.
19 years in prison. hope he gets a bazillion dollars.
weird...the story at the link has different time-lines than the story in this thread starter.
Also, why did the husband let the dogs bury his spouse’s head ? ( as the story seems to read)
This article, critical of the type of 'expert' testimony surrounding bite-mark evidence contains more details about the case. (See: Flawed Science of Bite-Marks)
Here's another article that talks about the possibility of the blue fibers found under her fingernails being planted there by the criminologist. (See: VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES: THE STRUGGLE TO FREE WILLIAM RICHARDS
Also, why did the husband let the dogs bury his spouse’s head ? ( as the story seems to read)
The Richards owned several dogs that were allowed to roam freely on the property. That night the police did nothing to secure the crime scene, including the dogs.
Nowadays, the police would simply just shoot the dogs claiming they felt threatened.
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