The case of an Alabama man convicted of murdering his wife in 1985 will not be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, despite evidence that, nearly 40 years later, has been “wholly discredited.”
The Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case of McCrory v. Alabama, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited research from Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor Valena Beety in her concurring agreement with the court’s decision.
Charles M. McCrory was convicted for the murder of his wife, Julie Bonds, based in large part on expert testimony from an odontologist who matched McCrory’s teeth to two bite marks on Bonds’ shoulder. But the odontologist retracted his testimony later, writing that science has revealed the limitations of bitemark evidence. McCrory had requested a new trial, which was denied by the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama.
“This petition raises difficult questions about the adequacy of current postconviction remedies to correct a conviction secured by what we now know was faulty science,” Sotomayor wrote. “One in four people exonerated since 1989 were wrongfully convicted based on false or misleading forensic evidence introduced at their trials. Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis.”
Sotomayor wrote that the issue of due process claims like McCrory’s have “yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts.” The justice encouraged legislatures not to wait for a constitutional remedy in cases of wrongful convictions based on faulty science, and instead pass postconviction statutes to address the problem.
Drawing on cases from California and Texas, Sotomayor noted the power state legislatures have in passing statutes to address wrongful convictions. Adding those tools to the state courts’ arsenal would allow innocent people to attain freedom sooner, the justice wrote.
Sotomayor cited Beety’s 2020 Houston Law Review article, “Changed Science Writs and State Habeas Relief,” which reviewed the growth of state-level changed science writs and examined how other states can adopt those tools to review habeas petitions based on scientific evidence.
“The adoption of these changed science writs empowers courts in state habeas proceedings to reverse wrongful convictions, rather than be hindered by procedure,” Beety wrote.
Beety, a former federal prosecutor and innocence litigator, has written extensively on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, prosecution, and incarceration. She is the co-editor of The Wrongful Convictions Reader, and author of the award-winning book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights. She is also a co-author of the treatise Scientific Evidence and the litigation guide Miscarriages of Justice: Litigating Beyond Factual Innocence. She is a founding board member of the new Indiana Innocence Project.