William O’Dell Harris (Charleston, West Virginia)

Factual background. On December 16, 1984, a nurse was walking home from work when she was grabbed from behind and sexually assaulted. On July 25, 1985, Harris was arrested and charged with first-degree sexual assault. Harris was a juvenile at the time of the offense, but the State’s motion to transfer the case to adult status was granted on May 16, 1986.

A Kanawha County jury deliberated for nearly 4 hours before convicting William O’Dell Harris of second-degree sexual assault. On October 18, 1987, Harris was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison, with 75 days credit for time served.

Prosecutor’s evidence at trial. The prosecution based its case on several points:

• A sheriff’s deputy testified that the victim had positively identified Harris as her attacker.
• The victim lived near Harris and originally claimed to have been acquainted with him.
• The victim identified Harris in a police lineup and made an in-court identification of him.
• Police serologist Fred Zain (see also Glen Woodall and Gerald Wayne Davis cases) testified that the genetic markers in the semen left by the assailant matched those of Harris and only 5.9 percent of the population.
• Harris’s alibi, that he was with his girlfriend at the time of the crime, was corroborated only by her.

Postconviction challenges. On November 10, 1993, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals authorized special habeas corpus proceedings on any case involving the testimony of Zain (438 S.E.2d 501). One week later, Harris’s attorneys filed a writ of habeas corpus, consenting to DNA testing of Harris as a condition of relief. On December 8, 1993, the State Supreme Court of Appeals issued the writ and remanded the case to the Circuit Court of Kanawha County for further proceedings. On December 29, 1993, the circuit court judge ordered prosecutors to release the trial evidence. More than a month later, the judge repeated his order.

The judge freed Harris to home confinement on $200,000 bond on June 21, 1994. At the same hearing, the judge again ordered the district attorney to release the evidence for DNA testing. At this time, the sheriff’s department stated that all evidence from the trial had been lost. An investigator with the public defender’s office later found a slide containing semen evidence at the medical center originally used by the victim.

On September 13, 1994, the judge held a hearing on a prosecution motion to reconsider his order of release of evidence and then ordered for a fourth time that the evidence (the slide from the medical center and a sample of the victim’s blood) be released for DNA testing. Harris’s attorneys filed a contempt of court motion on the prosecutors on November 1, 1994. During these hearings, the district attorney stated that the victim was being uncooperative about giving a blood sample but had sent the evidence slide for DNA testing on November 2, 1994.

DNA results. On May 1, 1995, a report from Dr. David Bing of the Center for Blood Research Laboratories stated that DNA extracted from Harris’s blood sample was inconsistent with DNA extracted from the semen on the evidence slide. Harris asked the circuit judge to dismiss the case against him. Prosecutors, however, requested that a second test be conducted by a court-approved laboratory, LabCorp in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. This request was granted.

Conclusion. After the results of the second test also showed that Harris was not the donor of the semen on the evidence slide, the district attorney held a press conference on August 1, 1995, to state that Harris was innocent. On October 10, 1995, Harris’s conviction was vacated. One month later, the court also dismissed the underlying indictment. Harris had served 7 years of his sentence and an additional year of home confinement. As an added note to this case, the detective who testified in this trial was later convicted for perjury.

This case profile is excerpted from Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence After Trial, a 1996 research report by the U.S. Department of Justice.