A man convicted of rape and murder in Virginia more than three decades ago is innocent and should be released from prison, the state's highest court said Thursday.
The Virginia Supreme Court granted Keith Allen Harward's petition for a writ of actual innocence after new DNA tests failed to identify Harward's genetic profile in sperm left at the crime scene. Harward received a life sentence for the 1982 killing of Jesse Perron and the rape of his wife in Newport News.
Harward will be released from the Nottoway Correctional Center on Friday, said Olga Akselrod, an attorney with the Innocence Project who represented Harward. She said the Supreme Court's quick action on Harward's case speaks to "how incredibly powerful the evidence of his innocence is."
The high court's order came a day after Attorney General Mark Herring said DNA evidence proves that Harward couldn't have committed the crimes. The evidence implicated Jerry L. Crotty, a former sailor who was stationed in the area at the time of the crime. Crotty died in an Ohio prison in June 2006, where he was serving a sentence for abduction, Herring said.
Herring said in a statement Thursday that he's glad Harward will soon be reunited with his family.
"It's just heartbreaking to think that more than half of his life was spent behind bars when he didn't belong there. The Commonwealth can't give him back those years, but we can say that we got it wrong, that we're sorry, and that we're working to make it right," Herring said.
