Conviction Tossed for Former Alabama Prisoner Paroled After 42 Years
by Chuck Sharman
Long-delayed justice finally arrived for former Alabama prisoner Ervin Harris on June 19, 2026, when a state court tossed his conviction for a November 1974 rape that he has consistently denied committing. The 10th Judicial Circuit Court in Bessemer determined that modern advances in memory science would have almost certainly kept jurors from convicting Harris on the basis of the victim’s recalled eyewitness identification.
No other evidence tied Harris to the crime except that the victim, 21 at the time of the assault, picked his photo out of a lineup. He did not match a description that she had given police of her attacker’s age, height and facial hair. She also said that the assailant spoke very clearly, while Harris “had, and still has, a severe speech impediment,” the court noted.
In another glaring discrepancy, the perpetrator drove the victim around in her car before the assault, and Harris could not drive. He also suffered from a “severe, contagious sexually transmitted disease which the victim did not contract,” the court added. Moreover, prosecutors never managed to impeach eyewitness testimony placing Harris elsewhere at the time of the crime, “an unshaken alibi” which “further suggests that Mr. Harris did not commit this sexual assault,” the court said.
How did it go so wrong for Harris? He was a Black man with two prior burglary convictions who was accused of rape by a young white woman in Alabama in 1974, as Judge David Carpenter noted. The state Court of Criminal Appeals dutifully affirmed his conviction in 1976. See: Harris v. State, 333 So. 2d 871 (Ala. Crim. App. 1976).
There was no DNA testing available at the time. Crucially, there also were no experts who could testify to the difficulty inherent in making an identification from memory, like the one made by the victim—who has since died. “[C]ourts have held that advances in the sciences of eyewitness identification and memory that demonstrates the unreliability of the evidence presented at trial can be new evidence sufficient to vacate a conviction,” the trial court declared, as it proceeded to do just that.
Harris, now in his 70s, was not freed from prison, having been paroled nearly a decade earlier after serving 42 years. The Innocence Project got involved with his case in 2018, but it wasn’t taken up by the Conviction Integrity Unit of 10th Judicial Circuit District Attorney Lynniece Washington until it was established in 2021—leading to his exoneration. In addition to vacating Harris’ conviction, the court ordered him removed from the state sex offender registry, the Birmingham News reported. The decision came too late to salvage decades of Harris’ life, but Washington told the news outlet that its arrival on Juneteeth was “apropos.”
Additional source: Birmingham News
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