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Eyewitness Identification |
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Eyewitness Identification |
| Eyewitness identification is
one of the most potent and effective tools available to police and
prosecutors. It is compelling, and time after time, it convinces
juries of the guilt of a defendant. The problem is, eyewitness
identifications are WRONG at least 50% of the time!
Read about the real-life victims
of faulty eyewitness identification and see what experts have to say on
this subject. Note:
We add
links to updates with the original news articles
reporting death penalty issues, so be sure to scroll down to check for "new news". In May 1981, when Michael Williams was 16, a jury in Jonesboro, LA rejected his claim of innocence, deliberating for less than an hour before convicting him of the savage beating and sexual assault of his math tutor. Nearly 24 years after his arrest, independent DNA tests by three laboratories, including the Louisiana state crime lab, show what Williams has long contended: He is not the man who committed the crime. The victim, shot while riding on the back of her husband's motorcycle in South Florida, identified someone else as her assailant. The best-positioned eyewitness was unable to pick out Persad from a photo lineup; he, too, picked someone else. He couldn't identify him in court, either. The same eyewitness said there was nothing unusual about the assailant's car, while Persad's car had foreign slogans written all over it. Moreover, three witnesses testified Persad was studying for an exam with them when the incident happened. But the victim's husband was shown a photo of Persad by an ex-FBI investigator, told Persad was the assailant, identified him in court -- and Persad is doing 43 years in prison. Clarence Harrison of Decatur, GA, has spent 17 years in prison for rape, kidnapping and robbery. The victim identified him from both a photo and live lineup. He has become the 150th person proven innocent by DNA in the past ten years. Arthur Lee Whitfield spent part of his first hours of freedom standing up on the bus that carried him home. Whitfield was released from prison after DNA tests exonerated him of raping two women in Ghent, VA in August 1981. He had served 22 years of a 63-year sentence. Whitfield had little to say to the investigator who helped convict him, or to the two women who at trial said they were sure he was the man who had raped them. “It would be nice for them to say they made a mistake,” he said. “It takes a big person to say they made a mistake.” This Sharpes, FL case was a classic -- mistaken victim identification and perjured snitch testimony put him in prison for a 1981 rape. He has been exonerated by DNA, and freed after 22 years. After nine men were convicted here for crimes they did not commit, Boston police and the Suffolk County district attorney's office have agreed on a series of reforms on how evidence is gathered, especially from witnesses to a crime. Click HERE to
read the Report of the Task Force on Eyewitness Evidence.
David Lemus and Olmado Hidalgo have spent 12 years in jail for the murder of a New York City nightclub bouncer named Marcus Peterson and the attempted murder of another man on Nov. 23, 1990. Three eyewitnesses identified Jose Figueroa.as the man who had acted as a mediator between the bouncers and the murderers during an argument earlier in the night. But Figueroa was in jail that night, and the same eyewitnesses also identified Lemus and Hidalgo. Victims who get a good long look at violent criminals are unlikely to identify them accurately later, Yale and U.S. Navy researchers have found. This caveat follows from a unique study of 509 Navy and Marine officers undergoing elite survival training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Results suggest that police and juries may give eyewitness testimony too much credibility. Michael Roper's case has all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction -- shaky eyewitness identification, jailhouse "snitch" testimony and no physical evidence connecting him to the murder of an Akron, Ohio convenience store owner. At his 4th trial the jury convicted him, but they didn't know another suspect closely resembles Roper. UPDATE: Michael Roper denied new trial despite prosecutor misconduct. In 1997 an assailant dropped his hat when he shot Boston police officer Gregory Gallagher in the buttocks. Then the shooter burst into a nearby home, drank a glass of water and dropped his sweatshirt before fleeing. Later Officer Gallagher identified Stephan Cowans as the assailant (although the woman whose home was invaded disagreed) and a crime lab technician said a fingerprint on the water glass was Stephan's. Now DNA has trumped both. DNA on the hat, the sweatshirt and the water glass are from the same person -- but not from Stephan.
Link: Landmark
Series from the Winston-Salem, NC Journal
Murder, Race, Justice The State of North Carolina v. Darryl Hunt When
a 19-year-old black man was charged with the murder of 25-year-old
Deborah Sykes, it set off a case that has helped define race relations
in Winston-Salem for nearly 20 years. Hunt was convicted twice
despite
the lack of physical evidence and DNA tests that excluded him. Although such
DNA test results have freed numerous others in rape and murder cases,
Hunt remains in prison. February 7, 2004: Darryl
Hunt Exonerated. Darryl Hunt's long imprisonment in
connection with the 1984
rape and murder of Deborah Sykes in Winston-Salem, NC was a case of
mistaken identity.
Another man killed her, the police and prosecutors have admitted. And
most importantly, that man acted alone. Unfortunately,
police and prosecutors were so thorough in inciting
hatred and a desire for revenge against Darryl Hunt in Deborah
Sykes' family that her mother and step-father refuse to accept Hunt's
innocence. Bitter Justice Other
so-called forensic identification sciences, including
microscopic hair analysis, handwriting identification, bite-mark
analysis, ballistics, and even fingerprints have also been under attack
in recent years. The Supreme Court, in its 1993 Daubert
decision,
established the “known rate of error” as one of the indicia of
scientific reliability. Yet courts continue to admit "ear witness
identification" and juries continue to convict innocent people
believing witnesses are much better at voice recognition than research
indicates. Falling on Deaf Ears Steven A. Avery was a 23-year-old father of five, including 6-day-old twin boys, when he was arrested for rape in July 1985 at his rural Manitowoc County, Wisconsin home. As many as 16 witnesses eventually would say that Avery could not have been on the beach at the time. But the victim was sure Avery was the man who raped her; a jury found him guilty of sexual assault and attempted murder, and a judge sentenced him to 32 years in prison. After 17 years in prison, DNA Has Cleared Him After
17 years in prison - most of it seeking DNA tests to prove his
innocence - Lonnie Erby walked free on August 25th because genetic
testing
conclusively showed he had not committed two of the three rapes for
which he was convicted. His exoneration came despite strenuous
opposition by Circuit Attorney Jenniver Joyce, who argued the DNA
testing would cause unnecessary upheaval for victims and their
families and unneeded
expense. All three victims picked him out of a line up. Lonnie Erby People think of memory as a videotape recording in the brain. But few people, if any, can reliably distinguish between memories of something they've been shown and something they've been asked to imagine. In fact, we assemble our memories by patching together broken pieces of stored information and then filling in the blanks. Now there is hope of a False Memory Detector Dana Holland, 35, was freed after a Cook County judge found
him
not guilty in a retrial on the 1993 attempted murder and armed robbery
of
a woman in Chicago. Holland had been
linked
to that crime by a wallet found at the scene that had belonged to
another
woman, a rape victim. Holland was originally convicted of that rape,
but
DNA evidence exonerated him of it earlier this year. He had been
sentenced
to more than 100 years in prison for both crimes and served 10 years.
The victim of the attempted murder testified against Holland
again
this week, identifying him in court. Eyewitnesses
Rarely
Concede Error After 11
years
in prison, DNA has cleared Michael Mercer of raping a 17-year-old girl.
The
victim saw Mercer 2 months after she was attacked and identified him as
her
assailant. She was certain, but she
was
wrong In 1983,
in Lowell,
MA, two rape victims identified Dennis Maher as their assailant.
For
19 years, Dennis protested his innocence. DNA tests have
confirmed
his innocence and he has been freed. 126th
DNA
Exoneration Of the 125
wrongly convicted persons exonerated by DNA, Marvin Anderson is the
only one where the real rapist was shown to the victim in the original
photo spread, and instead she picked an innocent man. Fallibility of Eyewitness Identication In 1998, a
rape victim identified Josiah Sutton as one of her assailants when she
saw him on the street, and the Houston, Texas crime lab claimed DNA
tests implicated him. The crime lab has been shut down because of
the poor quality
of its work, and new DNA tests have excluded Josiah. 4 1/2 Years in Prison -- for Nothing Over 21
years ago, a rape victim in Hampton Roads, VA saw Julius Ruffin on an
elevator and insisted he was her attacker. After two mistrials,
he was convicted at a third trial and sentenced to five life terms.
Now he has been Cleared by DNA. Eleven
years after Terry Arndt was murdered and his girlfriend raped in Shasta
County, CA, the rape victim identified Thomas Brewster as the assailant
-- even though she failed to pick him out of a line up 6 days after the
attack.
The charges cost Brewster almost 2 years pre-trial in jail; DNA
tests
cleared him 8 weeks into his capital murder trial. Now it's The System's Turn to Pay Louisville,
KY financial advisor Troy Rufra was identified by four eyewitnesses as
the man who robbed an equal number of banks. The eyewitnesses
were sure. The problem? The
Eyewitnesses were Wrong Bernard
Webster spent 20 years in prison for raping a Baltimore, MD woman when
he was 19 years old. He was repeatedly denied parole because he
refused to admit his guilt. Now DNA has established Bernard's
innocence. The victim remains convinced of her identification of
him. 115th Person Freed by DNA
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| In 1984, Jennifer Thompson was brutally raped. She concentrated on memorizing her attacker's features. When she picked Ronald Cotton out of a line up, Jennifer says, |
 Gary Graham, executed by Texas despite serious doubts about his guilt. |
Gary Graham was sentenced to death based solely on the identification of one eye witness. Two other eye witnesses who say the killer was not Graham were never heard at trial. |
| Jump to "The Cotton Case" from our Links page for a riveting demonstration of just how wrong eyewitness identification can be. |
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