Eyewitness Errors Lead to False Arrests
by TChris
Columnist Ronnie Polaneczky writes about three men in the Philadelphia area who were arrested on the basis of mistaken identifications.
[Morris] Wells was arrested in March for a subway-stop murder that police now believe had been committed by Philly serial-killer suspect Juan Covington, who has admitted to the crime. Yesterday, murder charges against Wells were dropped.
The district attorney may soon also drop aggravated-assault and attempted-murder charges against Clyde Johnson, who has been imprisoned since April 2004, for a Logan shooting that ballistics tests have since tied to a gun belonging to Covington.
Wells and Johnson were arrested in large part based on eyewitnesses who tagged them as suspects. So was Omar Lezama de La Rosa, the Ambler man arrested last week for a rape that his half-brother is now suspected of committing.
Mistaken identification is a frequent cause of mistaken convictions. Temple law professor Edward Ohlbaum explains why:
"For victims, we're talking about the heavy stress and anxiety of actually surviving an incident. And you have victims who close their eyes during an attack, or tears blur their vision," he says.
Other witnesses may see the attacker for seconds, at best.
"But there remains an absolute failure within the criminal justice system to acknowledge any of that," he says.
While juries frequently believe an eyewitness who claims to be certain of her identification, studies show no correlation between certainty and accuracy. Eyewitness identification is often unreliable, as these cases demonstrate. These stories, and countless others like them, deserve to be widely publicized so that the public learns to take a skeptical view of eyewitness testimony.
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