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Eyewitness Errors Lead to False Arrests

By TChris, Section Innocence Cases
Posted on Thu Jul 28, 2005 at 06:58:48 AM EST
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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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    Eyewitness Errors Lead to False Arrests | 2 comments (2 topical)
    Re: Eyewitness Errors Lead to False Arrests (none / 0) (#1)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:01:43 PM EST
    There was a case a few years back that my girlfriend has studied quite a bit about in which a woman was raped and at first wasn't able to identify her attacker. Later the police showed her a photo lineup of 6 different suspects. She picked the one that in her mind was the rapist. The man she identified proclaimed his innocence all the way through the trial, but he was convicted after she testified that without a doubt this man was her assailant. Years pass and this guy sat in prison still saying he didn't commit the crime and after a DNA test was done it turned out he was telling the truth. To this day the woman still sees this man in her rememberances of the attack but it wasn't him. They now travel the country talking about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. For anybody with a cognitive psych background this kind of stuff is old news. Many tests and experiments have shown that a very small percentage of eyewitnesses are actually reliable. Woe unto you, though, if you happen to be in court with a few people saying you definitely committed some crime they witnessed. The general populace still thinks that eyewitness testimony is hands down the best evidence around.

    Re: Eyewitness Errors Lead to False Arrests (none / 0) (#2)
    by chemoelectric on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:01:43 PM EST
    Back around 1981 I was a 19-year-old juror is an armed robbery case of two young men, and the only evidence was a single eyewitness account. One of the defendant's lawyers was fool enough to put his client on the stand so he could point the finger at someone else, which made the defendant appear guilty, but to me this was not evidence I would take into account. So there was just this one eyewitness, but by then television had warned time and again that eyewitness accounts were unreliable. So, I was not going to convict, period. Besides that, the fingerprints supposedly had been 'lost'. That was why we had to go just with the eyewitness testimony. There was one fellow who said he couldn't vote not to convict, given an eyewitness account, but it was evident to me that the other jurors had explained to him on the side that there was no way this kid was going to convict, so go along with a 'not guilty' verdict and we all get to go home. I don't like risking acquittal of guilty people, but the legal system just isn't keeping pace with science and technology. It's a very general problem with our social institutions, that they are designed for much more primitive societies than ours.

    Eyewitness Errors Lead to False Arrests | 2 comments (2 topical)