Wrongful Conviction Lawsuit Defense Blog : Wrongful Conviction Defense Lawyer & Attorney : Andrew M. Hale Law Firm

According to an article in USA Today - they are reporting:

At least five states — Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia — and some major U.S. cities have either revamped or started changing the way law enforcement officials use photographic lineups to identify suspects. Since changing its policy in April, Dallas Police Lt. David Pughes says the department has conducted 1,400 lineups and believes "we're bringing a stronger piece of evidence to court."

"Challenges to lineups were first dismissed as misguided academic exercises, until (law enforcement officials) could see the concrete disasters resulting in exoneration," says Iowa State University psychology professor Gary Wells, an expert on eyewitness identification. Earlier this year, Dallas became the largest police department to stop presenting blocks of mug shots to witnesses. Now, suspects' photographs are presented one at a time by investigators who are not involved in the cases. The new sequential technique is designed to focus witnesses' memories more precisely on who they saw and not allow for potentially faulty comparisons.

But are sequential lineups really better? The National Institute of Justice is not convinced.  According to their research:

So far, research that compares simultaneous and sequential lineups and the use of "blind" administrators has not been conclusive. In a blind lineup, the person who is running the lineup does not know which person the police believe is the likely suspect.

According to an article published by the NIJ:

“At the present time, [when comparing simultaneous and sequential lineup presentations,] there is no definitive sense that one form of lineup presentation is superior to the other,” Roy S. Malpass, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso..

Malpass noted that certain practices typically used in sequential lineups—such as asking witnesses to make a separate decision on each photograph or individual—have not been examined in simultaneous lineups. Thus, it is unclear whether differences in the effectiveness of the two lineup models are due to method of presentation (simultaneous or sequential) or the presence of these other variables.

Jury is still out. But crimes still need to be solved. Best tool police have to do that is still eyewitnesses - whether a psychology professor likes it or not.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Today the Innocence Project released a new report entitled  Reevaluating Lineups: "Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification".  The new report discusses several attempts at reforming lineups, including: 

• Double-blind presentation: photos or lineup members should be presented by an administrator who does not know who the suspect is.

• Lineup composition: “Fillers” (the non-suspects included in a lineup) should resemble the eyewitness’s description of the perpetrator and the suspect should not stand out. Also, a lineup should not contain more than one suspect.

• Witness instructions: The person viewing a lineup should be told that the perpetrator may not be in the lineup and that the investigation will continue regardless of whether an identification is made.

• Confidence statements: At the time of the identification, the eyewitness should provide a statement in her own words indicating her level of confidence in the identification.

• Recording: Identification procedures should be videotaped.

• Sequential presentation (optional): Lineup members are presented one-by-one (by a “blind” administrator) instead of side by side.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Houston Chronicle's website, chron.com is reporting:

 A federal jury on Thursday awarded $5 million to a Houston man who spent 17 years in prison for a kidnapping and rape he did not commit, finding the city should pay for its “deliberate indifference” to problems at the crime lab whose false evidence secured the conviction.

Ain’t no amount of money is going to even my scale,” Rodriguez said after hearing the verdict. “I lost my dad and my girls have been through hell. I am grateful, but no money could replace what I lost.” “This verdict says what I think we all know to be true about the Houston Police Department crime lab,” said Barry Scheck, one of Rodriguez’s lawyers and a co-founder of the Innocence Project, which helped secure his release from prison. “They convicted innocent men and the city was indifferent.”

City Attorney Arturo Michel, whose office defended the city, said officials would take a close look at the trial transcript to review questions of evidence and evaluate how the city would assess the case if it were retried before deciding whether to appeal. “The jury was deadlocked on the issue of whether Lee Brown was deliberately indifferent,” he said. “That meant that they had difficulty coming to a conclusion on the evidence.”

A jury of five women and three men deliberated for about two days after hearing testimony from former Mayor Lee P. Brown, who was police chief in 1987, James Bolding, a crime lab manager who testified at Rodriguez’s trial and from Rodriguez himself.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Click here to see the full 60 minutes 

CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl provided an in-depth analysis on the flaws of eyewitness identification. Stahl tells the compelling story of a rape victim named Jennifer Thompson. She picked Ronald Cotton out of a photo array and Cotton was arrested. After she picked him out of a lineup, Cotton was put on trial and convicted. While in prison, Cotton ran into a man named Bobby Poole and they looked a lot alike. In fact, the prisoners and guards would even mistakenly call each other by the other name. Eventually, Cotton was exonerated by DNA evidence, and it was shown that Poole committed the crime.

The story goes on analyze some issues involved with the identification. First, Stahl reports that it is often the case that the real perpetrator is not in the photo array.

"When you're sittin' in front of a photo lineup, you just assume one of these guys is the suspect. It's my job to find it," Thompson explained.
"Bobby Poole's photograph was not in the photo lineup," Thompson told Stahl. "He was not in the physical lineup."

"When the real perpetrator is not in the set, is none of them, witnesses have a very difficult time being able to recognize that," explained Gary Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University.

Wells goes on to state that eyewitness ID's are very persuasive because the victim has no reason to lie. However he says, that if a person sees someone that did the crime, it would trigger recognition memory.

"Recognition memory is actually quite rapid. So we find in our studies, for example, that if somebody's taking longer than ten, 15 seconds, it's quite likely that they're doing something other than just using reliable recognition memory."

Wells continues and states that the biggest issue is the reinforcement factor after an identification. After the choice, the detective or officer familiar with the case and the victim often say good job or you made the right choice. This makes the victim feel they did it right, and become more positive about their choice.

[Wells] says the solution is to have someone independent administer the lineup, someone who doesn't even know who the suspect is. And certainly not the detective on the case.

Don't be quick to discount eyewitness identification - it has been the most prominent and valuable tool in putting away criminals. While there are cases such as this one, which are heart-wrenching, the police officer was doing his job by the book. Yet, in many cases such as this, the wrongly convicted still goes after the officer and the police department for civil liability. In a case like this, that lawsuit would be inappropriate and frivolous (but it still happens everyday). It is important to note that Cotton did not sue the police department and received 10,000/year for each of the 11 years from the state of North Carolina.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Chattanooga Times Free Press is reporting: 

State Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield has been working on changing the way lineups are conducted in the state.  "So much of this comes down to training," said the DeKalb County Democrat. "If you've got good training, then you're less likely to make mistakes." Mistakes were the key issue for Rep. Benfield and the Georgia Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that works to secure post-conviction DNA testing for Georgia inmates. According to information from the Innocence Project, seven Georgia inmates have been exonerated based on DNA evidence since 1999. During original trials all seven were misidentified by either the victim or an eyewitness. According to the project, more than 75 percent of prisoners exonerated by post-conviction DNA also were misidentified during their original trials. The Georgia Police Academy for years has offered training in conducting suspect lineups for eyewitness verification, but the course has been part of the academy's criminal investigator program only.With the new Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training recommendations, course materials are available online and can be tailored to police agencies of all sizes.

Dalton police Chief Jason Parker said most of the main points of the training are already in place at his department. "I don't think it throws too many obstacles in investigators' way and it's reasonable to do," Chief Parker said. The three key areas that the course addresses are preparation, presentation and preservation, Mr. Howard said. The training outlines correct preparation for the lineup when choosing participants or their photographs, the best practices for presenting the lineup and preserving the results through good documentation of what the witness intended. A major point that both Rep. Benfield and Innocence Project officials have pushed for is a "blind administrator" to conduct the lineups. That's a police officer who has no knowledge of the investigation and could not influence a victim or eyewitness to select a suspect. "You don't want to indicate the suspect to the witness," Chief Parker said. "They may feel undue pressure to identify the person."

One part of the new course recommends that police tell the witness that he or she does not know if the suspect is in the lineup, which should reduce any influence on the witness, Rep. Benfield said. Though it took four years of pushing her bill in the General Assembly, Rep. Benfield said she's happy that the changes took place within law enforcement.

Much is made about blind administration of lineups within the academic world.  In Chicago, a study (The Illinois Field Study) was conducted that showed that the old original method produced more correct identifications.  That  study was conducted in Chicago, Evanston and Joliet by then General Counsel to the Chicago Police Department, Sheri Mecklenburg along with Ebbe Ebbesen a psychology professor at the University of California at San Diego.   

In the end, we know that mistaken identifications occur, irrespective of the lineup conditions or who is administering the lineup.  

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks