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: Grits for Breakfast

How many tragedies must befall innocent people from false eyewitness IDs before police use scientifically valid methods?

By Gritsforbreakfast

I've been focused on Texas-based exonerations of wrongfully convicted inmates, especially in Dallas, but my brother brings word of another case just a couple of hours east of Dallas down I-20 in Shreveport, LA, where Rickey Johnson, 52, just got out of prison after doing 25 years of a life sentence for a sexual assault he didn't commit ("Leesville man freed after wrongful conviction," Shreveport Times, Jan. 12)A rape victim made a positive identification that Johnson was her assailant, but: DNA testing completed Dec. 21 determined that the Leesville man could not have raped a Many woman on July 12, 1982. The man who did was convicted in May 1984 of committing an aggravated rape April 30, 1983, at the same apartment complex How many more such cases must we see before police practices and the rules of evidence are changed to strengthen eyewitness identifications?What good argument is there for police not using double-blind lineup procedures with neutral administrators?Given how many eyewitnesses simply get their ID's wrong, when will the Legislature require corroboration for victims who did not previously know the assailant (or for that matter, for informants who cut a deal for their testimony)?I'd asked in a recent post how a value could be placed on wrongful convictions, and quoted my father, a civil defense attorney who said tort law allows compensation, among other things, for "lost consortium" with one's family and a more general loss of "companionship and society...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on January 15, 2008 (boomark / email).