Blind Justice Demands a Little Vision


	Blind Justice Demands a Little Vision If Wrongful Convictions Are to End, a Better Way Must Be Found For Witnesses to Identify Suspects May 19, 2006 Newsday (Opinion) By Curtis Stephen As the criminal-justice system grapples with a disturbing wave of wrongful convictions, law enforcement in jurisdictions nationwide, including New York, has come under enormous pressure to improve the methods that witnesses use to identify criminal offenders. And although enhancing those procedures could help to prevent future wrongful convictions, a just-released study might be used to derail much- needed reform. After DNA, the most significant and compelling evidence that a prosecutor can present in the courtroom is eyewitness testimony. In fact, many convictions have rested solely upon the word of crime victims or other witnesses who identify defendants in police lineups or photo spreads. But, sadly, such identifications also have incarcerated an alarming number of people for crimes they didn't commit. According to the Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, which uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted, mistaken identification accounts for more than 75 percent of the 177 wrongful convictions uncovered nationally through DNA evidence. And it surely has been the primary cause for other false-imprisonment cases in which circumstantial evidence was the key. In general, presumed offenders are identified when detectives show photographs of suspects to witnesses, who examine multiple photos simultaneously. When witnesses make identifications from police lineups, they also observe multiple individuals at the same time. In both cases, detectives who oversee the procedures have an expectation of who will be picked out. As more wrongful-conviction cases surfaced in the late 1990s, research on identification procedures exposed inherent flaws, ranging from witnesses' sometimes faulty perceptions to suggestions made by detectives. As traditional methods of identifying offenders began to lose credibility, the U.S. Justice Department, the American Bar Association and criminal justice advocates urged law enforcement to adopt ways that would reduce the possibility of the wrong person being identified. Last month, the Illinois State Police released findings on an experimental, yearlong program in three cities, including Chicago, where police departments used what's called the sequential double-blind method. To make the process as objective as possible, lineups were administered by detectives who didn't know which person was the suspect. And the suspects in lineups, or photographs, were presented to witnesses one at a time. The Illinois report gave the procedure a failing grade. In 700 lineups, the study found that witnesses using the sequential method were 15 percent more likely to choose an innocent person and that locating a "blind" investigator was often a time-consuming hurdle. At first glance, the report appears only to reinforce the views of those in law enforcement who staunchly oppose altering traditional methods of identification. But the study clearly recommends "further exploration" into a host of other remedies that might strengthen the process. One possibility mentioned was the use of "certainty questions" such as those used by police in North Carolina. North Carolina officers are required to ask several questions intended to gauge the confidence of witnesses, and they also must tell witnesses that the people in a lineup - or the photographs that are shown - don't necessarily include a suspect. In New York, despite the discovery of wrongful convictions that resulted from mistaken identifications, local police and district attorneys' offices throughout the state have resisted attempts to review their investigative guidelines. In 2002, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes became the first chief prosecutor in the state to express interest in revamping procedures. But it isn't clear when, orif, changes will take effect. The same year, the Nassau County district attorney's office reportedly looked into alternative lineup methods, but its findings are unknown. What remains clear is the dreadful possibility of mistaken identification. Five years ago, I examined the case of Colin Warner, convicted in the 1980 drive-by murder of Mario Hamilton, a 16-year-old student gunned down outside Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. When I interviewed a still grief-stricken Martell Hamilton about his older brother's murder, he vividly recalled the overwhelming pressure he had felt to make an identification from a group of photographs a detective aggressively displayed. Sadly, that decision implicated an innocent man and led to 21 years of wrongful incarceration for Warner, who was 18 at the time. And although more and more law-enforcement agencies, like the NYPD, are relying on computers to display the images of suspects to reduce suggestion, other mistakes happen all too easily. Studies have shown that many witnesses automatically presume that offenders, often glimpsed in fleeting moments of enormous trauma, are in the lineups that police arrange, and the witnesses therefore feel compelled to pick someone, choosing the person who most closely resembles the perpetrator. Ultimately, revamping eyewitness identification methods improves the credibility of the entire process. But to ignore existing flaws means that, after scores of falsely incarcerated people have been exonerated during the past decade, more innocent people could be taking their place behind bars in the future.
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