Misidentification Ramifications

April 29, 2007
Newsday
By Les Payne

'Is that Al Sharpton with President Carter?" asked the physical therapist eyeing a photo of a White House handshake hanging on the wall. Stepping in for closer view, he confirmed, "That is Al Sharpton!"

The Sharpton misidentification, as relayed by my brother John, was instead a snapshot of me with the 39th president. A week later, John added, a substitute therapist treating my 93-year-old stepfather at home in Hartford, Conn., contemplated another such photo, this time of me shaking hands in the Cabinet Room with President Bill Clinton, in 1995.

"When was that shot of Clinton taken with Jesse Jackson?"

The response prompted by John's recounting induced such horse laughs I convulsed and had to beg off the phone. (My wife and daughter were not amused by the Sharpton comparison.)

Laying aside the chasmic difference in tone and character, I no more resemble Sharpton than David Letterman resembles Jay Leno. While we both could shed a few kilos, I have a decade and several inches on the preacher; he has a chin or two on me. My hair is proudly Don Imus "nappy," Sharpton sports a heat-straightened, perma-waved, James Brown-inspired, flipped to a fare-thee-well pompadour.

As for Jackson, a comparison that didn't chill my folks so much, the protest impresario cuts a dashing figure, has good bones, a fine head and the predatory gaze of a lounge lizard. With the turning of his leaves, he continues to drape his sturdy, well-traveled, quarterback form in tailored shirts, gold cuff links and fine worsteds. Still, save possibly for the eyes, there's not a hint of resemblance between Jackson and me, to his everlasting advantage.

Yet two well-meaning, disinterested white citizens, with roots in the community, gazed at a photo of me and concluded separately and respectively that it was Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson - who bear no resemblance to each other. Had police pulled the subjects to the precinct for identification, instead of horse laughs, the results might have generated a long prison stretch.

This very thought haunted me the other night at a benefit dinner for The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. The 15-year-old organization uses the science of DNA testing to determine the innocence of prisoners wrongfully convicted.

Some 200 such prisoners have been exonerated scientifically after exhausting all other remedies while serving an average of 12 years. Seventeen of the "exonerees" marched across the stage Tuesday, stated their names, home states, prison years served, then ripped up a sheet of paper bearing their inmate numbers, declaring that, thanks to the Innocence Project, "I'm now a free man."

The group honored former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, praised by Scheck for "working tirelessly for the reform of the juvenile courts." In addition to enforcing the civil rights laws on the books, Reno, he said, was promoting the exoneration by DNA of the wrongfully convicted. "Janet Reno put forensics on the front burner."

In addition, Reno was credited with challenging the high rate of convictions in serious crimes based solely on faulty eyewitness identification. Of the 200 cases Scheck and his group have reversed, mistaken identification accounted for some 75 percent of the original convictions.

Errors in police lineups, Scheck said, commonly involve prosecutors steering eyewitnesses to identify pre-selected suspects in groups assumed to include the perpetrator. The Innocence Project is working to institute a wide range of reforms in all 50 states.

Under a double-blind lineup system, the possibility of steering is eliminated. Lineup procedures would be recorded, preferably electronically, and eyewitnesses would write down the degree of confidence they had in the identifications.

I offer another recommendation. Police, judge and jury should be very, very wary indeed of eyewitness identifications across racial lines. Whereas no knowing African-American in the republic would mistake either my views or my countenance for Al Sharpton's, white readers regularly insist on the former, and more than a couple in Hartford confounded me with the latter.

My daughter hates when this happens.


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