Another Georgia Man Exonerated, Will Appear before Eyewitness Reform Committee Two Days after Release

Another Georgia man was exonerated by DNA evidence yesterday, after serving nearly 30 years in a state prison for a rape he did not commit. Like the six other men exonerated in Georgia since the Innocence Project started digging through old cases, John Jerome White was convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness testimony.

Tomorrow, two days after his release from his decades-long prison term, Mr. White will appear at the final hearing of the eyewitness ID study committee that was formed by the Georgia House of Representatives to study police procedures behind the statewide problem of wrongful convictions resulting from faulty eyewitness testimony.

Maybe with another wrongful conviction fresh in their minds, and with another face on this systemic problem, the Georgia committee will do the right thing and mandate that law enforcement in the state adhere to a set of best practices that everyone agrees will reliably collect eyewitness evidence and reduce false identifications.

UPDATE: It turns out that the man who was incriminated by the DNA evidence that exonerated Mr. White was in the same lineup from which the victim selected Mr. White. But Mr. White was the primary suspect, and sure enough, the victim picked the man police had in their crosshairs. Just another example of why blind lineup procedures are critical to getting at the truth.

Read more :: Permalink

Georgia Cops Resist Reform, Defend Flawed Status Quo

In the second day of hearings by the Georgia House committee organized to consider a new law mandating that police adhere to well-established best practices when conducting eyewitness lineup procedures, law enforcement officials were out in full force in opposition.

Given the total lack of empirical support for that position, cops are left to rely on baseless claims in defense of the status quo:

Monday, Chief Louis M. Dekmar of LaGrange spoke for the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police when he said many questions remain about university studies into eyewitness misidentification. For instance, real witnesses are more careful about the consequences of a mistaken identification than students are when they volunteer to participate in an experiment.

"Folks don't just jump out there and make an identification unless they're certain," he said.

Of course, we know the opposite is true from both the scores of wrongful convictions resulting from witnesses doing exactly that, and from numerous studies showing a striking lack of correlation between witness "certainty" and actual accuracy.

Further,

Harris County Sheriff Mike Jolley, president of the Georgia Sheriffs Association, told the committee that a single law would prevent witness procedures from continuing to improve when research determines yet a better way to conduct lineups. That's why individual police agencies need the freedom to write their own policies and to update them when needed.

If that concern bore any resemblance to the reality in the state, the argument might carry with it some force. Unfortunately, as we reported recently, most Georgia cops have no eyewitness guidelines to speak of.

The Sherriff went on:

Plus, some county sheriffs' offices only have four deputies, too few to conduct elaborate lineup procedures if required by law, he said.

The "resources" argument falls equally flat, as zero-cost methods (PDF) (see "folder method," p. 10) have been developed, which are the antithesis of "elaborate" and can be implemented with no more than a stack of photographs and manilla folders and a few minutes of training.

The law mandating best practices is needed precisely because Georgia cops have failed to take action to curb the state's wrongful conviction problem on their own. They have known about the problem for long enough to take action, and they have not done so. Hopefully Georgia legislators will see the debate for what it is, and move Georgia police practices into the present day by passing this law.

Read more :: Permalink

Most Georgia Cops Have No Eyewitness Guidelines

Despite the fact that the Innocence Project has exonerated six men in Georgia who were wrongfully convicted as a result of faulty eyewitness evidence, the majority of Georgia law enforcement agencies still lack even basic written guidelines for the collection of eyewitness evidence. A recent report found that 83% of the 296 Georgia law enforcement agencies surveyed have no specific guidelines to standardize eyewitness procedures.

In the past legislative session, the GA House of Representatives launched a study aimed at improving police procedures for the collection of eyewitness evidence, acknowledging the importance of reliable police practices in preventing wrongful convictions.

State lawmakers are considering legislation to tighten eyewitness guidelines on the heels of several high-profile cases in Georgia, and elsewhere across the country, where prisoners have been cleared by DNA evidence. Of the 205 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA evidence in the United States, 75 percent involved faulty eyewitness identification. Six of those were in Georgia.

Hearings began this morning, and will continue through mid-November (schedule here (PDF)). From the Georgia Innocence Project:

Presenters during the series of hearings include: Calvin Johnson, DNA Exoneree and Georgia Innocence Project Chairman-Elect (all six Georgia exonerees are invited to the first hearing); Barry Scheck, Co-Founder of the Innocence Project (New York), Aimee Maxwell, Executive Director of the Georgia Innocence Project, Jennifer Thompson Canino, victim in a rape case involving mistaken identification, Jeff Brickman, former DeKalb District Attorney involved in a wrongful conviction case, John Bankhead, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Butch Beach, Georgia Public Safety Training Council (see attached schedule for list of all presenters). The House Study Committee is chaired by : Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield from DeKalb County.

The legislative effort to bring about more reliable police procedures has also brought the spotlight back to Troy Davis, who still sits on Georgia's death row:

Most recently, questions about eyewitness identification have cast doubt on the conviction of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis, who was found guilty of killing a police officer. He is awaiting a hearing before the Georgia Supreme Court. Davis' lawyers are asking for a new trial because they say several witnesses who initially testified against their client have since recanted or contradicted their testimony.

Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield fought to pass an eyewitness ID reform bill last year, but prosecutors inexplicably opposed the bill -- the express purpose of which was to make law enforcement practices more accurate -- and managed to kill it. Benfield has another shot this session, and led the study committee at the outset of the hearings this morning in Atlanta.

Read more :: Permalink

Troy Davis Case Spotlights Eyewitness Fallibility, Drives Georgia Reform Effort

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a story today on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, in connection with the ongoing Troy Davis case. The article highlights the systemic problem of wrongful convictions resulting from faulty eyewitness testimony, including all six DNA exonerations in Georgia over the last eight years, all of which resulted from inaccurate eyewitness evidence.

To explore the laundry list of problems with the eyewitness evidence in Mr. Davis' case, the defense team hired cognitive psychologist and eyewitness expert Dr. Jeffrey Neuschatz. Needless to say, he "found numerous concerns with the identification of Davis as the man who fatally shot Officer Mark Allen MacPhail in a Burger King parking lot on a summer night in Savannah."

Whether or not Neuschatz's analysis will be enough to sway the Board of Pardons and Paroles to permanently stay Mr. Davis' death sentence remains an open question.

Neuschatz's report has been filed with both the parole board and in Davis' court appeals for a new trial. Neuschatz analyzed the eyewitness identifications using contemporary standards to determine if there were flaws in the procedures used to implicate Davis.

Among other factors, Neuschatz highlighted issues present in the Davis case relating to the "mugshot effect (PDF) and the "weapon-focus" effect:

Neuschatz concluded that one witness, Dorothy Lee Ferrell, told police she had seen Davis' picture on the news as a suspect in MacPhail's slaying. "Prior exposure to the suspect's picture increases the likelihood that the suspect will be picked out of the lineup," Neuschatz wrote.

Neuschatz also made other observations, including: When a weapon is involved in a crime, witnesses tend to focus on it, rather than the suspect; the passage of time, in many cases 10 days, between the crime and the identification of Davis. Another witness testified that he had been drinking on the night of the shooting.

The Davis case has also given momentum to an ongoing effort to reform police procedures in Georgia relating to the collection of eyewitness evidence. Following the sixth DNA exoneration in Georgia earlier this year, by which Willie Williams was released from prison after serving 21 years for a rape he didn't commit, state Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield (D-Atlanta) attempted to get a bill passed that would have required Georgia police to use procedures that have been demonstrated to make eyewitness evidence more reliable. Predictably, prosecutors fought the legislation, and for now, managed to win the day.

Despite the legislative loss, House Speaker Glenn Richardson supports the reforms, and appointed Rep. Benfield to chair a committee to investigate the connection between flawed police identification procedures and the systemic wrongful conviction problem in the state. Hearings are scheduled for the fall, where Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, among others, is expected to testify.

The Georgia Innocence Project, which has played a role in three of the state's exonerations, is promoting lineup standards.

"In all six of those [Georgia] cases, the victims, and sometimes witnesses as well, incorrectly identified the attackers," said Lisa George, spokeswoman for the project. "It's not that these victims or witnesses were lying; it's just that they got it wrong. Human memory is extremely fallible."

Predictably, Rick Malone, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia, said "prosecutors don't object to better standards for lineups, but they don't want them codified into state law." In other words, Georgia prosecutors support preventing the conviction of innocent people in theory, just not in practice.

Fortunately, cases like those of Mr. Davis and Mr. Williams are driving the effort to reform police procedures that are unmistakably linked to mistaken eyewitness testimony, and inform those procedures with well-settled scientific findings that reveal a better, more reliable methodology that is less likely to distort the memories of well-meaning witnesses. It's time for Georgia prosecutors to catch up, and stop standing in the way of efforts to keep innocent people out of prison.

In related news, check out Emory Law School's new project to Save Troy Davis, sponsored by their Indigent Criminal Defense Clinic.

Read more :: Permalink