 |
Eyewitness Identification |
| |
Eyewitness Identification |
| Eyewitness identification is
one of the most potent and effective tools available to police and
prosecutors. It is compelling, and time after time, it convinces
juries of the guilt of a defendant. The problem is, eyewitness
identifications are WRONG at least 50% of the time!
Read about the real-life victims
of faulty eyewitness identification and see what experts have to say on
this subject. Note:
We add
links to updates with the original news articles
reporting eyewitness identification issues, so be sure to scroll down to check for "new news". Dallas DNA
Exonerations
A stunning 18 of the
19 Dallas, Texas convictions overturned by DNA were based on faulty
eyewitness identification. The
faulty identifications were the
predictable consequences of a criminal justice system that ignored
safeguards meant to protect the innocent. The files reveal a
law-and-order machine that focused on securing and bolstering
eyewitness testimony, regardless of the victim's doubt or the lack of
corroborating evidence.
It was a hot, humid August
night in 1995 when two men
entered E.T.'s Sandwiches Almighty Deli in Newark, NJ ordered "a corn
beef
sandwich with everything" and shot the owner dead. Newark
detectives quickly zeroed in on a suspect, Darrell
Edwards, who lived in the neighborhood, and arrested him on Sept. 15,
1995 based on a "police-directed" identification of him by a heroin
addict, who has since recanted. After three mistrials, a jury
convicted Edwards of store owner
Errich Thomas' murder. Now, DNA proves what Darrell has said all
along: he wasn't there. The state, of course, is wrapped in
denial
and opposing a retrial.
Patrick Waller After almost 26 years in prison, Walter Swift of Detroit, MI has been officially cleared of raping a pregnant mother who was surprised in her Indian Village home as she played with her infant child. In a joint motion both the Innocence Project and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office asked Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Vera Massey Jones to set aside Swift’s conviction -- one based on what authorities now concede was a shaky identification. Michael Disimo
The
case that Rachel Jernigan robbed a Gilbert, AZ bank was based on
eyewitness identification. After she was arrested, the robberies
continued. Before she was tried, FBI agents knew Rachel bore a striking
resemblance to Juanita
Rodriguez-Gallegos, who was arrested for a string of bank robberies in
Gilbert and surrounding communities. Did they notify either the
prosecution or Rachel's defense attorneys? Of course not.
Rachel served 7 years of a 14-year prison sentence for
Rodriguez-Gallegos' crimes before the federal government admitted its
error.After a suburban
Pittsburgh, PA bank was robbed, Michael Disimo was pulled over by a
police officer who thought Michael fit the teller's description.
Under pressure, the teller identified Michael. He spent two
months in jail and lost his job before the real robber was nabbed and
confessed. Michael learned that, the Constitution
notwithstanding, you have to be able to prove your own innocence.
He also learned that in Pennsylvania, you can't sue for negligent
prosecution.
Two weeks after his release from prison in March 1991, Marcus Lyons arrived at the DuPage County Courthouse carrying a wooden cross. As police tried to intervene, Lyons stepped onto a small platform attached to the bottom of the 8- by 6-foot crucifix, lifted a hammer and drove a nail into his foot. It was a cry for help. Lyons had just served 3 years in prison for a rape he said he didn't commit. "I needed someone to listen," he said in a recent interview. A few years ago, someone finally did. A new attorney took his case, and in September, 2007, after DNA evidence from the 1987 crime proved his innocence, Lyons' conviction was dismissed by DuPage County State's Atty. Joseph Birkett -- the same prosecutor who tried the case. Value
of eyewitnesses unclear
Few
people listened when Ronald Gene Taylor declared himself
innocent of a rape charge 14 years ago. But the Harris County District
Attorney's Office finally agreed with him on October 3, 2007,
acknowledging that
the scandal-plagued Houston Police Department crime lab was responsible
for sending yet another wrong person to prison. The crime lab
said
there was no semen on a sheet taken from the rape scene. New
tests
yielded the DNA profile of another man, a sex offender currently in
prison, who looks very much like Taylor."Eyewitness ID reform
is the No. 1 priority of people who want
to reduce the number of wrongful convictions," said Edwin Colfax, Texas
state
program director for the Justice Project, a criminal justice reform
organization. "It is the single most important thing we can do."
Colfax said erroneous eyewitness testimony was the key ingredient in 24
of the 30 Texas cases that have been reversed after belated DNA
testing.
Steven
Phillips
In 1982, a rape
victim riveted a Dallas, Texas jury with her identification of Steven
Phillips as her attacker. She spoke at length about his "striking
blue eyes." So did the victims in 8 other sex crimes.
Phillips' eyes are green. But when the jury convicted him anyway,
Phillips pled guilty to the other crimes, which involved
fondling. Now Phillips is the first to benefit from Dallas DA
Craig Watkins' joint initiative with the Cardozo Innocence Project, to
identify and free the innocent.
Derrick Bell
A
defense lawyer was found ineffective because he failed to inquire into
the effects of blood loss and heavy sedation on the memory of a robbery
victim who identified a defendant 11 days after the crime, a federal
appeals court has ruled. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
vacated the conviction of Derrick Bell, who is serving 12 1/2 to 25
years in prison for the robbery and shooting of Brentonol Moriah in
Brooklyn in 1996. Moriah, who suffered enormous blood loss from a
single shot to the thigh, spent the next 11 days under heavy sedation
and in a near-comatose state. He did not name Bell as his assailant at
the scene of the crime, instead giving only a general description of
"male black, wearing a lemon-colored shirt," even though he knew Bell
from having shared space with him in a rooming house for more than a
year.
Dwayne Allen Dail of Goldsboro, NC always said he was innocent. He always said he was not the man who raped a 12-year-old girl in September 1987. He turned down a plea deal that would have put him on probation for 3 years because he knew he was innocent, and he refused to plead guilty to something he did not do. But a jury believed the victim's eyewitness identification, tenuous and inconsistent as it was, and junk microscopic hair comparison testimony. Now DNA has undone Dail's conviction, proving he was right all along--he is innocent, and now he is free. UPDATE: 10/11/07 - NC Gov. Mike Easley has signed a pardon of innocence for Dwayne, clearing the way for him to receive compensation for the 18 years he spent in prison.
'Sometimes I wonder if death ain't better.' Perhaps
only Roger Dean Gillispie knows for sure whether he kidnapped and raped
three Fairborn, Ohio area women in 1988. No physical evidence
tied him to the crime. He was convicted on the basis of
eyewitness identifications made two years after the crimes
occurred. His case illustrates the tough road for inmates who
insist they are innocent but cannot use DNA to prove it.
Charles T. "Ted" Dubbs was convicted of sexually assaulting two women in Dauphin County, PA in 2000 and 2001. Both women identified him as their attacker. Wilbur Cyrus Brown, II has been convicted of a series of similar attacks, and has confessed to the two attacks Dubbs was convicted of committing. Did the eyes deceive?
UPDATE: On 9/11/07, Judge David Ashworth dropped all charges against Ted Dubbs after prosecutors admitted the crimes he was convicted of committing were perpetrated by Wilbur Brown. Dubbs' Conviction Thrown Out. COMMENTARY: Sometimes justice happens in spite of the justice system. Sometimes it only happens when the people in the justice system get their noses rubbed in their messes. On 9/11/07, Lancaster County District Attorney Donald R. Totaro did the right thing by freeing Charles T. "Ted" Dubbs from a 12- to 40-year prison term in two sexual attacks he probably did not commit. Dubbs was sentenced in May 2002. Wilbur Cyrus Brown, a serial rapist who confessed to 13 other rapes, including one on the same jogging trail where Dubbs supposedly committed his crimes, confessed to those attacks in November. But Totaro had to spin things to portray his office as a well-oiled machine that immediately turned to fix an honest error when it came to their attention. That’s not what happened. Jerry Miller On the
same day -- March 29, 2007 -- in Buffalo, NY and in St. Louis, MO, two
innocent men were cleared of crimes in which the only evidence against
them was their identification by the victims as the perpetrators.
The eyewitnesses were wrong. Analysis: The Wrongful Conviction of Anthony Capozzi: The Hindsight of DNA Technology by William J. Morgan, Jr. Antonio Beaver was convicted in 1997 in the carjacking of a woman near the St. Louis, MO Arch the year before. The robber, wielding a screwdriver, was stabbed during a struggle with the victim. Blood inside her car was not Beaver's, according to recent DNA test results. Prosecutors said the sample had not been tested before trial because it was too small for the technology of the day. Beaver's ordeal began when the carjacking victim described a man with a baseball cap and gap in his front teeth. Six days later, a St. Louis police officer noticed Beaver on the street and thought he fit the description. Beaver voluntarily participated in a line-up. The victim picked him from among four men.
The Dallas County, TX
district attorney's office has
acknowledged that prosecutors illegally withheld evidence that might
have saved a
man from a 1983 rape conviction and 10 years in prison. Newly
discovered evidence amassed by attorneys for James Curtis
Giles "strongly suggests" that he was misidentified -- based on his
name alone -- as one of three men
involved in the gang rape, prosecutors said. They
said his conviction should be overturned, but stopped short
of declaring Mr. Giles innocent. Instead, they asked state District
Judge Robert Francis for additional time to investigate Mr.
Giles' claim that a man with a nearly identical name was the true
rapist.
Similar: Kerry Sanders was whisked from Los Angeles, CA to prison in Stormville, NY when he was mistaken for fugitive Robert Sanders. For 2 years, no one would listen when he insisted, "My Name is Not Robert." Napoleon Cardenas North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley has pardoned a Sanford man who spent more than five years in prison for a 1998 armed robbery in Goldsboro. There was no physical evidence against Steve Snipes, only testimony that the masked robber of the convenience store sounded like Snipes trying to disguise his voice. Snipes presented alibis and a witness who testified that a man named Terrance Wyatt was the robber. Wyatt was caught committing an identical robbery while Snipes was in prison. DNA evidence has cleared an Atlanta, GA man who has served 21 years in prison after being convicted of raping and kidnapping a woman at a Sandy Springs apartment complex in 1985, the man's lawyers said on January 19, 2007. Willie O. "Pete" Williams, who is now 44, was convicted largely on the eyewitness testimony of the rape victim and of another woman who was assaulted — though not raped — a few days later in the parking lot of another Roswell Road complex. Marlon Pendleton
Marlon Pendleton of
Chicago, Illinois says, "I always knew I was innocent," although the
woman who picked him out of a line up was certain he was her
assailant. His repeated requests for DNA testing went unheeded
while he served the first 10 years of his 100 year sentence for
rape. U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow heard his plea and ordered
DNA testing. The results absolutely exclude Marlon as the
rapist. The victim, however, remains convinced that she picked
the right man.
On the morning of Sept. 19, 1992, a man named Leonard Aquino stood with another man in front of a building in Woodside, NY. He was approached by a couple of men who spoke briefly, then opened fire. Mr. Aquino was killed; another man, Paul Peralta, was shot, but survived. Mr. Rivera's picture was picked out of an array of photos by Mr. Peralta and another witness, and in February 1993, five months after the shooting, Mr. Rivera was charged with killing Mr. Aquino and shooting Mr. Peralta. He was convicted in December 1995. The eyewitness now says he did not see the killer long enough to identify him, and new witnesses have come forward to assert that Mr. Rivera was not even present at the scene of the crime. In Chicago in 1997, June Siler mistakenly identified Robert Wilson as the man who slashed her with a razor blade, after viewing a suggestive photo line up and being told he had confessed. This is a chilling reminder of how easy it is for police and prosecutors to manipulate a witness' testimony. Now, June wants to make things right for Robert. Larry Fuller
Nine
years after he was convicted of rape and burglary
and 11 years after his arrest, DNA tests have cleared Allen Coco's name
and record. The
38-year-old Louisiana man had insisted since his arrest in 1995 that he
was
innocent. The 28-year-old victim had chosen his picture from a photo
lineup.
In April 1981, a
Dallas woman was attacked and raped in her bedroom.
When police showed her photographs of potential suspects two days
later, she did not identify Fuller. Several
days later, police showed her a second group of photos. The photograph
of Fuller was the only one that appeared in both arrays. Although the
victim said her attacker did not have facial hair, and Fuller was
pictured with a full beard, she identified him and he was
arrested. Twenty-five years later, Fuller has been exonerated by
DNA.
Link A man imprisoned for more than 18 years for kidnapping and raping a woman was released after new forensic tests showed evidence from the crime did not match his DNA. James Calvin Tillman, 44, told his family he wanted to take a quiet walk and watch the squirrels play for the first time since 1989, when he was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Tillman was 26 when he was charged with abducting a woman as she got into her car near a Hartford, CT restaurant, then beating and raping her at a nearby housing project. The victim picked out Tillman from a series of photos and he was convicted. Experts don't see police
errors in Tillman case
The
most striking aspect of Journal Inquirer interviews with four
eyewitness-identification experts about the case of James Calvin
Tillman is
what they failed to produce. None
of the experts identified a clear error in the procedures Hartford
police used in investigating the case. Although
several experts suggested that the jury in Tillman's 1989
trial would have benefited by hearing from an expert in eyewitness
identification, none identified a compelling point an expert could have
made to change the jurors' minds.
Shaun
Rodrigues
Shaun
Rodrigues claims he is innocent of a Manoa, Hawaii robbery that
happened in July, 2000. Robert Rees of the Honolulu Advertiser
described Rodrigues' conviction: "What
we have here is an injustice illustrative of the dangers inherent in
eyewitness identifications without one iota of physical evidence. The
Rodrigues verdict is illustrative also of the danger of combining
overzealous prosecutors, uninhibited either by a dearth of evidence or
by sloppy police work, with a judge who may have allowed her subjective
feeling about the credibility of witnesses to become a factor in
determination of guilt." But the Hawaii
Supreme Court upheld his
conviction, and he turned himself in on January 9, 2006.
It took a courtroom minute to end 15 months of limbo for Clyde A. Johnson 4th, a Philadelphia, PA social worker wrongly accused of a shooting that investigators now say could be linked to confessed serial killer Juan Covington. Police arrested Johnson after he was picked out of a photo lineup by the victim. Unable to post $1 million bail, Johnson was detained at the city's Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. When Covington confessed to three slayings, police took a second look at the case against Johnson. The Bryant shooting occurred around the corner from Covington's home. Bullets were tested and matched a gun owned by Covington. Forest Shomberg, 41, is serving a 12-year prison term for a sexual assault in Madison, WI, a crime for which he has always professed innocence. At the heart of his appeal is the argument that the trial judge erred in disallowing testimony from an expert witness knowledgeable in the area of eyewitness identifications. The victim agreed at trial with statements that she picked Shomberg because he was "the best of the six," even though "he very well could have not been the guy." His fate now rests in the hands of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. UPDATE: The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Shomberg's conviction. David Hansen
DNA
has allowed Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer David Hansen to dodge
a deadly bullet. When a woman was raped in February, 2005 by a
man who
offered her a ride home from her health club, she picked David out of
more than 1,400 photos of club members. Arrested, charged with
first-degree sexual contact and kidnapping, placed on administrative
leave, David was cleared by DNA. The charges have been dropped,
although the county attorney says there is no evidence that leads to
another suspect.
Luis Diaz
For 26 years, the
people of Miami, Florida believed the Bird Road Rapist was Luis Diaz,
and that he had been caught and locked up. The rapist was named
after the
location in the Miami
area where the rapes occurred. The rapist used the same method with all
of his victims:
He attacked young women driving in the Bird Road-U.S. 1 area of Coral
Gables. He would signal the women to pull over by flashing his
headlights, then force them to have sex at gunpoint. Diaz was
convicted based
on identifications made
by eight victims, even
though some of them initially described their attacker as being 6-feet
tall, 200 pounds, and fluent in English.
Diaz is 5-foot-3, about 130 pounds and speaks little to no English. He
also constantly smelled of onions because he worked as a fry cook -
although none of the victims described their attacker having that
odor. Now DNA as excluded Diaz as the Bird Road Rapist, and he has
been set free.
Alejandro Dominguez
Thirty
years ago Juneal Pratt was convicted of raping two sisters who were
staying in a motel together in Omaha, Nebraska. The conviction
hinged
on the women's identification of Pratt in a line up; his alibi
witnesses were rejected by the jury. New testing has excluded
Pratt as
the source of DNA found on the women's clothes. He stands on the
brink
of becoming Nebraska's first DNA exoneration.Alejandro
Dominguezwas
16 when he
was charged with the September 1989 home
invasion and rape in Waukegan. He was convicted in a 1990 trial, in
large part because the victim identified him as her attacker.
Dominguez insisted he was wrongly identified and was innocent.
Sentenced to 9 years in state prison, he served more than 4 years,
receiving time off for good behavior, before he was released in
December 1993.
Even though he was free, Dominguez continued to try to prove his
innocence. He
persuaded lawyer Jed Stone
to seek DNA testing on semen recovered from the victim.
The tests excluded Dominguez as a source of the semen, and they
prompted Lake County prosecutors and Stone to ask a judge to vacate the
convictions.
Mistaken eyewitness identification is the major reason innocent people have been sent to prison in Virginia, a two-year study of 11 wrongful convictions concludes. Preventing such tragedies could be as simple as changing police procedures or as expensive as improving the quality of legal help given poor people in Virginia, which pays court-appointed lawyers the lowest fees in the nation. In May 1981, when Michael Williams was 16, a jury in Jonesboro, LA rejected his claim of innocence, deliberating for less than an hour before convicting him of the savage beating and sexual assault of his math tutor. Nearly 24 years after his arrest, independent DNA tests by three laboratories, including the Louisiana state crime lab, show what Williams has long contended: He is not the man who committed the crime. The victim, shot while riding on the back of her husband's motorcycle in South Florida, identified someone else as her assailant. The best-positioned eyewitness was unable to pick out Persad from a photo lineup; he, too, picked someone else. He couldn't identify him in court, either. The same eyewitness said there was nothing unusual about the assailant's car, while Persad's car had foreign slogans written all over it. Moreover, three witnesses testified Persad was studying for an exam with them when the incident happened. But the victim's husband was shown a photo of Persad by an ex-FBI investigator, told Persad was the assailant, identified him in court -- and Persad is doing 43 years in prison. UPDATE: 3/1/07 - Persad's was one of the most controversial criminal cases in recent memory: one eyewitness, a 90-second look at a stranger before the stranger fired. No physical evidence. Persad's case wended in and out of courts for years. A month ago, Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga threw out the ID, the keystone of the case. On March 1, 2007, prosecutors wiped Persad's slate clean. Charge dropped in "road rage" shooting. Clarence Harrison of Decatur, GA, has spent 17 years in prison for rape, kidnapping and robbery. The victim identified him from both a photo and live lineup. He has become the 150th person proven innocent by DNA in the past ten years. Arthur Lee Whitfield spent part of his first hours of freedom standing up on the bus that carried him home. Whitfield was released from prison after DNA tests exonerated him of raping two women in Ghent, VA in August 1981. He had served 22 years of a 63-year sentence. Whitfield had little to say to the investigator who helped convict him, or to the two women who at trial said they were sure he was the man who had raped them. “It would be nice for them to say they made a mistake,” he said. “It takes a big person to say they made a mistake.” This Sharpes, FL case was a classic -- mistaken victim identification and perjured snitch testimony put him in prison for a 1981 rape. He has been exonerated by DNA, and freed after 22 years. After nine men were convicted here for crimes they did not commit, Boston police and the Suffolk County district attorney's office have agreed on a series of reforms on how evidence is gathered, especially from witnesses to a crime. Click HERE to
read the Report of the Task Force on Eyewitness Evidence.
David Lemus and Olmado Hidalgo have spent 12 years in jail for the murder of a New York City nightclub bouncer named Marcus Peterson and the attempted murder of another man on Nov. 23, 1990. Three eyewitnesses identified Jose Figueroa.as the man who had acted as a mediator between the bouncers and the murderers during an argument earlier in the night. But Figueroa was in jail that night, and the same eyewitnesses also identified Lemus and Hidalgo. Victims who get a good long look at violent criminals are unlikely to identify them accurately later, Yale and U.S. Navy researchers have found. This caveat follows from a unique study of 509 Navy and Marine officers undergoing elite survival training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Results suggest that police and juries may give eyewitness testimony too much credibility. Michael Roper's case has all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction -- shaky eyewitness identification, jailhouse "snitch" testimony and no physical evidence connecting him to the murder of an Akron, Ohio convenience store owner. At his 4th trial the jury convicted him, but they didn't know another suspect closely resembles Roper. UPDATE: Michael Roper denied new trial despite prosecutor misconduct. In 1997 an assailant dropped his hat when he shot Boston police officer Gregory Gallagher in the buttocks. Then the shooter burst into a nearby home, drank a glass of water and dropped his sweatshirt before fleeing. Later Officer Gallagher identified Stephan Cowans as the assailant (although the woman whose home was invaded disagreed) and a crime lab technician said a fingerprint on the water glass was Stephan's. Now DNA has trumped both. DNA on the hat, the sweatshirt and the water glass are from the same person -- but not from Stephan.
Link: Landmark
Series from the Winston-Salem, NC Journal
Murder, Race, Justice The State of North Carolina v. Darryl Hunt When
a 19-year-old black man was charged with the murder of 25-year-old
Deborah Sykes, it set off a case that has helped define race relations
in Winston-Salem for nearly 20 years. Hunt was convicted twice
despite
the lack of physical evidence and DNA tests that excluded him. Although such
DNA test results have freed numerous others in rape and murder cases,
Hunt remains in prison. February 7, 2004: Darryl
Hunt Exonerated. Darryl Hunt's long imprisonment in
connection with the 1984
rape and murder of Deborah Sykes in Winston-Salem, NC was a case of
mistaken identity.
Another man killed her, the police and prosecutors have admitted. And
most importantly, that man acted alone. Unfortunately,
police and prosecutors were so thorough in inciting
hatred and a desire for revenge against Darryl Hunt in Deborah
Sykes' family that her mother and step-father refuse to accept Hunt's
innocence. Bitter Justice Other
so-called forensic identification sciences, including
microscopic hair analysis, handwriting identification, bite-mark
analysis, ballistics, and even fingerprints have also been under attack
in recent years. The Supreme Court, in its 1993 Daubert
decision,
established the “known rate of error” as one of the indicia of
scientific reliability. Yet courts continue to admit "ear witness
identification" and juries continue to convict innocent people
believing witnesses are much better at voice recognition than research
indicates. Falling on Deaf Ears After
17 years in prison - most of it seeking DNA tests to prove his
innocence - Lonnie Erby walked free on August 25th because genetic
testing
conclusively showed he had not committed two of the three rapes for
which he was convicted. His exoneration came despite strenuous
opposition by Circuit Attorney Jenniver Joyce, who argued the DNA
testing would cause unnecessary upheaval for victims and their
families and unneeded
expense. All three victims picked him out of a line up. Lonnie Erby People think of memory as a videotape recording in the brain. But few people, if any, can reliably distinguish between memories of something they've been shown and something they've been asked to imagine. In fact, we assemble our memories by patching together broken pieces of stored information and then filling in the blanks. Now there is hope of a False Memory Detector Dana Holland, 35, was freed after a Cook County judge found
him
not guilty in a retrial on the 1993 attempted murder and armed robbery
of
a woman in Chicago. Holland had been
linked
to that crime by a wallet found at the scene that had belonged to
another
woman, a rape victim. Holland was originally convicted of that rape,
but
DNA evidence exonerated him of it earlier this year. He had been
sentenced
to more than 100 years in prison for both crimes and served 10 years.
The victim of the attempted murder testified against Holland
again
this week, identifying him in court. Eyewitnesses
Rarely
Concede Error After 11
years
in prison, DNA has cleared Michael Mercer of raping a 17-year-old girl.
The
victim saw Mercer 2 months after she was attacked and identified him as
her
assailant. She was certain, but she
was
wrong In 1983,
in Lowell,
MA, two rape victims identified Dennis Maher as their assailant.
For
19 years, Dennis protested his innocence. DNA tests have
confirmed
his innocence and he has been freed. 126th
DNA
Exoneration Of the 125
wrongly convicted persons exonerated by DNA, Marvin Anderson is the
only one where the real rapist was shown to the victim in the original
photo spread, and instead she picked an innocent man. Fallibility of Eyewitness Identication In 1998, a
rape victim identified Josiah Sutton as one of her assailants when she
saw him on the street, and the Houston, Texas crime lab claimed DNA
tests implicated him. The crime lab has been shut down because of
the poor quality
of its work, and new DNA tests have excluded Josiah. 4 1/2 Years in Prison -- for Nothing Over 21
years ago, a rape victim in Hampton Roads, VA saw Julius Ruffin on an
elevator and insisted he was her attacker. After two mistrials,
he was convicted at a third trial and sentenced to five life terms.
Now he has been Cleared by DNA. Eleven
years after Terry Arndt was murdered and his girlfriend raped in Shasta
County, CA, the rape victim identified Thomas Brewster as the assailant
-- even though she failed to pick him out of a line up 6 days after the
attack.
The charges cost Brewster almost 2 years pre-trial in jail; DNA
tests
cleared him 8 weeks into his capital murder trial. Now it's The System's Turn to Pay Louisville,
KY financial advisor Troy Rufra was identified by four eyewitnesses as
the man who robbed an equal number of banks. The eyewitnesses
were sure. The problem? The
Eyewitnesses were Wrong Bernard
Webster spent 20 years in prison for raping a Baltimore, MD woman when
he was 19 years old. He was repeatedly denied parole because he
refused to admit his guilt. Now DNA has established Bernard's
innocence. The victim remains convinced of her identification of
him. 115th Person Freed by DNA
Could the witness really see what he thinks he could see? Eyewitness Identification Expert Dr. Paul Michel could have the answer. Eyewitness Expert |
| In 1984, Jennifer Thompson was brutally raped. She concentrated on memorizing her attacker's features. When she picked Ronald Cotton out of a line up, Jennifer says, |
 Gary Graham, executed by Texas despite serious doubts about his guilt. |
Gary Graham was sentenced to death based solely on the identification of one eye witness. Two other eye witnesses who say the killer was not Graham were never heard at trial. |
| Jump to "The Cotton Case" from our Links page for a riveting demonstration of just how wrong eyewitness identification can be. |
|
|
