UNRELIABLE EYEWITNESS IDENTIFICATION

If there's one thing we all should have learned from the string of wrongful convictions recently come to light, it’s that you can’t always believe someone else’s eyes. Questionable or flat-out-wrong eyewitness-identification testimony led to Anthony Powell’s 1992 conviction for rape, and the murder convictions of Shawn Drumgold in 1989, Donnell Johnson in 1996, and Marlon Passley in 1995. All have been released — with apologies from Suffolk County district attorney Dan Conley in the first two cases and former Suffolk County DA Ralph Martin in the others — in the last five years.

Not every wrongful conviction is the fault of eyewitnesses, of course. A jury found Stephan Cowans, freed this January, guilty of a 1997 police-officer shooting largely on the basis of an erroneous fingerprint match. But witnesses remain the most common problem, in Boston and elsewhere. The New York–based Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that takes on prisoner appeals in which DNA or other scientific tests can prove innocence, says that more than 80 percent of prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence since 1992 were originally convicted on mistaken eyewitness testimony. A University of Michigan study released Monday found that almost 90 percent of wrongful rape convictions and half of wrongful homicide convictions since 1989 included at least one eyewitness misidentification. The results of the study suggest that thousands of those incarcerated today may, in fact, be innocent.

All this has prompted calls for change in Suffolk County. After Powell, who’d been identified by the victim from a photo array, was exonerated by DNA evidence and freed in March, Conley and new Boston Police Department (BPD) commissioner Kathleen O’Toole announced the establishment of an eyewitness-identification working group. The group includes three defense attorneys, a prosecutor, a BPD superintendent, and an academic researcher specializing in witness IDs.

The group has taken as its guide previous reports by the US Department of Justice in 2001 and by the states of New Jersey, North Carolina, and Illinois, according to task-force member James Doyle, an attorney with the Boston law firm Carney & Bassil and author of several studies on eyewitness identification. Doyle, who also served on the working group that issued the Justice Department’s report, says that the BPD uses outmoded techniques for eyewitness identification. For example, photo arrays or line-ups, which display several faces at once, encourage the witness to select the one "most similar" to their memory; sequential arrays, showing one photo at a time, more reliably result in a correct identification. "Double-blind" identification, in which the presenter does not know who the suspect is, eliminates the subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — ways that a police officer may influence the witness to choose the "correct" person.

The working group’s charge is to make recommendations like these to improve the reliability of eyewitness identification. Which means that the group will not concern itself with old convictions. "There are two kinds of innocence issues," Doyle says. "One is reopening specific cases. The other is creating a template for doing things in a systematic way in the future."

But clearly, Suffolk County needs a second group to study old eyewitness-based convictions. In too many instances, questionable eyewitness testimony has resulted in guilty verdicts for people who may well be innocent. Such convictions are not hard to find; just ask criminal-defense attorneys if they have any cases that still gnaw at them. In conversations with more than a dozen attorneys who defend homicide suspects in Boston, the Phoenix found three cases that continue to haunt not only the lawyers, but also the families and friends of the young men who are in prison because of eyewitness identifications. All three involve homicides committed between the fall of 1999 and summer of 2000. No significant physical evidence tied the defendants to the crime in any of these cases. All three young men named below are in prison today; their sentences range from eight years to life.

Keyon Sprinkle: Convicted of first-degree murder in 2002; sentenced to life after incredible police misbehavior. It's the police who should be in jail

On November 16, 1999, Charles Taylor was shot six times, in broad daylight, on a Roxbury street corner. Keyon Sprinkle, who was then 17 years old, told police that he was in his house three blocks away when he heard the gunshots. But eyewitnesses told a different story during his trial, and on March 27, 2002, Sprinkle was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. "This case eats me up, because I’m as certain as I can be that Keyon is innocent," says Peter Parker, the North End attorney who defended him. "I think about this case all the time."

Sprinkle, just 5’3" and 120 pounds, was an unemployed high-school dropout living with his grandmother at the time of his arrest. His only previous legal trouble was a marijuana-possession charge that was never prosecuted. He has a daughter with his girlfriend Jayda, and wanted to put together a life with them, says his cousin Loreen Jones, a Boston Public School teacher living in Randolph. "He had some plans," Jones says. "After the baby came, he knew he had to buckle up." But he never got that chance.

Three key witnesses testified against Sprinkle during his trial. Two had been threatened on tape with accomplice charges, and the other admitted in court that a detective on the case testified in his behalf at a sentencing hearing for his prior crimes — a fact that even the prosecutor did not know until the trial began, says David Procopio, spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. (All questions for the police were referred to Procopio by Boston Police Department spokeswoman Mariellen Burns; the individual prosecutors in each also referred questions to Procopio.)

The victim’s wife, Rosa Amporo-Taylor, testified against Sprinkle. She was in Sprinkle’s house at the time of the murder, and had previously had an affair with Sprinkle’s cousin Clarence Williams. According to prosecutors, Williams asked Sprinkle to kill Taylor, who was hanging out on a nearby street corner, and Sprinkle, who was playing video games with his friends and little brother, walked to the corner, put six bullets into Taylor, and calmly returned to his game. (Note: Williams was charged as an accessory before the fact and tried simultaneously with Sprinkle. He was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole.)

Initially, Amporo-Taylor insisted to detectives that Sprinkle was in the house with her when she heard the gunshots — she recalled Sprinkle going outside and asking a girl in the courtyard what had happened. She repeated this story no less than 13 times in at least three separate interviews with detectives James Wyse, John Martell, and Michael Primm, according to transcripts of those interrogations. But the detectives put pressure on her to implicate Sprinkle. "You keep sticking with this story and what you’re telling us here right now, and you’re going to be putting both of your feet in Framingham State Prison for a long time," one of the detectives said, according to a transcript that doesn’t indicate which of the detectives was speaking.

Finally, just before Amporo-Taylor testified for the grand jury, the detectives threatened her with felony perjury, and she changed her story to implicate Sprinkle. At the grand jury and again at Sprinkle’s trial, Amporo-Taylor testified that she saw Sprinkle tuck something into his waistband and go out; then, later, Sprinkle claimed to hear the gunshots, but she did not. No charges were ever brought against Amporo-Taylor.

The detectives also leaned hard on another key witness. Spencer Redding, a friend of Williams’s, was parked in his car down the street when he heard the shots and looked up, catching a brief glimpse of two men at the scene. Redding, who called 911, initially told police that he couldn’t see much from his car, with his poor eyesight. He just saw "shadows," he said then — and he thought the men were white. The detectives later threatened to charge him as an accessory to the murder if he didn’t identify Sprinkle as one of the two men. "The heat was on in that room" when the detectives questioned him, Redding said under cross-examination. He testified at the trial that one of the killers "could have been" Sprinkle.

Another trial witness, Angel Suazo, first came to the attention of detectives six months after the Taylor shooting; by then, the grand jury had already indicted Sprinkle in March 2000. In late May, Suazo was arrested for probation violations, and his probation officer recommended an 18-month sentence. Suazo, who knew Williams and was an acquaintance of Sprinkle’s, asked Martell and Primm for help in exchange for information about Sprinkle. "Their exact words were, we’ll see what we can do depending on what you can tell us," Suazo testified under cross-examination at Sprinkle’s trial. (It also came up at trial that in an attempt to avoid the 18-month sentence for probation violations, Suazo had originally claimed during a probation hearing that he had been in a Dade County correctional institute since September. When that assertion was easily disproved, he then claimed that he had undergone ankle surgery in October and spent months immobilized in rehabilitation; he even brought in forged hospital documents to back up the claim. Only after these attempts failed, Suazo admitted under cross-examination, did he approach Martell and Primm with his story about Sprinkle.) On June 27, Martell testified in Suazo’s behalf at his final surrender hearing, where a judge determined Suazo’s sentencing. (He got the 18 months despite the detective’s testimony.) At Sprinkle’s trial, Suazo testified that he saw Sprinkle on the sidewalk that afternoon just before the shooting, and that Sprinkle showed him the gun he was carrying in his waistband.

Another eyewitness, who had been waiting for a bus directly across the street from the shooting, refused to change his claim that the killers were light-skinned Hispanics. Attorney Parker asked Modesto Gonzalez on cross-examination: "They told you you were wrong about the individual being Hispanic. He was black. Isn’t that what the police told you?" Gonzalez replied: "Yes."

Other witnesses supported Amporo-Taylor’s original story, that Sprinkle was in his house when the shots were fired, and that he came out and asked a girl in the courtyard — Lillian Robinson, who was then 13 years old — what had happened. Prosecutor Pat Hagan argued in court that those witnesses were unreliable, because they were motivated to protect their friend and neighbor. They stick by their story today. "He was like a big brother," says Robinson, now 18, of Sprinkle. "He looked out for me. But I had no reason to lie."

Marion Jones, an elderly woman who lived across the street from Sprinkle, testified that she was on the phone with Sprinkle when she and others heard the gunshots. On a recent evening, sitting on a plastic chair in her living room, she repeated her story. As she spoke, she could see the front door of Sprinkle’s former home through her front door, which she keeps open in nice weather. Why, she asks, would she lie to keep a cold-blooded killer living directly across the courtyard? "I just knew him as a kid around here," Jones says. "He wasn’t a trouble kid."

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