Faulty eyewitness identifications leading cause of wrongful convictions

The case seemed rock solid: A tag had been discovered with the suspect's name on it found near a bloody knife used to kill the victim, and a witness had fingered him as the man she saw lurking around at the time of the murder. There was only one problem: He didn't do it.

Denver police Lt. Jon Priest told the story this morning during a session on wrongful convictions at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference in Denver. In that February 1999 case, a woman had been killed in her Denver home. Authorities had found a hand towel wrapped around a bloody knife, and clothing tag with the name "Gerald Simpson" on it.

Simpson, it turned out, lived in a halfway house near the victim's home. Simpson denied killing the woman, but a witness picked him out of a lineup. Authorities charged him with the murder. A short time later, DNA evidence proved he didn't do it, and it fingered another man, who subsequently confessed to the crime. "I was devastated because Gerald Simpson was 'the guy,'" Priest recalled.

The issue of wrongful convictions is of particular importance in Dallas County where there have been more DNA exonerations than any other county in the nation. All but one of the 20 DNA exonerations involved bad eyewitness identification.

In the United States, officials have documented more than 230 wrongful convictions. About 60 involved false confessions and about 80 involved informant testimony, said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University of School of Law.

About 80 percent of those exonerated through DNA testing were wrongfully convicted based on faulty eyewitness identifications, making eyewitness indications the leading cause of wrongful convictions, Warden said.

Steven Drizin, legal director of Center on Wrongful Convictions, pointed to three main factors in wrongful convictions:

Law officers assume a suspect's verbal cues, behavior, emotion or lack thereof, or body language constitute evidence of guilt. Investigators develop a tunnel vision approach in which everything is filtered through the lens that this is the guilty party. Investigators leak information to the suspect, often unintentionally, that the suspect incorporates into a false confession.

"Videotaping is a way to prevent false confessions and wrongful convictions," Drizin said.

The earliest documented wrongful conviction in the United States involved both false confessions and a jail house snitch, Warden said. In that case, a Manchester, Vt. farm hand named Russell Colvin had disappeared in the early 1800s. Colvin's brother in laws, Steven and Jesse Boorn, had made no secret of their disdain for him, Warden said.

Seven years after Colvin's disappearance, a distant relative had a dream that Colvin had been murdered. This started a string of events involved a jailhouse snitch who claimed that Jesse had confessed to him, as well as the subsequent false confessions of both Jesse and Steven. Jesse received a life sentence, and Steven got the death penalty.

If not for a letter to the editor printed in a New York paper about the case, Jesse would likely have spent the remainder of his life in prison and Steven would have been executed. A man who read the letter recalled that one of his relatives had a Russell Colvin from Vermont working on his farm. It turned out to be the same Russell Colvin, who was very much alive and well.

Original report here



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