I draw your attention to the case of a man held on death row since 1993 based on erroneous eyewitness testimony - Tony Egbuna Ford. He remains there fighting for his lifte to this day. The issuess with his ID are as follows:
* Viewing a 6 person photo spread with Tony at position 5, the witness first picked out number 4 as the perpetrator. This was written over with the number 5 later (by the detective in the case). We have copies of both the original and the amended statements. This has never been explained and was never challenged by Tony's trial counsel.
* One of the two witnesses identified Tony AFTER his picture had been all over the news as the prime suspect, and after having time to speak to the first witness (her sister) and discuss the photo spread (both sisters were shown the same photo spread)
* One of the two "eye witnesses" stated she had her head buried in a pillow the whole time of the incident
* On the day of trial both witnesses were asked (improperly) to confirm their identification of Tony outside of the courtroom. The prosecution pointed to Tony and asked "does that look like the man?". The witnesses took a long time to look at him and answered only that they weren't sure but it "could" be. This was witnessed by the court reporter who came forward in 2006 and spoke to journalists then researching the case for the show "The Wrong Man". The court reporter stated it was the only case that had ever caused him to be upset since he knew as soon as he witnessed it that Tony's trial would not be fair.
* This was a cross racial ID - under high stress.
* None of the other men in the line ups the witnesses were shown looked even vaguely like Tony or the true perpetrator.
* Eyewitness evidence was the ONLY evidence against Tony.
Further information on Tony's case is available on www.tonyegbunaford.com - including a study done by an eyewitness expert (whose assistance was denied at trial) which shows that the photospread was heavily weighted towards Tony being picked out.
We continue to fight for justice.
When Our Eyes Deceive Us
Being part of a system that identified and ultimately convicted the wrong man became another form of victimization.
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
Describe the last person who served you coffee. What if I helped refresh your memory? Showed you some photos of local baristas? Pulled together a helpful lineup? Cheered exuberantly when you picked the "right" one? Now imagine that instead of identifying the person who made your venti latte last week, we had just worked together to nail a robber or a rapist. Imagine how good we would feel. Now imagine what would happen if we were wrong.
Last month, a Texas judge cleared Timothy Cole of the aggravated-sexual-assault conviction that sent him to prison in 1986. Although his victim positively identified him three times—twice in police lineups and again at trial—Cole was ultimately exonerated by DNA testing. The real rapist, Jerry Wayne Johnson, had been confessing to the crime since 1995. Unfortunately for Cole, he died in prison in 1999, long before his name was cleared.
Our eyes deceive us. Social scientists have insisted for decades that our eyewitness-identification process is unreliable at best and can be the cause of grievous injustice. A study published last month by Gary Wells and Deah Quinlivan in Law and Human Behavior, the journal of the American Psychology-Law Society, reveals just how often those injustices occur: of the more than 230 people in the United States who were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated by DNA evidence, approximately 77 percent involved cases of mistaken eyewitness identification, more than any other single factor.
Wells has been studying mistaken identifications for decades, and his objection to the eyewitness-identification system is not that people make mistakes. In an interview, he explains that eyewitness evidence is important, but should be treated—like blood, fingerprints and fiber evidence—as trace evidence, subject to contamination, deterioration and corruption. Our current criminal-justice system allows juries to hear eyewitness-identification evidence shaped by suggestive police procedures.In a 1977 case, Manson v. Braithwaite, the Supreme Court held that such evidence could be used ifdeemed "reliable."Today we know you can have a good long look, be certain you have the right guy and also be wrong. But Manson is still considered good law.
Jennifer Thompson was 22 the night she was raped in 1984. Throughout the ordeal, she scrupulously studied her attacker, determined to memorize every detail of his face and voice so that, if she survived, she could help the police catch him. Thompson soon identified Ronald Cotton in a photo lineup. When she—after some hesitation—again picked Cotton out of a physical lineup a few days later, a detective told her she'd picked the same person in the photo lineup.
But in this case Thompson got it wrong, although Cotton served 10 years before DNA evidence exonerated him and decisively implicated another man, Bobby Poole. The curious part of the story is that despite Thompson's determination to memorize every detail, when she first saw Poole in court she was certain she had never seen him before. Indeed, according to Wells and Quinlivan, "even after DNA had exonerated Cotton and Thompson herself had accepted the fact that Poole was her attacker, she had no memory of Poole's face and, when thinking back to the attack, she says, 'I still see Ronald Cotton'."
- 1
- 2
- Next Page »
Discuss