If we need another reason to remove Councilman Phil Mendelson from the chair of the Judiciary Committee, allow me to present the “Eyewitness Identification Procedures Act of 2008.”
Mendelson’s latest harebrained way to hamstring the police was the subject of a council hearing yesterday.
The hearing announcement says the bill would “require that identification procedures be documented and recorded and to authorize discovery of these materials; and to create a rebuttable presumption that an identification procedure not in accordance with this law is unreliable.”
Let me put it in simple terms: Mendelson wants cops to do video interviews with people who witness crimes; he also wants them to sign statements at the scene. And if the witnesses are not videotaped and they don’t sign a statement, then their statements are not worth anything in court. This sounds good in the abstract.
It makes sense if you are a lawyer who lives in Ward 3, or a council member who lives on upper Wisconsin Avenue (Mendelson), or you are a cop in a small town like Winston-Salem, N.C., or you are a psychology professor from England. All of the above spoke in favor of the bill.
But if you are a police detective on the mean streets of Washington, D.C., trying to get people to finger a murderer who just might live next door, or if you are a prosecutor who knows how hard it is to get anyone to talk to the cops about violent crime, then you think Mendelson’s bill is nothing short of preposterous and horribly destructive.
“A thoughtful review of these points should lead the committee and the council to conclude that this bill is unnecessary, unwise and, at best, premature,” Patricia Riley testified. She’s special council to the U.S. attorney and has worked with D.C. cops for years.
“The District of Columbia — unlike some of the states — does not have a record of having convictions overturned on the basis of mistaken identification. In fact, to the best of my knowledge there are only two such cases in the past 20 years.”
Where does Mendelson come up with these ideas? In this case, the procedures come from the Innocence Project, composed of crusaders who believe too many people are wrongly accused. But Barry Scheck, co-director of the group, testified, “Now that I’ve seen what your police department has in place, you are pretty much there.”
Police union chief Kris Baumann testified after the British psychologist. “I am once again stunned by this council,” he said. We are at 142 homicides as of today. The Seventh District alone will see another 50 bodies hit the ground this year. And we’re here discussing legislation about addressing a problem that has arisen twice in the last 20 years. Baumann said the law, if passed, would stop witnesses from coming forward in a city where revenge for “snitching” is already a major problem.
“We’re not some social experiment for other jurisdictions,” he said. “As police officers, we have to serve and protect the people who actually live in the city.” Wouldn’t it be nice if Mendelson worked toward the same mission?
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