One man served 19 years behind bars for an Alexandria rape and attempted strangulation. Another Alexandria man served the first seven years of a 45-year sentence in a rape and burglary case. A third man is asking a Virginia appeals court to clear his name after he spent 27 years in prison for rapes prosecutors say they now know he didn’t commit. And faulty eyewitness identifications wrongfully put all of them behind bars.
Nationwide, the number of people exonerated based on new DNA evidence is surging. That has fueled a movement in the legal community to take a closer look at the reliability of older investigative tools, such as eyewitness identifications.
| Resistance to change |
| Experts on wrongful convictions say they’ve encountered some resistance from police departments when new lineup procedures are suggested. |
| Departments don’t like to hear that they’re not already using best practices, said Jon Gould, a justice, law and society professor at American University. And bureaucratic agencies are often reluctant to embrace any sort of change, said Karen Newirth, the Innocence Project’s eyewitness identification litigation fellow. |
| Experts say convincing police that different procedures make their cases and identifications more solid is key in getting agencies to make changes. |
More than a dozen people in the D.C. region who were exonerated by DNA had been convicted based on mistaken eyewitnesses — the leading cause of wrongful convictions, according to data from the Innocence Project. Such cases have spurred efforts to try to improve identification procedures.
Earlier this year, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell signed a bill that requires local police departments to establish policies for conducting lineups and directs the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Services to develop a model policy.
That’s expected to be finished this fall, said Teresa Gooch, the agency’s law enforcement division director.
Gooch said she believes the policy will include two elements experts have called best practices for conducting lineups: blind administration — when the officer showing a witness photographs doesn’t know who the suspect is — and showing the photographs one at a time, rather than all at once.
An officer shouldn’t show witnesses photo lineups unless the witnesses are confident they could identify a suspect, said Officer Rebecca Innocenti, a Montgomery County police spokeswoman. But done correctly, she said, a lineup can also be used to eliminate a suspect if the victim says, “it’s none of these people.”
Such methods make it less likely that a victim will pick someone who is wrongly suspected by police or simply looks most similar to, but not exactly like, their attacker, said Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor and expert on wrongful convictions.
“Eyewitness memory is fragile and highly malleable,” he said. DNA exonerations, Garrett said, have highlighted that sometimes witnesses make mistakes.
The Virginia Court of Appeals is deciding whether to grant a writ of actual innocence to Thomas Haynesworth, whom multiple victims mistakenly identified as their rapist in 1984. DNA has already cleared him in one rape in which he was convicted and one in which he was a suspect; now, his lawyers and prosecutors are both asking to court to declare him innocent in two cases in which no DNA evidence is available.
He was released from prison earlier this year, after having served 27 years.
Shawn Armbrust, his attorney and the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, said Haynesworth was only placed in a photo array because he was seen walking on a street where a rape happened.
“It calls home the idea that just because a witness picks the guy out doesn’t mean it’s right,” she said.
It’s important for police departments to take steps — like blind and sequential lineups — to improve identification methods because juries find eyewitness testimony especially persuasive, said Jon Gould, a professor of justice, law and society at American University.
And, Armbrust said, putting an innocent man behind bars means “the right guy is still out there committing other crimes.”
