‘Lying eyes' create serious problems for death penalty option

 

Gas chamber is one of the death penalty options

The death penalty is favored by many Americans, while experts tell us how witness mistakes create wrongful convictions. Lying eyes and witness mistakes have caused too the wrongfully convicted to spend long years in prison and likely innocent people to have been executed, according to legal experts. 

As folks who stand at the bar of justice wait for honest decisions about their guilt or innocence, sometimes the balance is swayed by witness error. Experts maintain it is a major problem in the criminal justice system, as innocent people languish in jail for years because of these errors. How and why does it happen?

Various research studies have indicated that witnesses err when making judgments about crimes. It has been found that in 75 percent of cases overturned by DNA testing,  eyewitness accounts were wrong, according to the Innocence Project.

Research conducted at Pennsylvania University by Mary Beth Oliver, a media studies professor, found people often get details wrong when race is a factor. She examined viewer memory of black and white criminal suspects in a newscast. When these viewers watched a news story with both black and white suspects, then were given a wanted poster of either an African American or white suspect, they often identified the African Americans as the ones guilty.

“Over time,” Oliver wrote in a report published in the Journal of Communications, “participants who had seen the Caucasian suspect in the news story were increasingly likely to mistakenly identify African-Americans as the ones guilty of a crime. In addition, endorsement of anti-black attitudes was associated with decreases in mis-identification of Caucasian photographs and increases in misidentification of African-American photographs.”

That type of wrong eyewitness testimony has led to wrong convictions, as in the case of someone discussed in the article about the Penn State research. A man by the name of Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, having been picked out of a lineup by victims, one ambivalent but persuaded by the earlier identification. Both of these witnesses misidentified Cotton, which led to his sentence. He was found guilty even though physical evidence at the scene indicated another man may have committed the crime. That other man, Bobby Poole, eventually confessed to both rapes.

A review of 53 cases of wrongful convictions in New York State revealed the following to be the paramount causes, according to a study presented by the New York Bar Association. These were the causes found:

• Government Practices: one or more general errors by a government actor (a prosecutor,member of law enforcement, or judge). • Identification Procedures: the misidentification of the accused by the victim and/or one or more eyewitnesses. • Mishandling of Forensic Evidence: errors in the handling or preservation of key forensic evidence and/or the failure to use DNA testing. • Use of False Confessions: the extraction and use of what turned out to be a false confession by the accused

There have been 241 wrongful convictions in the United States according to the Innocence Project. This is the breakdown according to race: 143 African Americans 70 Caucasians 21 Latinos 2 Asian American 5 whose race is unknown.

Only about half of those wrongfully convicted have been financially compensated, although 27 states are presently working on this issue. Still it is telling that given the information about wrong eyewitness accounts, specifically about African Americans when compared to white suspects, the large number of African American convictions certainly shows race to be an issue in the criminal justice system,with an imbalance in how justice is meted out, sometimes wrongfully.

With these facts in mind, one wonders why the clamor for the death penalty continues loud and long, even in questionable cases.  Realizing that witnesses can err, and providing research on the subject, may help the system make modifications so that wrongful convictions do not occur.  Knowing that an error identifying the wrong person can lead to that wrong conviction, and eventually, the death penalty may allow the public to reconsider whether it is worth the risk that an innocent person spends years in prison or dies because of witness mistakes.