Bells
Staff member
Your whining will get you nowhere.
Provide evidence that eyewitness testimony is reliable. I have lost count of how many times I have had to make this request.
As for your pleading for victims of crimes.. Do you think it serves them to imprison or kill innocent people and leave their actual perpetrators at large in the community, MR? I mean, do you think they are better served, that they will obtain justice for the crimes committed against them, to rely on a system that is so unreliable that these poor victims remain at actual risk as the real perpetrators remain free? Because that is what happens when you imprison the wrong person, MR. Are you aware of that?
Are you aware of what it does to the victims, when they find out that their testimony jailed the wrong person? When they find out that they have ruined the life of an innocent person?
Now, tell me how reliable it is, MR, prove it. You keep making the same ridiculous claim and you are yet to back it up. So prove this wrong with actual studies:
"Off the bat, 35 percent of eyewitness testimonies are wrong," Rebecca Brown, director of state policy reform at the Innocence Project, told VICE.
And research shows that once you introduce a gun, a perpetrator of a different race, bad lighting, and police interference, the risk of misidentifying someone rises considerably. Last year saw a record number of exonerations, three-quarters of which centered on people who had been falsely convicted on the basis of a misidentification. Studies conducted over the last five years have shown one of every three people ID'ed as a perpetrator from a police photo lineup is an innocent "filler."
While prosecutorial misconduct, including deliberately mishandling witnesses, is present in up to 42 percent of exoneration cases, Brown believes misidentifications are a function of poor protocol.
"What we've seen is that the vast majority of mistaken identities is not the intention of police, but just them doing the normal procedures of the time," she said.
Decades of sociological and psychological research suggest the way police departments have traditionally conducted photo lineups is akin to trampling through a crime scene with muddy boots on.
"Everyone agrees that it's what happens at the front end of the criminal justice system that leads to wrongful convictions," John Furman, the director of research at the International Association of Police Chiefs (IAPC), said in an interview.
[..]
As surely as physical evidence collected at a crime scene can be contaminated purposely or through carelessness, a witness's memory can be sullied and rendered invalid. In Miles's case, police began the process of contaminating the witnesses' already shaky memories as soon as they created the six-packs, according to advocates and experts who reviewed the case.
The two bank employees, Trina Gomez and Max Patlan, did not have a clear recollection of the two men who held them up, according to court documents. They knew that both men were black; one of the men was short and stocky and the other slender and maybe taller. The "stocky" man was said to have a shaved head, facial hair and "rolls on the back of his neck."
At the outset, Patlan admitted to the investigators he would not be able to identify the stocky suspect. The man had struck him on the face with the butt of a gun, pushed him to the ground, and shouted to him and Gomez to "do as they were told."
Nevertheless, Detective Michael Montgomery, the lead investigator, presented the witnesses with a total of 48 mugshots. He told the three witnesses that the police had arrested two suspects. During the process, the witnesses picked several photos of different people, suggesting they resembled the men who robbed the bank.
Miles's mugshot appeared in the last set. His picture shows him with close-shaven hair, a shadow of a beard, and drooping shoulders. Miles was selected by Gomez and Patlan as the "stocky" man who had waved a gun around that June night, the man Patlan had suggested he would not be able to identify.
But when Trina Gomez took the stand at the trial a few months later, she stared at Miles sitting at the table next to his lawyer and said, not in the presence of the jury, "He looks different." Pausing, and then viewing him from another angle: "I'm sure that that's him in the photo, but I'm not sure if that's him over there."
After a quick meeting with the prosecutors, during which she was directed to look at Miles's mugshot again, Gomez returned to the witness stand and stated for the jury, without hesitation, that Miles was the man.
And research shows that once you introduce a gun, a perpetrator of a different race, bad lighting, and police interference, the risk of misidentifying someone rises considerably. Last year saw a record number of exonerations, three-quarters of which centered on people who had been falsely convicted on the basis of a misidentification. Studies conducted over the last five years have shown one of every three people ID'ed as a perpetrator from a police photo lineup is an innocent "filler."
While prosecutorial misconduct, including deliberately mishandling witnesses, is present in up to 42 percent of exoneration cases, Brown believes misidentifications are a function of poor protocol.
"What we've seen is that the vast majority of mistaken identities is not the intention of police, but just them doing the normal procedures of the time," she said.
Decades of sociological and psychological research suggest the way police departments have traditionally conducted photo lineups is akin to trampling through a crime scene with muddy boots on.
"Everyone agrees that it's what happens at the front end of the criminal justice system that leads to wrongful convictions," John Furman, the director of research at the International Association of Police Chiefs (IAPC), said in an interview.
[..]
As surely as physical evidence collected at a crime scene can be contaminated purposely or through carelessness, a witness's memory can be sullied and rendered invalid. In Miles's case, police began the process of contaminating the witnesses' already shaky memories as soon as they created the six-packs, according to advocates and experts who reviewed the case.
The two bank employees, Trina Gomez and Max Patlan, did not have a clear recollection of the two men who held them up, according to court documents. They knew that both men were black; one of the men was short and stocky and the other slender and maybe taller. The "stocky" man was said to have a shaved head, facial hair and "rolls on the back of his neck."
At the outset, Patlan admitted to the investigators he would not be able to identify the stocky suspect. The man had struck him on the face with the butt of a gun, pushed him to the ground, and shouted to him and Gomez to "do as they were told."
Nevertheless, Detective Michael Montgomery, the lead investigator, presented the witnesses with a total of 48 mugshots. He told the three witnesses that the police had arrested two suspects. During the process, the witnesses picked several photos of different people, suggesting they resembled the men who robbed the bank.
Miles's mugshot appeared in the last set. His picture shows him with close-shaven hair, a shadow of a beard, and drooping shoulders. Miles was selected by Gomez and Patlan as the "stocky" man who had waved a gun around that June night, the man Patlan had suggested he would not be able to identify.
But when Trina Gomez took the stand at the trial a few months later, she stared at Miles sitting at the table next to his lawyer and said, not in the presence of the jury, "He looks different." Pausing, and then viewing him from another angle: "I'm sure that that's him in the photo, but I'm not sure if that's him over there."
After a quick meeting with the prosecutors, during which she was directed to look at Miles's mugshot again, Gomez returned to the witness stand and stated for the jury, without hesitation, that Miles was the man.
Sound reliable to you, MR? Miles was innocent of the crime, by the way. He was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 18 years. He remained in prison even after he was exonerated for a crime he never committed. He was finally released in June of this year, after being forced to strike a plea deal for a crime he was exonerated for. Is this protecting society, MR?
Here is what the American Bar Association has to say about eyewitness testimony and later on in the article, they also provide guidelines in regards to eyewitnesses from the point of the investigation right through to the trial, in a bid to stem the tide of wrongful convictions:
To those who follow crime and courts, the stories are familiar and unnerving. Cornelius Dupree spent 30 years imprisoned in Texas for a 1979 rape and robbery he did not commit, largely due to a single eyewitness identification. He was freed in 2011 through new DNA evidence. Derrick Williams of Florida was freed through DNA evidence after spending 18 years in prison for a rape based on eyewitness misidentification. Johnny Pinchback, a Texas inmate convicted of a 1984 rape based on eyewitness misidentification, was freed through DNA testing after 27 years in prison. Alvin Jardine was freed through DNA testing after serving 20 years jailed in Hawaii, again due to eyewitness misidentification. Of the 21 cases on the Innocence Network’s 2011 exoneration report, 19 wrongful convictions involved eyewitness testimony. Innocence Network Report, 2011. This is consistent with statistics showing that more than three-quarters of wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA evidence relied on faulty eyewitness evidence.
Even after hearing the statistics, we are reluctant to distrust a sincere eyewitness, but decades of research show that memory is neither precise nor fixed. For instance, we would expect a moment of high stress to focus the mind and sharpen recall, but the opposite is true. Violence, stress, and the presence of a weapon during an incident actually weaken memory. Racial differences between the witness and the suspect can impair identifications. Unconscious transference, or confusing someone seen in one place with someone seen in another place, is common. Identification can also be impaired by how long the witness is exposed to the suspect, the delay between the incident and the identification, and post-event information, such as feedback from the police or other witnesses.
Even after hearing the statistics, we are reluctant to distrust a sincere eyewitness, but decades of research show that memory is neither precise nor fixed. For instance, we would expect a moment of high stress to focus the mind and sharpen recall, but the opposite is true. Violence, stress, and the presence of a weapon during an incident actually weaken memory. Racial differences between the witness and the suspect can impair identifications. Unconscious transference, or confusing someone seen in one place with someone seen in another place, is common. Identification can also be impaired by how long the witness is exposed to the suspect, the delay between the incident and the identification, and post-event information, such as feedback from the police or other witnesses.
I am always on the victim's side MR. That does not mean I support or boast about a system that is so unreliable and has such a high error rate which results in innocent people going to prison, which places even further stress and pain on the victims, for personal gain as you are.
Now, once again, prove all the experts wrong. You keep claiming it is reliable. Prove it with actual evidence. Studies will do.
