Personal Law Torre Colegrove
Witness Essay 1/19/16

Eye witness identification is very significant in a conviction, it can put a guilty person behind bars or if misidentified, it can put an innocent person behind those same bars. Eye witness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions proven by DNA testing, paying a role in more than 70% of convictions overturned through DNA testing nationwide. For instance, in the misidentification of Marvin Anderson, a man wrongfully convicted of a rape, misidentification by the victim caused him to serve fifteen years in prison. Because the rapist had told the victim he had a white girl, the police immediately looked to Marvin as a suspect since he is the only colored man living with a white wife. After the victim chose Marvin’s mugshot out of a dozen black and white mugshots, the police created a line up with Marvin being the only man in it from the mug shots. Although Marvin had an alibi he was convicted and served fifteen brutal years he didn’t deserve in prison. It wasn’t until after DNA had testing proved Marvin wasn’t the rapist that they let him free. This is only one of the many cases that witness misidentification has taken years and even entire lives from innocent people.
To ensure that witness misidentification isn’t a problem many states are considering improving their identification procedures. For instance, Connecticut supreme court reconsiders a murder conviction based on the identification from a witness who was 265 feet away and five stories up from where the crime was committed, the justices are also considering changing rules on witness identification evidence. For more than 35 years, judges have used what is called a balancing test in cases where they find that investigators may have been suggestive during the eyewitness identification process, and they need to determine whether the identification can still be admissible as evidence. If a judge determines that law enforcement was indeed suggestive in the identification, the judge must decide if the identification is still reliable by considering the witness's accuracy of the description and other factors. The Associated Press reports that the Innocence Project and the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association are urging Connecticut’s Supreme Court to devise a better method than the current balancing test. Karen Newirth, a senior fellow at the Innocence Project stated “The test has a very perverse result…The Supreme Court basically directed trial courts to balance suggestion against witness reliability. What we know is that suggestion inflates confidence. It inflates people's recollection of how good their attention was. What we're really concerned with is preventing wrongful identifications.” Like many other states, Connecticut is attempting to improve the chances of correct eyewitness identifications to ensure the guilty are serving time instead of the innocent.
Another unique case with wrongful conviction from witness misidentification but exonerated from the use of DNA is the case of Joseph Abbitt. Abbitt served fourteen years in prison for crimes he did not commit. The victims told investigators that their attacker looked like Joseph Abbitt, a man who had previously lived in the neighborhood and had been a visitor in their home. The victims separately identified Abbitt in a photo lineup and police focused on him as the primary suspect. Rape kits were collected from the victims along with other evidence from the crime scene. DNA testing from a piece of clothing did not match Abbitt, but the clothing was not directly linked to the crime. Other DNA tests were inconclusive. Abbitt was tried before a jury in June and at trial the victims testified that Abbitt was the man who had attacked them. Abbitt had a strong alibi, stating that he was at work at the time of the crime, and although his employer testified to this alibi, he could not provide a time card due to the four-year time lapse between the crime and the trial. Based soley on the eyewitness identifications by the two young victims, Abbitt was convicted of rape, burglary, and kidnapping and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus an additional 110 years. In 2005 Abbitt seeked help. An organization accepted his case and began to search for evidence that could be subjected to DNA testing. Most of the evidence from the crime scene had been destroyed by the county clerk's office, a few items, including the rape kit, were located at the Winston-Salem police department. New DNA testing conducted on the evidence was initially inconclusive, but a second round of testing on one of the rape kits excluded Abbitt as the perpetrator. He was set free and officially exonerated after serving 14 years in prison for crimes he didn't commit.