This is a very interesting article about how the point of a finger gave a man a 50 year prison sentence on a rape charge.
Three days after the rape, Detective Gauldin called the rape victim Jennifer Thompson in to do a photo lineup. He lay six pictures down on the table, said the perpetrator may or may not be one of them, and told her to take her time.
Thompson did not immediately identify a photo, taking her time to study each picture.
"I can remember almost feeling like I was at an SAT test. You know, where you start narrowing down your choices. You can discount A and B," Thompson said.
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I find it so interesting that the flaws of eyewitness identification can be so obvious. When taking a multiple choice test you being narrowing down the answers. When you come down to the bottom two you seem to make an educated guess. When dealing with 50 years in prison, I would hope the question only has one obvious answer, and isn't multiple choice.
Throughout this class we have dealt with many aspect of witness identification. Through the construct a line up project I was amazed at how many people actually guessed the suspect right. So not only is this whole process biased in that a person basically picks as a multiple choice guess sometimes, but also that a line up can be very biased. Many line ups are made with an obvious answer to be picked. Many of think us probably think, so what! That person is probably guilty. However, in this above case we see that a man was wrongly picked from a line up and the consequence was major jail time. When picking out of a line up the person is basically choosing the course for the person. We also learned in class that eye witnesses are of HUGE impact to a jury. This can also lead to false testifying which can easily sway a jury. It starts to make you really reflect upon our justice system and the ways that eye witnesses, juries, and even line ups can be extremely biased.
Wow, this article was very good. I like how you brought out that in this case when Thompson was studying the pictures she matched it to like taking a multiple choice test. I think that is very wrong. This just goes to prove what we have learned in class, memory can be altered, lost, confused, or bring up images that were never there before. Because you are right, when dealing with someone's life in prison or life itself, you cannot handle it as if it is a multiple choice question.
One thing I do find that is improvement in our system is that in this article it said that a lot of these detectives will go back to cases where they didn't bring in DNA and review them after seeing the right conviction, like this one.
This also goes to show how much of a change the DNA testing has advanced since the 70's and 80's. I think that in a court case, most of the decision should be based off of actual facts, ones that everyone can see. People can not see what a person is thinking. Like in class, we learned that just by talking with another person, the events in you head can change. A person can forget what they saw, but so much want to help that hey make up somethings. I think Memory in a court case should really be looked at closely, because it is clear that way to many innocent lives are being put to a halt based off of what someone says, not actual facts.
This article was very good. I liked the story behind it as well. I am glad that both parties are doing well now and that the real rapists is behind bars forever.