Prosecutors Insist on the Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony

Prosecutors are the most powerful figures in the American criminal justice system.  They have authority to investigate persons, grant immunity to witnesses, accused criminals, and plea bargain with defendants. Prosecutors decide what criminal charges to bring when and where a person will answer to those charges. Courts rarely second-guess the decisions of a prosecutor, and all courts presume that a prosecutor has acted appropriately. However, that is not always the case.

Many people end up on death row after being convicted of horrible crimes they did not commit. With the exception of the extremely lucky ones who are exonerated while they are still alive. In 1973 a club was formed called, the “macabre club,” that has over 152-death row inmates whom were exonerated.

Most of the cases below were all convicted based on faulty eyewitness identification.

• Freddie Pitts Florida Conviction: 1963, Pardoned: 1975 (right) Although no physical evidence linked them to the deaths of two white men, Lee and Pitts’ guilty pleas, the testimony of an alleged eyewitness, and incompetent defense counsel led to their convictions. The men were sentenced to death but maintained their innocence. After their convictions, another man confessed to the crime, the eyewitness recanted her accusations, and the state Attorney General admitted that the state had unlawfully suppressed evidence. The men were granted a new trial (Pitts v. State 247 So.2d 53 (Fla. 1971)) but were again convicted and sentenced to death. They were released in 1975 when they received a full pardon from Governor Askew, who stated he was “sufficiently convinced that they were innocent.” (Florida Times-Union, 4/23/98).
• Kirk Bloodsworth Maryland Conviction: 1984, Charges Dismissed: 1993 Bloodswoth was convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. Despite alibi witnesses, he was convicted primarily on the basis of faulty eyewitness identification. When it was discovered that the state failed to disclose exculpatory evidence, Bloodsworth received a new trial, at which he was convicted and given a life sentence. He was released after subsequent DNA testing confirmed his innocence.
•  Larry Hicks Indiana Conviction: 1978, Acquitted: 1980 Hicks was convicted on two counts of murder and was sentenced to death. Two weeks prior to his scheduled execution, with the help of a volunteer attorney, Hicks received a stay. The Playboy Foundation became interested in this claim of innocence and supplied funds for a reinvestigation after he passed lie detector tests. At retrial, Hicks was acquitted and released after evidence established Hicks’s alibi and showed that eyewitness testimony against him at his original trial was perjured.
•  Levon “Bo” Jones North Carolina Conviction: 1993, Charges Dismissed: 2008 The state of North Carolina dropped all charges against Levon Jones, and he was freed May 2, 2008 after spending 13 years on death row. U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle overturned Jones’s conviction two years ago, but he was held in prison awaiting a possible retrial until prosecutors announced that they were dismissing all charges. Judge Boyle criticized Jones’s defense attorneys for “constitutionally deficient” performance, noting their failure to research the history and credibility of Lovely Lorden, the prosecution’s star witness. The judge noted, “Given the weakness of the prosecution’s case and its heavy reliance on the testimony of Lovely Lorden, there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.” In April, Jones’s new defense team filed an affidavit in which Lorden said, “Much of what I testified to was simply not true.” She also stated that a detective coached her on what to say. Additionally, she collected $4,000 from the governor’s office for offering the clues that led to the arrest of Jones. Jones’s retrial was set to begin May 12th, 2008. Duplin County District Attorney Dewey Hudson decided to ask the judge in the case to drop all charges. Jones was originally convicted of robbing and shooting a bootlegger named Leamon Grady.

The latest case was Anthony Hinton, he walked out of an Alabama prison on April 3, 2015.

• Anthony Hinton Alabama conviction: 1985, Charges Dismissed: 2015  Anthony Ray Hinton was exonerated after spending nearly 30 years on Alabama‘s death row. He was released on April 3, 2015. Hinton was convicted of the 1985 murders of two fast-food restaurant managers based upon the testimony of a state forensic examiner that the bullets in the two murders came from a gun found in Hinton’s house. The prosecutor, who had a documented history of racial bias, said he could tell Hinton was guilty and “evil” just by looking at him. Hinton was arrested after a victim in a similar crime identified him in a photo lineup, even though Hinton had been working in a locked warehouse 15 miles away when that crime was committed. Hinton’s lawyer did not know the law and mistakenly believed that funding to hire a qualified firearms expert was not available.  Instead, he hired an expert he knew to be inadequate, and as a result failed to present any credible evidence to rebut the state’s claim that the bullets were fired from Hinton’s gun. In 2002, three top firearms examiners testified that the bullets could not be matched to Hinton’s gun, and may not have come from the a single gun at all. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that Hinton had been provided substandard representation and returned his case to the state courts for further proceedings.  Prosecutors decided not to retry him after the state’s new experts said they could not link the bullets to Hinton’s gun. Bryan Stevenson, Hinton’s lead attorney, said, “Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice. I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton.”

The remaining innocent citizens remain locked up for life in cold concrete cells. Some died of natural causes; some cases inmates who were almost certainly innocent were put to death.

Innocent people get convicted for many reasons, false confessions made under duress, bad lawyering, mistaken identifications and the pressure of prosecutors needing to win a case.   With advances in DNA analysis the pace of exonerations has increased, it has also become clear that prosecutorial misconduct is at the heart of an alarming number of these cases.

In the past year alone, nine people who had been sentenced to death were released and in all but one case, prosecutors’ wrongdoing played a key role.

On May 21, the University of Michigan Law School, in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, released the first-ever National Registry of Exonerations. The searchable online database is the most credible and comprehensive resource on wrongful convictions in the United States. Peter Neufeld, the co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, has called it the “Wikipedia of Innocence.” The registry, which can be viewed at exonerationregistry.org, currently counts 891 cases since 1989, the year of the first exoneration achieved using DNA.

As of March 2015, the Registry included 1,555 exonerees:

• Sex: 91% men; 9% women.
• Race: 47% black; 40% white; 11% Hispanic; 2% Native American or Asian.
• Trials and Guilty Pleas: 80% convicted by juries; 7% convicted by judges; 12% pled guilty.
• Crimes: 45% falsely convicted of homicide; 29% of sexual assault (includes 11% convicted of child sex abuse); 13% of other violent crimes; 14% of non-violent crimes.
• DNA: 25% were exonerated at least in part by DNA evidence; 75% without DNA evidence.
• Time served: All told, these exonerees spent nearly 14,429 years in prison–on average 9 years each. Almost all were imprisoned for years; 40% for 10 years or more; 61% for at least 5 years.
• Contributing factors that led to their wrongful convictions (many cases have multiple factors):
  • Perjury or False Accusation: 56%
  • Official Misconduct: 46%
  • Mistaken Witness Identification: 34%
  • False or Misleading Forensic Evidence: 23%
  • False Confessions: 13%

Among exonerations in specific crime categories:

• The rate of Perjury or False Accusations is highest in child sex abuse cases (80%) and homicide cases (67%).
• The rate of Official Misconduct is highest in homicide cases (60%) and child sex abuse (44%).
• The rate of Mistaken Identifications is highest in adult sexual assault cases (72%).
• The rate of False or Misleading Forensic Evidence is highest in adult sexual assault cases (32%) and child sex abuse cases (23%).
• The rate of False Confessions is highest in homicide cases (21%

The above captioned data speaks volumes of how corrupt our legal system is and how many innocent people are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

Work Cited

“152 Innocents, Marked for Death.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 Apr. 2015. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.

“How Many Innocent People Have We Sent To Prison?” How Many Innocent People Have We Sent To Prison? N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.