|
Richard
Leo | Elizabeth Loftus
| Joe Warren | John Graham | Daron
Caldwell | Walter Gillespie
and Robert Mailman | Ronnie
Lee Wilson | RCMP
confession tricks in Australia | Richard
McNally | Polygraph: Mikai |
Gary Wells
- Eyewitness expert studies
police lineups
- ISU professor Wells
will present findings from last 30 years
By Jackie Swim, Daily Correspondent,
February 07, 2005
Gary Wells has received nationwide
recognition for his studies on the way memory affects eyewitness
identification.
Wells has been studying police
lineups for 30 years -- more than anyone in his field, and his
studies have proven that the standard ways of eyewitness identification
lineups are often ineffective.
"It's not just that [eyewitnesses]
would make a mistake in identification, but it was not uncommon
for them to do so with a lot of confidence," Wells said.
Wells received the first grant
for his studies in 1991 from the National Science Foundation.
He said the grant is supporting work that examines composites
sketches, or computer-produced sketches. He said the research
found that the sketches rarely produce a likeness to the actual
criminal, and his group is studying ways to improve them.
Wells said an important improvement
in lineups was discovering that witnesses tend to compare one
suspect to another -- instead of comparing each individual suspect
to their memory. Now police departments are using a sequential
procedure so the witness only sees one suspect at a time.
Police departments in New Jersey,
North Carolina, Boston and Minneapolis have implemented the new
procedure, Wells said.
"I think Iowa police departments
are sort of ready to change," Wells said. "It's amazing
how slow it can be to change things within the legal system."
Clinton County Attorney Mike
Wolf said Wells served as an expert witness in the homicide case
of State of Iowa v. Robert Jackson. Wells provided testimony
to aid the jury in understanding the various psychological and
memory aspects of eyewitness identification.
"I think the change is
coming," Wolf said. "Dr. Wells has established certain
procedures for law enforcement agencies to comply with to best
preserve fair and trustworthy eyewitness identification."
Wells said there are still
many people who have not recognized the reliability problems
that exist in current lineups.
Three-fourths of prisoners
who have been proven innocent by DNA tests were wrongly convicted
by eyewitness lineups, he said.
Wells said he hopes social
sciences become more of an important part of criminal investigation.
In the past, criminal departments have only thought of psychologists
as therapists, Wells said.
Wells will present his findings
in the 2005 ISU Presidential University Lecture at 8 p.m. Monday
in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.
Copyright © 2004, Iowa
State Daily
Many of Prof. Wells articles
on this topic can be downloaded in PDF format from
his website
Police lineups'
flaws spur new approach
By GINA KIM , Chicago Tribune , February 7, 2005
TWO RIVERS, Wis. - For 18 years,
the photographs that lined Steve Avery's prison cells linked
him to the outside world. They helped him see his children grow
up. They made him feel as if he hadn't completely missed those
birthdays and Thanksgivings.
But the dozens of yellowed
snapshots - now stored in a cardboard box in his blue trailer
- also are bitter reminders of the moments and memories stolen
from him while he served time for a rape he didn't commit.
Although 16 witnesses placed
him elsewhere July 29, 1985, when Penny Beerntsen was brutally
attacked on a Wisconsin beach, she identified Avery in a lineup
and swore it was him during the trial. But almost two decades
later, DNA evidence proved she was wrong.
Avery's case - he was released
from a Wisconsin prison in Sept. 2003 - dramatically highlights
flawed police lineup procedures, where well meaning witnesses,
even crime victims themselves, confidently pick the wrong person,
experts say.
"That day I heard the
news was worse than the day I was assaulted," said Beerntsen,
who now lives in Naperville, Ill., and vividly recalls identifying
Avery. "I just wanted the earth to open and swallow me.
I felt so horrendous and so guilty about being a part of this
miscarriage of justice."
In a pilot study underway since
last fall, a different way of conducting lineups that some say
could sharply reduce the number of false identifications is being
tested in Evanston, Joliet and Chicago.
Suspects in traditional lineups
are arranged shoulder to shoulder in the same room, and witnesses
use a process of elimination to select someone who looks most
like the perpetrator, said Gary Wells, a psychology professor
at Iowa State University who has researched mistaken identifications
for more than 25 years.
Wells and other researchers
advocate another approach, the "sequential" lineup,
where suspects are brought in one at a time so witnesses can
examine each individually.
Already used in New Jersey
and with half a dozen police departments across the country,
the sequential lineup is being tested in the three Illinois communities,
a project that will conclude later this year.
"Psychologically, it's
a very different experience," Wells said. "With the
(traditional lineup) it's a relative judgment process that leads
to the identification rather than what we're after, which is
true recognition."
Mistaken identification - which
was a factor in more than 75 percent of the 155 DNA exonerations
across the country since 1989, according the Innocence Project
- can be cut in half or more with sequential lineups, Wells said.
Although Chicago Tribune policy
is not to name rape victims, Beerntsen has become an advocate
for criminal justice reform and regularly shares her story with
convicted criminals, politicians and the public.
Beerntsen recalls leaving her
husband and daughter on a bright July afternoon and taking a
jog on a Manitowoc County beach halfway between Green Bay and
Sheboygan. It wasn't far from her family's candy and ice cream
store, which she helped manage.
After going about three miles,
she was running back when a man darted from beneath a fallen
tree, put her in a chokehold and dragged her to a wooded area
beyond some dunes.
The 5-foot-2-inch Beerntsen,
then 36, kept talking about her two children, hoping to evoke
a sliver of compassion. Instead, he beat her unconscious and
assaulted her.
Beerntsen remembers making
a mental note of the man's face during the attack.
"When he grabbed me, two
thoughts went through my head," she recalled. "I need
to stay calm and the second was, I need to get a good look at
this guy."
She also made a point of scratching
him and thought to crawl on her wrists after the assault to preserve
whatever evidence was under her nails. Those scraping were tested
in 1996 but came back inconclusive.
While she was being examined
at a hospital, Beerntsen recounted the attack to a sheriff's
deputy, who thought the rapist's physical description sounded
like Avery. The department already was familiar with him because
he was accused of running a sheriff deputy's wife off a road
six months earlier.
Just hours after the attack,
Beerntsen looked at nine photographs laid out on her hospital
bed. She picked Avery.
A few days later, she picked
him again, this time from a lineup of eight people.
Beerntsen was so sure Avery
was her attacker that when she saw him in court, the hair on
the back of her neck stood on end and she began to shake, she
recalled.
After the Wisconsin Innocence
Project took on Avery's case, a pubic hair, saved from the rape
kit, was tested and matched Gregory Allen, whose information
was on file because he was serving a 60-year sentence for a 1995
sexual assault.
When Beerntsen learned the
truth, she was devastated.
"You can forgive a wrong
that's done to yourself more than you can forgive yourself, albeit
unintentional, for something that was done to someone else,"
she said.
For his part, Avery never believed
a jury would find him guilty. Even after Manitowoc County sheriff's
deputies barged into his home in Maribel, Wis., in the middle
of the night and locked him in a cell, Avery thought the truth
would protect him.
But when the verdict was read
and he found himself sentenced to 32 years in prison, Avery realized
his life was forever altered.
"I was screwed,"
said Avery, who went to prison at age 23 and got out when he
was 41.
A high school dropout who had
been laid off as a sheet-metal worker, Avery tried to keep up
with the lives of his family, a wife, stepson and four children,
the youngest twin boys born six days before his arrest.
But his wife divorced him and
only one of his daughters returned his letters. Avery still can't
distinguish his twin sons.
For 18 years, an intense anger
consumed him - anger at the sheriff's investigation that made
him the prime suspect and at a judicial system that found him
guilty even though so many people swore he wasn't at the beach
the day of the attack.
But when Avery left the Stanley
Correctional Institution in Northwestern Wisconsin and ate barbecued
ribs for the first time in almost two decades, that anger melted
away, he said.
"They stole it all from
me, but the hate, it isn't there anymore, not like it used to
be," said Avery, now 42.
Similar cases prompted former
Gov. George Ryan's Commission on Capital Punishment to recommend
changing Illinois' lineup procedures in 2002.
The following year, state Rep.
Julie Hamos introduced a bill in the General Assembly requiring
sequential lineups across the state. She agreed to a pilot study
last year to test the two procedures.
"We're going to learn
which one is better," she said.
During the study, Evanston
is using a case number system to determine who gets what kind
of lineup. Suspects in cases assigned even numbers get the traditional
lineup while those with odd case numbers are lined up sequentially,
said Deputy Chief Joe Bellino.
The only glitch so far for
the relatively small department is finding a person with absolutely
no knowledge of the case to fulfill the "blind administrator"
requirement, Bellino said.
With the sequential approach,
someone without any knowledge of the suspect is to conduct the
lineup as a way of avoiding body language or commentary, no matter
how slight, that might influence the witness.
In Joliet, lineups in the eastern
half of the city are being conducted sequentially. And in Chicago,
all lineups in the Harrison Police District on the West Side
are being done that way.
Sheri Mecklenburg, coordinator
for the pilot program and chief counsel to Chicago Police Supt.
Philip Cline, hopes to submit a report to the General Assembly
on the findings from all three jurisdictions at the end of the
year. Then lawmakers will decide whether to adopt the practice
statewide.
But Locke Bowman, legal director
of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago
Law School, thinks the study is unnecessary.
Bowman represented John Willis
who was exonerated in 1999 of a string of Chicago robberies and
sexual assaults. While there's no way of knowing if sequential
lineups would have prevented the dozen or so women who identified
him as the attacker, using the approach is a no-brainer, Bowman
said.
"The Willis case just
makes crystal clear that when we have ways to improve this, we
need to employ them," he said. "I can't conceive why
anything needs to be studied."
Avery admits he doesn't know
whether the lineup procedure is solely to blame for his conviction.
But he does believe he's owed for the 18 years of his life he
missed and is suing Manitowoc County, the former sheriff and
the former district attorney for $36 million.
Since his exoneration, Avery
has been helping out at his family's auto-salvage company, plans
to remarry in July and hopes for more children.
"I'd like to hear, `Daddy,'
and `Mama,'" he said. "That's one thing I miss. So
I figure I'll have a couple more so I can hear that."
Jury Finds
FBI Agents Framed Former Cop
By MIKE ROBINSON ASSOCIATED
PRESS, January 24, 2005
CHICAGO (AP) - A former policeman
who served 14 years in prison was awarded more than $6.5 million
in damages Monday after a federal jury found that two FBI agents
had framed him for murder and kidnapping.
Steven Manning, 54, spent eight
years on death row in Illinois before his murder conviction was
reversed, and several more years in prison in Missouri before
charges in that state were dismissed.
He claimed in his civil suit
that the agents framed him after he tried to stop working as
an informant, according to his attorney, Jon Loevy.
Federal officials issued a
statement saying they "respect the jury system, the work
of this jury and its verdict." But they said they were "confident
that the agents who were sued did not engage in any misconduct."
Both agents remain with the FBI.
U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald
and Richard K. Ruminski of the Chicago FBI office declined further
comment.
Manning appeared relieved Monday.
"It's a long, long way from death row to complete vindication,"
he said at a news conference.
Manning had left the Chicago
police force and was working as a limousine driver and security
guard when he was arrested.
He was convicted in 1992 of
taking part in the 1984 kidnapping of two reputed Kansas City
drug traffickers and was sentenced to two life terms plus 100
years. The next year, he was convicted of the 1990 murder of
suburban Chicago trucking company owner Jimmy Pellegrino and
was sentenced to death.
FBI agents Gary Miller and
Robert Buchan investigated the Illinois case, and Buchan investigated
the Missouri case.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
