DNA Evidence Sets Free Another Mistakenly Identified Prisoner
On July 12, 1982, a woman in northwest Louisiana was held at gunpoint and raped. During the four hours that the rapist stayed in her house, he identified himself as Marcus Johnson from Leesville, Louisiana.
When the victim reported the attack, the police could find no information about a Marcus Johnson, but they did find a Rickie Johnson who had once been arrested on a minor traffic charge. Mr. Johnson became the only suspect in the case.
The victim was shown a photo lineup of three men who were listed as potential perpetrators, although the image of Johnson was eight years old. The victim identified Johnson as the perpetrator, even though he looked very little like the description she had given of the attacker after the rape.
Johnson was charged with aggravated sexual assault and was tried in Sabine Parish, Louisiana. During the trial the victim told the jury that she was “positive” that he was the perpetrator and there was “no question in [her] mind.”
In 2007, however, Johnson’s innocence was determined with forensic DNA testing, a technology that was not available at the time of the crime.
Rickie Johnson’s case is only one of many recent DNA exonerations, most of which stem from eyewitness misidentifications. In fact, eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions. Over the past 10 years, almost 400 people have been released from prison when DNA evidence confirmed that they could not have committed the crime for which they had been convicted. And in more than three-quarters of these cases, the cause of the innocent people being falsely convicted was erroneous eyewitness testimony (Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006).
According to the Innocence Project (http://www.innocenceproject.org), “The human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound.”
In October 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice released the first national guidelines for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence. The guide was commissioned by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno (http://www.wic.org/bio/jreno.htm) and consisted of a panel of experts, including social psychologist Gary Wells (www.psychology.iastate.edu/~glwells/bio2001.html), the world’s foremost authority on the psychology of eyewitness identification.
Sources: www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Rickie_Johnson.php.