Exoneration shows need for eyewitness ID reform

Editorial, The Athens Banner-Herald (free subscription required), December 17, 2007

The timing couldn't be worse for the dozens and dozens of local law-enforcement agencies across Georgia that don't have eyewitness identification standards in place. Last week, a Georgia man convicted in a 1979 rape - a conviction based in large part on an eyewitness identification - was released from jail after DNA evidence proved what he'd been saying all along: He didn't do it.

The DNA exoneration of John Jerome White, who spent 28 years in prison on the rape charge, comes just a few weeks before the Georgia General Assembly is set to convene for its 2008 session. One of the bills that will be up for consideration in the legislative session is a proposal from Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, D-Atlanta, calling for police line-ups - both photographic and live - to be conducted only by police officers who have completed training in eyewitness identification procedures. If the legislation is approved as currently written, the new standard would be put in place on July 1, 2011. The legislation sets a shorter time frame for law-enforcement agencies to have a specific eyewitness identification protocol in place, mandating that written standards be developed by Jan. 1, 2009.

The need for the legislation is obvious. Of the nearly 300 police agencies that responded to a Georgia Innocence Project survey regarding eyewitness identification, just 17 percent indicated they had a specific protocol for displaying mug shots or conducting physical line-ups of potential criminal suspects.

White's case provides a textbook example of the problems that can crop up in eyewitness identification. According to media reports on the DNA exoneration (in which the Georgia Innocence Project was involved), White was picked from a live police line-up by the rape victim. Coincidentally, the Oct. 4, 1979 line-up from which White was selected included the man whom DNA evidence now has linked with the rape, James Edward Parham.

In other words, in a line-up that included the man now implicated in the rape, the victim picked out an entirely different man. According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution account from last week, a photograph of that long-ago line-up, while fuzzy, shows a slender White in the middle, with a stockier Parham standing to the far right. Parham simply happened to be in jail on that long-ago day, on unrelated charges, and was inserted into the line-up.

Certainly, it's possible the rape victim made what she thought was an accurate identification of her assailant, and that she would have made the same identification regardless of the circumstances in which the line-up was conducted. Still, it's hard to simply ignore the assertion from Aimee Maxwell, director of the Georgia Innocence Project, who told the Atlanta newspaper last week that "(s)omething in the way police officers investigated this case led the victim to identify the wrong man, even though the true perpetrator was in the line-up."

Despite the reasonable concerns expressed by advocates of legislatively mandated eyewitness identification protocols - concerns vividly illustrated in the White exoneration - there appears to be some reluctance in the state's law-enforcement community to Benfield's proposal.

Earlier this year, addressing a legislative subcommittee looking into the eyewitness identification issue, LaGrange Police Chief Lou Dekmar said development of eyewitness identification protocols, and training in those protocols, should be left up to individual police agencies and law-enforcement certification agencies. Backing up Dekmar's point locally, Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry wrote in an October letter to this newspaper's editorial page that shoddy line-up procedures are quickly ferreted out as cases make their way through the court system, and therefore, determination of what constitutes an adequate and fair procedure should be the province of the judicial, rather than the legislative, branch of government.

In fairness, it must be noted that Dekmar and Berry both have valid points. But a legislative standard would have the benefit of ensuring the people of this state that all law-enforcement agencies - not just those where training is an integral part of the job, or those located in judicial circuits with top-quality judges and lawyers - are working to make eyewitness identification as problem-free as possible.