Innocent Schminnocent

by digby

In recent years many states and cities have moved to overhaul lineups, as DNA evidence has exposed nearly 200 wrongful convictions, three-quarters of them resulting primarily from bad eyewitness identification.

In the new method, the police show witnesses one person at a time, instead of several at once, and the lineup is overseen by someone not connected to the case, to avoid anything that could steer the witness to the suspect the police believe is guilty.

But now, the long-awaited results of an experiment in Illinois have raised serious questions about the changes. The study, the first to do a real-life comparison of the old and new methods, found that the new lineups made witnesses less likely to choose anyone. When they did pick a suspect, they were more likely to choose an innocent person.

Witnesses in traditional lineups, by contrast, were more likely to identify a suspect and less likely to choose a face put in the lineup as filler.

Advocates of the new method said the Illinois study, conducted by the Chicago Police Department, was flawed, because officers supervised the traditional lineups and could have swayed witnesses.

But the results have empowered many critics who had worried that states and cities were caving in to advocacy groups in adopting the new lineups without solid evidence that they improved on the old ones.

“There are people who’d say it’s better to let 10 guilty persons free to protect against one innocent person being wrongfully convicted,” said Roy S. Malpass, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and an analyst for the Illinois study, who served on a research group on eyewitness identification for the National Institute of Justice in 1999.

“I’m fine with that when we’re dealing with juvenile shoplifters,” Dr. Malpass said. “I’m not fine with that for terrorists. We haven’t figured out the risk there.”

Setting aside the efficacy or non-efficacy of the ID method being discussed, which I cannot assess, I can’t help but be struck at how confident this Doctor is that he’s not going to be that one innocent person. How I wish people like him would be wrongfully accused so they could see how it might feel. Like so many law and order types it’s apparently too abstract for him to understand otherwise so he needs to personally experience it.

Blackstone’s ratio is not some silly bleeding heart notion — it’s a recognition that while the system cannot be perfect, you must make a moral decision as to which side it will err on. For crying out loud, terrorism is not some magic word that changes every tenet of western civilization.

But maybe we aren’t really about western civilization at all anymore. Maybe we are becoming more like Singapore, the wingnut dream:

If, in the event of effective crime prevention, a few innocent people are punished or a few guilty ones are over-punished, that would be a price worth paying.

And it’s so nice and clean, too. With good prices.

Nobody wants to let the guilty go free. But the state imprisoning innocent people belongs in a special circle of hell and it taints us all. Terrorism certainly does not excuse it. When a state gives up that principle and simply accepts that a certain percentage of innocent people will be imprisoned because it’s too difficult to sort them out from the guilty ones, it has lost its civilized moorings. Guantanamo says it all about where the US is on that.

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