The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK, Va. — If not for a DNA test, 16-year-old Shaka Harrell might have been locked away for a very long time. On the word of two traumatized sexual assault victims, Harrell was identified as their attacker after a passer-by mentioned his name and the girls were shown a page from his Maury High School yearbook.
Harrell, released from the Norfolk Jail this month after a DNA test cleared him, is the latest in an increasingly long line of people accused -- and many convicted -- of horrible crimes based on witnesses’ erroneous identifications. He is lucky in two respects. DNA evidence existed that cleared him, and he spent only eight weeks in jail or detention.
Marvin L. Anderson, like Harrell a teenager with no criminal record when a Hanover County rape victim picked him out of a photo lineup, spent 15 years in prison for a crime DNA evidence later showed he didn’t commit.
Willie N. Davidson spent 13 years in prison based largely on an erroneous identification by a rape victim in 1981. Arthur Lee Whitfield was in prison for 22 years for rape before DNA tests cleared him. Troy L. Webb, identified in a photo lineup by a victim as the man who raped her in Virginia Beach, served seven years of a 47-year sentence before DNA tests proved he didn’t do it. Julius Earl Ruffin languished in prison for 21 years before DNA evidence cleared him of a 1981 rape in Norfolk.
Here’s the scary thing about these cases, most of them handled by Norfolk police: What if the rapists hadn’t left DNA behind? Anderson and Davidson and Whitfield and Webb and Ruffin -- and Harrell -- might still be behind bars, based on witnesses’ mistaken identifications, for crimes they didn’t commit.
Witness identification, the evidence that most often leads to mistakes, is sometimes the only evidence available. So it’s critical that police use specific, standard procedures for conducting lineups. In Harrell’s case, serious discrepancies exist between the police account and the version Harrell’s attorney relayed of how Harrell was identified as a rapist.
Harrell’s attorney said the identification process was skewed toward his client. A passer-by at the crime scene first suggested the assailant might be Harrell; later, attorney Kenneth Singleton said, police seated the victims together and presented them with a yearbook page -- the lineup -- which contained Harrell’s photo. When the girls agreed Harrell was the attacker, police went to the pizza parlor where the teenager worked and arrested him.
Norfolk police said the victims were separated, interviewed and shown the yearbook individually, as is standard protocol.
Typically in photo lineups, they said, the detective assigned to the case gathers six photographs, with consistent backgrounds, of individuals with similar looks. The photographs are assigned numbers randomly and put in a folder, and witnesses are isolated to lessen the chance of one influencing another’s identification. Sometimes, a police spokesman said, they use yearbooks, as was the case with Harrell, because the suspect’s school photo is the only one they have.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s guidelines for gathering witness identifications suggest that lineups are more objective if the officer conducting them has no knowledge of who the suspect is. The guidelines also recommend showing witnesses the photographs one at a time, rather than simultaneously, to reduce the likelihood that witnesses will choose the photo that appears more like the perpetrator.
Prosecutors, to their credit, asked that charges against Harrell be dismissed as soon as DNA results were released. But it’s troubling to consider what might have happened if DNA hadn’t been available, if witness identifications had carried the great weight of the evidence. Would a judge have thrown out the identification?
“The whole thing was avoidable,” said Harrell’s attorney, who next plans to ask the court to expunge his client’s arrest record. Expungement is appropriate. For police, the next step should be reviewing procedures used to interview the victims and identify the suspect.
Eight weeks is nearly one grading period in high school. For a law-abiding teenager eager to make something of himself, it came perilously close to a lifetime.
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