Texas takes steps to prevent eyewitness misidentifications

You’re walking out of Starbucks with your morning latte (or defrosting your car to head to work) when—suddenly—a man rushes by you and sprints around the corner. Three days later, a police officer knocks on your door and asks whether you saw anyone suspicious on the morning in question. You begin to describe the man who rushed by, giving a description that may be used for an arrest warrant. Once the police have someone in custody you are asked to view a lineup. Looking through the glass you think to yourself, which one of those looks most like the man who rushed past me?

Every year hundreds of alleged criminals are incarcerated with the help of eyewitness testimony; some of them, wrongfully so.

According to the Texas Innocence Project there are currently 2000 to 3000 inmates in Texas Prisons who were wrongfully convicted based on eyewitness testimony. The release of two Houston men, exonerated by DNA evidence, motivated the Texas legislature to address the growing need for more reliable eyewitness identification procedures.

The bill, which passed the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee yesterday, is sponsored by Representative Peter Gallego, a former Texas prosecutor. If passed, the bill will introduce research from scientific studies indicating the unreliability of eyewitness identification, especially of cross-racial identifications,  into the Texas justice systems. One of the key provisions that has been proposed is having a double blind line-up in which neither the officer conducting the line up nor the identifying witness would be told which person in the line up was the suspect. This step is intended to prevent the officer from giving unintended cues that might influence the identifying witness.

Another provision of the proposed law, and perhaps the most substantial one, effects habeas corpus proceedings by allowing evidence gathered through new technology to be introduced into post-conviction proceedings. Current habeas law requires that evidence must be viewed under the lens of what could have been discovered at the time of trial, making it difficult to introduce evidence gathered decades after a conviction. The new bill aims to alleviate some of the habeas constraints and provide more opportunities for claims of innocence to be proven.

While these changes represent only a start to correcting the injustice of wrongful convictions, a systemic issue which continues to plague every state in our nation, they are a solid beginning to righting past wrongs and preventing new ones from occurring.