Cornelius Dupree Jr.'s exoneration is a classic case of eyewitness misidentification.
Texas leads the nation in identifying wrongly convicted prisoners through DNA testing. Since 2000, the state has exonerated 42 inmates. Two others, including Cornelius Dupree Jr., have been released pending formal exoneration by the state. Bogus eyewitness identifications played a role in all but six of the convictions.
Nine Harris County inmates, convicted at least in part through eyewitness identifications, have been cleared through DNA testing.
"What this indicates to me," Scheck said, "is that there are a lot more prisoners that just didn't commit the crime. We just can't find them."
Picked in photo lineup:
Dupree was convicted of robbing a 26-year-old Dallas woman in November 1979. Authorities reported two men forced their way into the woman's car after she and her boyfriend stopped at a Dallas liquor store to buy cigarettes and use a pay phone. The men forced the woman's companion from the car, then drove her to a park where they raped her at gunpoint.
The woman later picked Dupree's picture from a photo lineup.
The Houston man also was charged, but not tried, for rape. Dupree's alleged accomplice, Anthony Massingill, also was cleared by DNA testing, but he remains imprisoned pending DNA testing in another robbery-rape.
James Bethke, director of the Timothy Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions, called mistaken eyewitness identification a "leading contributor" to wrongful convictions.
The bipartisan state committee is named for a Lubbock man who died in prison after being wrongly convicted of rape based, in part, on faulty eyewitness identification.
In an August report, the committee called on the state to require Sam Houston State University's Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute to draft a model policy and training materials for law enforcement agencies conducting photo and live lineups.
Under its proposal, police agencies would be required to abide by the guidelines, which would be reviewed annually. Whether the standards were followed would be admissible at trial.
The standards would address such things as instructions given to witnesses and who should conduct and be included in lineups.
Such guidelines would represent a major step in unifying police lineup procedures statewide. Of 750 state police agencies responding to a Cole committee query, only 88 had written procedures for conducting lineups.
Link:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7366110.html