Wrongful conviction throws
spotlight on unreliability of eyewitness evidence
William Mills was
sentenced to nine years for bank robbery based on police identification from
CCTV images, despite their showing a man in sunglasses with a scarf over his
mouth and chin.
Four people said they
recognised William Mills as the man who robbed a bank in
With more eyewitness
evidence being gathered than ever before, could he be part of a growing trend
of wrongful convictions?
"It was about
5.30 in the morning when I heard my partner Toni shouting loudly: 'They've got
guns, they've got guns'," said Mills. "I jumped out of bed and ran to
look through the spy hole but all I could see outside was a mass of black,
people in black.
"My two young
girls and my partner were standing in the hall so I told them to stay back and
I opened the door. The whole communal landing was covered in police, all
dressed in black with ski masks on, with big rifles and shields ... They were
telling us all to get on the floor and there were red dots from the guns
everywhere."
Mills described how
he was handcuffed, wearing only his boxer shorts, as the armed police stood by.
The whole of his street had been cordoned off. "I had no idea what they
wanted. I kept on trying to ask: 'Why are you doing this?' It was only
when they got me to the police station that they told me they wanted me for a
bank robbery."
Mills, from Partick,
Glasgow, was arrested in May 2007 and held on remand for stealing £8,216 from
the Royal Bank of
Mills was freed
earlier this year, six months into his sentence. DNA evidence found on a door
stopper linked a convicted bank robber, Michael Absalom, to the crime.
Including the time he served on remand, he had spent roughly a year locked up
for something he did not do.
"I'm still
suffering through what they've done," he said. "My family's
suffering. I'm going to see a psychologist because I don't like going out now
... It was crazy, man, just unbelievable; you just never think it would happen
to you. On remand I was locked up 23 hours a day, that was for six months.
"Being away from
my family was the hardest thing, and not being able to protect my children
[when the police came]. I felt so helpless. After they found me guilty, I'll
never have faith in the judicial system again."
So how did it happen?
"This was a prosecution that stood or fell by eyewitness identification
alone," said Lord Gill, the lord justice-clerk at Mills's appeal.
"That is a form of proof that has been shown to be, in some cases, a
dangerous basis for a prosecution."
It was certainly not
the first time that eyewitnesses had got it wrong. As early as the 1970s there
was sufficient concern in
Many police forces in
The proliferation of
CCTV cameras has also led to an increase in the availability of identification
evidence. According to the Police Foundation, the
Under the Turnbull
guidelines - introduced in 1977 by a judge who found that visual identification
"can bring about miscarriages of justice and has done so" - a judge
has to warn the jury of the need for special caution when relying on such
evidence. But eyewitness testimonies can still be one of the most persuasive
types of evidence a jury will hear. "A witness standing up and saying: 'That's
the man, I saw him, I will never forget his face' is extremely compelling to a
jury," said Valentine. "Witnesses can be completely honest and be
mistaken."
Psychological
experiments have shown that facial recognition from CCTV can be as prone to
error as traditional eyewitness evidence. In an experiment which looked at 600
identity parades, a fifth of eyewitnesses picked the wrong person, Valentine
said.
In a recent
experiment conducted by Valentine and Dr Josh Davis, 33% of participants
identified the wrong person from close-up, high quality, video footage of the
suspect's face. CCTV images are often bad quality, and the angle and lighting
can change someone's appearance.
"You'd probably
recognise your mother from a CCTV image, but recognising somebody you don't
know well is very difficult," Valentine said. On top of this, in Mills's
case the suspect's face was obscured by dark glasses and he had a scarf over
his mouth and chin for most of the robbery. Yet two policemen were allowed to
testify that they recognised Mills from the CCTV image.
At Mills's appeal
Lord Justice Gill expressed his unease. "It is a matter of concern that an
important part of the case for the prosecution was the evidence of two police
officers, neither eyewitnesses, who made positive statements that Mills was the
robber on the basis of looking at CCTV stills," he said.
An alarming aspect of
Mills's case is that in some ways he was actually extraordinarily lucky. Having
suffered the misfortune of being wrongly convicted because of faulty
identification evidence, he was then very fortunate that both DNA evidence and
a plausible alternative suspect were available to set the story straight. Given
that DNA evidence is found at less than 1% of crime scenes, others in his
situation may well not be so lucky.
"Without the DNA
evidence there's no way we would have won an appeal," said Mills's lawyer,
Liam O'Donnell . "They would have said there are four identifications,
it's up to the jury to assess the identifications and they've accepted them.
End of story."
Even with the DNA
evidence Mills was initially refused an appeal. It is very rare that someone is
granted an appeal on the grounds that eyewitnesses in the original trial may
have been mistaken. "I can think of at least three men I know of in prison
now on the basis of what looks like unsafe identification evidence," said
Valentine.
"There was a
time when if someone in prison told me they were innocent, I'd say: 'Nah, I
don't believe you," Mills said. "But now I'd have to consider it.
Who's to say there aren't more people like me out there?"
Sylvia Rowley
Guardian, Tuesday 18
August 2009