07DAD
December 17, 2010, 4:10pm
38
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In 1986, a jury in California found Mark Sodersten guilty of beating, sexually assaulting and slicing the throat of a 26-year-old mother of two young children and then setting her body on fire in hopes of destroying the evidence.</p>
<p>The physical evidence linking Sodersten to the crime was scant, but law enforcement had two convincing eyewitnesses: the victims 3-year-old daughter and one of the victims neighbors.</p>
<p>Two decades later, a state court of appeal vacated Soderstens conviction on the grounds that the prosecution failed to provide defense attorneys with four audio recordings of those two witnesses that the judges said could have been a devastating impeachment tool and likely would have resulted in a different verdict.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Sodersten, the court decision came too late. He had died in the California prison system six months earlier.</p>
<p>But Soderstens case has resurfaced as Exhibit A in a recently released 113-page report by the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law. The report contends that prosecutorial misconduct in the nations most populous state continues to be a problem, and that prosecutors are seldom held accountable for misconducta charge that prosecutors and the State Bar of California dispute.</p>
<p>The study, titled Preventable Error: A Report on Prosecutorial Misconduct in California: 1997-2009, identified more than 4,000 federal and state criminal cases on appeal in California during the 13-year span in which prosecutorial misconduct was an issue raised by the defense. The report found:</p>
<p> 707 cases in which courts determined that prosecutors had committed misconduct, such as making improper statements to the jury in closing arguments, improperly coaching witnesses, or failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.</p>
<p> 159 cases in which courts found that the level of misconduct was harmful enough to reverse the conviction, declare a mistrial or bar the evidence.
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<p>That means that in over 20% of the California cases where prosecutorial misconduct was alleged, the reviwing court found it occurred. Ah, the reliability of eyewitness testimony.</p>
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Research psychologists have been studying the reliability of eyewitness testimony for about 20 years. Their experiments have included having people watch videos of enacted crimes or staging mock crimes and asking them to identify perpetrators from photos, testing various interviewing techniques with eyewitnesses and with police interrogators, and exploring whether eyewitness accounts could be misled by questions after the event.</p>
<p>Early on, they found that eyewitness identification often was not very good. Studies showed that witnesses often identified the wrong person from the photos (in one study, almost half the time) and that police interviewing techniques often hampered information gathering.</p>
<p>At the same time, researchers found that they could improve eyewitness information by changing the way it is gathered. The researchers built, in the psychological literature, a strong case for better police practices and they testified on the reliability of eyewitness testimony in court cases.</p>
<p>But by and large, police departments haven’t exactly knocked their doors down to find out what law enforcement was doing wrong in getting testimony to convict people.</p>
<p>Further, the justice system rarely gave police incentives to explore better methods, says Wells. “Courts almost never suppress identification evidence, even when the most egregiously biased line-up procedures are used.”</p>
<p>But then came the 1990s and the widespread use of DNA testing. In cases across the country, the technique found that mistakes had been made. People had gone to prison for years for crimes that they did not commit.</p>
<p>Today, more than 60 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence. And most were convicted with eyewitness testimony.
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