a public defender

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As the dust on the 208th DNA exoneree had barely begun to settle, Broward County public defender Howard Finkelstein sent a letter to law enforcement officials suggesting a change in identification procedures.

Bostic’s [the exoneree] accuser recently told an investigator she never saw her rapist. She picked Bostic out of a photo lineup, she said, because she had seen him in the neighborhood in the days before the attack.

Simple extra precautions could keep this from happening again, Finkelstein said.

“These procedures will impact the human cost of misidentification,” he said. “This isn’t about pointing the finger at law enforcement. This is about making sure the methodology and the systems we employ are designed so innocent people don’t get ensnared in our system.”

Currently, Florida uses the non-blind, non-sequential method of identification. Finkelstein called for them to use the double-blind, sequential method. Law enforcement’s response was curious, if not typical:

“If we had concerns about the procedure, we would have changed the procedure,” said Elliot Cohen, spokesman for the Broward Sheriff’s Office. “But new ideas and new proposals are always worth looking at, and we’ll take it in that spirit.”

At least eyeid reform seems to be gaining some momentum. 16 states have considered some legislation in this regard during the past year. Connecticut, although one of those sixteen, couldn’t get past simply funding a pilot program. I’m not even sure that the pilot program has gone into effect.