The first person to try to show the discrepancy between the eyewitness account’s actuality and retelling was Loftus. Loftus gave us a perfect example of this when she questioned a person’s ability to “recall” an event. She showed groups of participants movies and then asked questions on the movies. She presupposed that things that weren’t in the movie actually happened. This then became a part of the person’s memory. For example, she presupposed that there was a barn when she asked, “How fast was the car going when it passed the barn.” When the participants came back after a week and when she asked more questions, the participants who had been asked the question above tended to add the barn into their memory, when in reality the barn wasn’t there. We can then infer from this that people’s memory aren’t infallible and therefore can become estranged when a question is asked a certain way or how others influence us.
Sometimes we often misidentify a person to be the person guilty, when they, in actuality, did nothing at all. In 1997, two men were convicted of a Dallas murder and spent 12 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. The conviction of this case was “hinged” on faulty eyewitness identification. Claude Alvin Simmons Jr., 54, and Christopher Shun Scott, 39, were each sentenced to life in prison for the April 7, 1997, shooting death of Alfonso Aguilar during a home-invasion burglary. Their convictions were based primarily on the eyewitness statement of Aguilar's wife, Celia Escobedo, who was present in their Love Field area home when the killing happened.
Another one like this is also seen. Charles T. "Ted" Dubbs' guilt in two sexual assaults on Lancaster County jogging trails always seemed to come down to a topic of numbers -- numerical likelihoods. At Dubbs' trial in May 2002, Lancaster County First Assistant District Attorney Heidi Eakin pointed out that one of the victims picked him out from among 403 mug shots of white males. The other victim chose Dubbs from among photos of six similar-looking men. And a woman who saw the attacker driving away identified him at the trial. What were the odds that all three women were wrong? This is what actually happened. He was falsely convicted of a crime that he didn’t do. Wilbur Cyrus Brown II, a serial rapist who attacked two other women on jogging trails in the same part of Lancaster County, has admitted the assaults for which Dubbs is serving time. Brown then pleaded guilty to 5 assaults on six victims in Dauphin County in November 2006. Beerntsen, a commissioner of the Wisconsin Criminal Justice Study Commission, said, "Maybe my perspective has changed because I was involved in this wrongful conviction, but I think in the long run, it would be really helpful if prosecutors, police, judges, anybody who is involved in a wrongful conviction would say, 'We made a mistake, and what should we do in the future to make sure we don't make more of these mistakes?' "
