Tunnel Vision By Investigators and Prosecutors Convicts, Imprisons the Innocent
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Last year we blogged about the tragic wrongful convictions of three innocent Texas inmates, Ricardo Rachel, Timothy Cole (here and here), and Ernest Sonnier. This year has proven just as tragic. We have thus far blogged about the wrongful convictions of four more innocent Texas inmates: Donald Wayne Good, Anthony Robinson, Allen Wayne Porter, and Michael Anthony Green. The wrongful conviction emblem seems to have been deeply etched on the face of Texas justice. But convicting innocent people is not a phenomenon unique to this state.
Fourteen years ago three authors, C. Ronal Huff, Arye Rattner and Edward Sargarin, published a book titled Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy (Sage Publications. Inc. 1996). The book was based on ten years of measured, conservative research which outlined not only the frequency and causes for wrongful convictions of innocent people but the tragic consequences that inevitably flow from them. The authors interviewed 188 judges, prosecutors, public defenders, sheriffs, and police chiefs in the state of Ohio to draw the conclusion that as many as 10,000 innocent people are wrongfully convicted each year in this country. The authors found, and the New York-based Innocent Project has long since confirmed, that mistaken identification is the leading factor for most wrongful convictions.
This was the overriding factor in the seven wrongful convictions of the innocent Texas inmates mentioned above. But underlying the mistaken identification syndrome is an even more troubling phenomenon discussed by Huff/Rattner/Sargarin. “If we had to isolate single ‘system dynamic’ that pervades a large number of these cases, we would probably describe it as police and prosecutorial overzealousness: the anxiety to solve a case; the ease with which having such anxiety is willing to believe, on the slightest evidence of the negligible nature, that the culprits in hand; the willingness to use improper, unethical and illegal means to obtain a conviction, when one believes that the person at the bar is guilty.”
We tackled this subject earlier this year. The practice is called “tunnel vision”—law enforcement and prosecutors locking in on one theory or one suspect at the exclusion of all others. It was law enforcement “tunnel vision” that led to the mistaken identification of Michael Green and caused him to serve 27 wrongful years in prison—more than any other wrongfully convicted inmate in Texas. And it was both law enforcement and prosecutorial “tunnel vision” that led to the wrongful conviction of Clarence Elkins, Sr. who spent seven years in the Ohio prison system for a murder and rapes he did not commit. Elkins was arrested for the June 6, 1998 murder/rape of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and for assaulting and raping Johnson’s six-year-old granddaughter, Brooke Sutton (Elkins’ niece). The arrest came after the granddaughter went to a neighbor shortly after the crime was committed and said, “Uncle Clarence killed grandma.” But the child later that same day expressed doubt about her identification, telling a friend of her grandmother that “I think it sounded like [Uncle Clarence].” Homicide detectives were aware of the doubts expressed by their chief witness.
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