Forest Shomberg walked free from a Wisconsin prison last month after serving six years for a crime he did not commit. Thanks to post-conviction DNA testing and increasing awareness of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard announced that the county will not retry the case. Every time I hear about people like Forest, I have deeply mixed emotions. As the first death-row inmate to be exonerated by DNA evidence. I know firsthand what it is like to spend time in prison for a crime I did not commit.
Forest overcame the longest of odds to win his freedom in a system that was convinced of his guilt. Imagine the patience and persistence that took. Imagine the hardships he endured being isolated from friends and family. Imagine never knowing if the truth would come out. Somehow, Forest and his loved ones found the strength to persevere. For this I am extremely happy.
But exonerations like Forest’s are also deeply unsettling to me because they demonstrate the very serious problems confronting our criminal justice system. The fact is we still get it wrong far more often than we should. Some of the same errors that caused me to spend almost nine years in prison for a crime I did not commit also led to Forest’s wrongful conviction.
In both cases, an innocent man was arrested because he looked similar to a sketch compiled by police from eyewitness accounts. In both cases, an innocent man was convicted based on eyewitness testimony. And in both cases, an innocent man went to prison while the real perpetrator went unpunished.
Initially, the judge in the case did not let the defense present expert testimony about the unreliability of eyewitness identification. Only after post-conviction DNA testing revealed that Forest’s DNA did not match the DNA on the victim’s clothes did the powerful evidence about the factors that can lead witnesses to misidentify a perpetrator, including police sketches, seem to make a difference.
Fortunately, the State of Wisconsin has since developed model procedures for police sketches and conducting lineups. Like the recommendations in The Justice Project’s publication, Eyewitness Identification: A Policy Review, the Wisconsin Department of Justice recommends that sketches be used “cautiously, if at all,” and that police use sequential, rather than simultaneous, lineups and photo arrays. Because eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions, every state should enact these procedures to make sure that people like Forest and people like me do not have to endure the tragedy of being imprisoned for someone else’s crime.
We must take the necessary steps to prevent eyewitness misidentification. States can implement simple, common sense best practices to protect against eyewitness misidentifications. Forest Shomberg’s story and my own story are only two of the many cases of wrongful conviction based on eyewitness identification that prove such reforms are desperately needed.