After nearly 38 years, Malcolm Alexander walked away in January from a place he never should have been to begin with: the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. A judge tossed his conviction, partly in response to new DNA evidence proving that Alexander could not have been the armed man who in 1979 raped a 39-year-old woman in her antique shop bathroom, Stateline reports. Alexander was the victim of what the Innocence Project described as “a deeply flawed, unreliable identification procedure.” The Innocence Project, whose advocacy led to Alexander’s release at age 58, said the flaws included interactions with police that strengthened the victim’s initial “tentative” identification of Alexander in a police lineup into one of certainty by the time she testified at trial nearly a year later.
Alexander’s wrongful conviction helped convince Louisiana lawmakers to join a growing list of states in taking steps to prevent eyewitnesses from being swayed by police or other influences. Louisiana now requires “double-blind” lineups, in which the officer conducting the lineup doesn’t know who the suspect is. Other changes are intended to reduce the chance that witnesses will make identifications through guesswork or to please police. Although research has long demonstrated the unreliability of eyewitness identifications, police agencies largely resisted making changes until DNA exonerations over the past three decades proved that the wrong person had been convicted. The new policies, which have been adopted by police in half the states, largely grew out of research showing that traditional police practices and cues often induced witnesses to identify the wrong suspect. “There’s no question, we just didn’t know any better back then,” said William Brooks, police chief in Norwood, Ma., and a board member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.