STORY BACKGROUND (Marshall Project): "When Twitter ID’s the assailant. Internet sleuths spent Sunday trying to identify the men photographed beating 20-year-old Deandre Harris in a parking garage in Charlottesville, Va., amidst the violence last weekend. Such crowdsourced identifications present particular challenges for law enforcement, and defense lawyers sometimes claim social media can "taint" the memories of victims and witnesses.
GIST: "Of the hundreds of photos from Charlottesville, Va., that circulated online this weekend, a few seemed destined to be cited as evidence of crimes. One photo shows three men beating 20 year-old Deandre Harris with poles in a parking garage. “I have eight staples in my head, a broken wrist, and a chipped tooth,” Harris told The Root. One attacker wore a white construction helmet, another sported a long red bead. Who were they? Internet sleuths got to work, and by Monday morning they were naming names and calling for arrests. The name of the helmeted man went viral after New York Daily News columnist Shaun King posted a series of photos on Twitter and Facebook that more clearly showed his face and connected him to photos from a Facebook account. “Neck moles gave it away,” King wrote in his posts, which were shared more than 77,000 times. But the name of the red-bearded assailant was less clear: some on Twitter claimed it was a Texas man who goes by a Nordic alias online. Others were sure it was a Michigan man who, according to Facebook, attended high school with other white nationalist demonstrators depicted in photos from Charlottesville. After being contacted for comment by The Marshall Project, the Michigan man removed his Facebook page from public view. Such speculation, especially when it is not conclusive, has created new challenges for law enforcement. There is the obvious risk of false identification. In 2013, internet users wrongly identified university student Sunil Tripathi as a suspect in the Boston marathon bombing, prompting the internet forum Reddit to issue an apology for fostering “online witch hunts.” Already, an Arkansas professor was misidentified as as a torch-bearing protester, though not a criminal suspect, at the Charlottesville rallies. Beyond the cost to misidentified suspects, the crowdsourced identification of criminal suspects is both a benefit and burden to investigators. “If someone says: ‘hey, I have a picture of someone assaulting another person, and committing a hate crime,' that's great,” said Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, the spokesman for the Seattle Police Department, which used social media to help identify the pilot of a drone that crashed into a 2015 Pride Parade. (The man was convicted in February.) “But saying, 'I am pretty sure that this person is so and so’. Well, ‘pretty sure’ is not going to cut it.” Still, credible information can help police establish probable cause, which means they can ask a judge to sign off on either a search warrant, an arrest warrant, or both. “You have to take more time when social media is involved just to make sure that it's the right person who you are charging, and it's not just the perception of the individual who was victimized, who just wants to ID somebody to give closure to themselves,” said Lt. John Walker, who supervises 31 detectives in the Philadelphia Police Department’s West Philadelphia office. “You have to do the right thing.”.........A successful arrest assisted by mass interest on social media doesn’t necessarily lead to a successful conviction. Prosecutors dropped the charges against a shooting suspect, Walker recalled, after his attorney argued that the identification process “was tainted” because the victim had seen the suspect’s name and photos on Facebook. It’s becoming more common, at least in Philadelphia, for defense attorneys to petition the court to order additional line ups after police finger a suspect with the help of social media. “If the victim really doesn't know” who did it, “and is tuned into social media, and sees a frenzy of people ID’ing someone, they will latch on to it,” said Philadelphia-area defense lawyer Michael Fienman. “So many people say, ‘it must be him’. They adopt that view." Dozens of wrongful convictions have featured mistaken identifications."
The entire story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
