In the years since I started publishing this Blog I have become
increasingly disturbed by the 'white elephant' in the room: Sheer,
unadulterated, willful misconduct in the criminal justice system -
much of it involving forensic evidence - committed by lab technicians,
pathologists, police officers, prosecutors and others. Think Annie
Dookhan; Think Sonia Farak; Think David Kofoed; Think Charles Smith;
Think Ken Anderson; Think Gene Morrison. I have therefore decided to run this image of a
white elephant at the top of every applicable post henceforth, to draw
our reader's attention to what I see as a major problem in all too
many criminal justice system's - my own included. Harold Levy;
Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
"Reformers have for years recommended that all forensic labs be
independent from law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies' and this is
a key reform promoted by The Justice Project (2008). But fixing
these problems is only half the answer' because half of the wrongful
convictions attributed to misleading forensic evidence involved
deliberate forensic fraud' evidence tampering' and/or perjury.
From "The Elephant in the Crime Lab," by co-authored by Sheila Berry and Larry Ytuarte; Forensic Examiner; Spring, 2009;
http://www.t-mlaw.com/blog/post/the-elephant-in-the-crime-lab/
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is but a small portion of a much larger story which deserves to be read in its entirety at the link below.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Chares Smith Blog.
----------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Officials
at other police departments, including in Los Angeles, Chicago and
Philadelphia, said they keep their hands away from Photoshop. “Adding
or removing tattoos is not something we do,” said Detective Donny
Moses, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department. “We
don’t tamper with them at all,” he said of photos for arrays. “We would
get killed in the courts as well as the media. That’s something we
don’t mess with.”
-------------------------------------------------------------
STORY: " by reporter Nicholas Bogel-Burrough, published by The New York Times on August 24, 2019.
SUB-HEADING: "When
witness descriptions made no mention of a suspect’s facial tattoos, the
police airbrushed them away for an identification lineup. The practice
goes beyond one case."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Tyrone Allen’s facial tattoos were removed in a photograph shown to four bank tellers in a robbery case."
GIST: "Court
records and interviews with police departments across the country show
this was not an isolated episode of officers airbrushing aside a
discrepancy. Some of the nation’s largest police departments regularly
use Photoshop and other editing tools in cases where suspects have a
distinguishing tattoo, scar, bruise or other mark. Criminal
justice experts say there can be good reasons for touching up photos.
For instance, adding a suspect’s birthmark to pictures of the other
people in the array — known as fillers — can make lineups fairer by
ensuring that the perpetrator does not stand out. Modifying
the features of the suspect, however, is less common and has concerned
lawyers who say investigators are encouraging positive identifications
and changing the appearance of the person they are asking witnesses to
identify. “Law enforcement took these
photos of a defendant who did not match the description of eyewitnesses,
and then altered the photo to more closely match the witness
description,” said Mat dos Santos, the legal director of the American
Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “If you can’t do a good photo lineup,
the answer is not to change the photos; the answer is a photo lineup
just shouldn’t be done.” Margaret Bull
Kovera, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies
witness identification and evidence, said though it could be nearly
impossible to find five filler photos that look similar to a suspect
with an obvious scar or face tattoo, changing a suspect’s mug shot was
unacceptable. And she said she worried that the police could alter
photos in other ways, like making a suspect look thinner if they
believed that the person gained weight after committing a crime. “That’s not O.K.,” Professor Kovera said. “You can’t alter the face of the suspect.” Among
the police departments that do sometimes touch up a suspect’s photo is
the country’s largest, the New York Police Department, often as a last
resort. “All efforts are made to alter
the filler photos, not the subject’s photo,” said Sgt. Mary Frances
O’Donnell, a spokeswoman for the department. When confronted with a
suspect whose scars or tattoos would stand out from the filler images,
the department’s photo unit adds the same feature to the five filler
photos “to ensure photo arrays are fair and impartial,” she said, adding
that investigators document all changes. Officials
at other police departments, including in Los Angeles, Chicago and
Philadelphia, said they keep their hands away from Photoshop. “Adding
or removing tattoos is not something we do,” said Detective Donny
Moses, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department. “We
don’t tamper with them at all,” he said of photos for arrays. “We would
get killed in the courts as well as the media. That’s something we
don’t mess with.” In some cases, doing nothing about distinguishing marks may hurt suspects the most. "
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/us/police-photoshop-tattoos.html
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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles
Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of
interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold
Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
When
the police arrested a suspect in a series of bank holdups in Portland,
Ore., they took his mug shot and prepared to show it to witnesses in a
photo array alongside images of five similar-looking men.
But
there was a problem: The suspect had at least a half-dozen facial
tattoos, but according to surveillance video and bank tellers, the
robber had none.
This was nothing a little Photoshop could not fix.
The
police used editing software to remove the tattoos from the picture of
the suspect, Tyrone Allen, and presented his revised face to four tellers,
at least two of whom identified him as the bank robber. Prosecutors in
Portland said Mr. Allen may have applied makeup before the robberies and
that investigators simply mimicked the possible disguise.
Mr. Allen’s lawyer is asking a judge to throw the identifications out,
The Oregonian reported this month,
publicizing a practice that has drawn outrage from activists who say
the police unfairly changed Mr. Allen’s appearance to match witness
accounts.
Court
records and interviews with police departments across the country show
this was not an isolated episode of officers airbrushing aside a
discrepancy. Some of the nation’s largest police departments regularly
use Photoshop and other editing tools in cases where suspects have a
distinguishing tattoo, scar, bruise or other mark.
Criminal
justice experts say there can be good reasons for touching up photos.
For instance, adding a suspect’s birthmark to pictures of the other
people in the array — known as fillers — can make lineups fairer by
ensuring that the perpetrator does not stand out.
Modifying
the features of the suspect, however, is less common and has concerned
lawyers who say investigators are encouraging positive identifications
and changing the appearance of the person they are asking witnesses to
identify.
“Law enforcement took these
photos of a defendant who did not match the description of eyewitnesses,
and then altered the photo to more closely match the witness
description,” said Mat dos Santos, the legal director of the American
Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “If you can’t do a good photo lineup,
the answer is not to change the photos; the answer is a photo lineup
just shouldn’t be done.”
Margaret Bull
Kovera, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies
witness identification and evidence, said though it could be nearly
impossible to find five filler photos that look similar to a suspect
with an obvious scar or face tattoo, changing a suspect’s mug shot was
unacceptable. And she said she worried that the police could alter
photos in other ways, like making a suspect look thinner if they
believed that the person gained weight after committing a crime.
“That’s not O.K.,” Professor Kovera said. “You can’t alter the face of the suspect.”
Among
the police departments that do sometimes touch up a suspect’s photo is
the country’s largest, the New York Police Department, often as a last
resort.
“All efforts are made to alter
the filler photos, not the subject’s photo,” said Sgt. Mary Frances
O’Donnell, a spokeswoman for the department. When confronted with a
suspect whose scars or tattoos would stand out from the filler images,
the department’s photo unit adds the same feature to the five filler
photos “to ensure photo arrays are fair and impartial,” she said, adding
that investigators document all changes.
Officials
at other police departments, including in Los Angeles, Chicago and
Philadelphia, said they keep their hands away from Photoshop.
“Adding
or removing tattoos is not something we do,” said Detective Donny
Moses, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department.
“We
don’t tamper with them at all,” he said of photos for arrays. “We would
get killed in the courts as well as the media. That’s something we
don’t mess with.”
In some cases, doing nothing about distinguishing marks may hurt suspects the most. A
state appeals court in New Jersey last year
tossed out an identification in which a witness had selected a man as the perpetrator because he was the only person with face tattoos in a photo array.
In a
study published in 2016,
researchers in the United States and England asked witnesses to watch
someone with a distinctive feature commit a crime. When researchers then
produced a photo array in which only one person had the distinctive
feature, witnesses were more likely to identify that person as the
perpetrator — even when it was not the same person from the video.
“In
essence, the unfair lineup made people more likely to confuse the
guilty perpetrator with an innocent suspect,” said Melissa Colloff, a
psychology lecturer at the University of Birmingham in England and an
author of the study.
Experts generally agree that finding filler photos with similar identifiable markings is the ideal solution, although a
2004 survey
of 220 police departments, including many of the nation’s largest,
found that nearly a third did not do anything about unique marks.
According to a training manual
issued by the Justice Department in 2003, when a suspect has a unique
feature that a witness did not mention seeing — as in the Portland case —
the police should add it to the filler photos but “should not alter the
suspect’s photo.”
In these
circumstances, the Miami-Dade Police Department takes a novel approach.
Detectives use Adobe Photoshop to add the suspect’s tattoo or scar to
two of the five filler photographs, creating an array in which half of
the photos have the feature and half do not.
In a memorandum
to federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in 2017, Sally Q.
Yates, then the deputy attorney general, said the police could cover a
suspect’s unique mark with a black box and place a similar box on the
filler photos, the modern equivalent of what has long been done with
Band-Aids for in-person police lineups. Ms. Yates said all changes
should be documented.
Marc Garth
Green, the deputy chief of the Seattle Police Department, said the
department’s photography lab followed that advice: adding suspects’
identifying marks to filler photos but never changing the appearance of a
defendant.
“We want a true, fair and
accurate representation of the person we believe it to be,” Mr. Garth
Green said. “Then the victim can make their decision.”
In
the Portland case, investigators came to believe that Mr. Allen may
have used makeup to cover his tattoos after an anonymous informant told
the police that his unnamed roommate had said Mr. Allen was the robber,
Paul Maloney, an assistant United States attorney in Oregon, wrote in a
court filing.
“Investigators compared
defendant’s photo to the surveillance image and saw enough similarities
in the immutable facial features to include defendant in the photo
array, knowing that tattoos are easily concealed with makeup,” Mr.
Maloney wrote.
Sgt. Brad Yakots, a
spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said investigators then used
“digital makeup” to “help prevent misidentifying the suspect.”
Mr. Allen’s lawyer argued that the identifications should be suppressed.
“Presumably,
investigators believed that showing the tellers Mr. Allen’s real face
would decrease the likelihood of a positive identification, so they
simply chose to make Mr. Allen look different than he actually does,”
the lawyer, Mark Ahlemeyer, wrote in his motion.
The
judge has not decided whether to allow the photo array identification
as evidence, and the ruling could set a precedent for the use of
Photoshop on mug shots.
Prosecutors in
Oregon pointed to a California ruling in 2015, in which a judge allowed
the introduction of a photo array in which police had used editing
software to add hooded sweatshirts to six photos.
One
of the bank tellers who identified Mr. Allen as the robber in the photo
array told the police she was “100 percent” sure it was him,
prosecutors said.
“The face is really clear,” she said. “I’ll never forget that face.”
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/us/police-photoshop-tattoos.html
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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles
Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of
interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold
Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
Tyrone Allen’s facial tattoos were removed in a photograph shown to four bank tellers in a robbery case.
