A Miscarriage of Justice in Massachusetts: Eyewitness Identification Procedures, Unrecorded Admissions, and a Comparison with English Law

Like many other states, Massachusetts has recently known a number of acknowledged miscarriages of justice. This article examines one of them, the Marvin Mitchell case, in order to ask two questions: What went wrong? and What systemic reforms might have prevented this injustice? In seeking ideas for reform, we look to English law. In 1990 Marvin Mitchell was convicted of rape in Massachusetts. Seven years later he became the first Massachusetts prisoner to be exonerated by DNA testing. In this article we describe the two key factors leading to Mitchell\u27s wrongful conviction: faulty eyewitness identification procedures, and inadequate safeguards surrounding the recording and disclosure of Mitchell\u27s allegedly incriminating statements to the police. We then ask how English prosecutors and courts would have responded to a police investigation conducted in the same way as Massachusetts police handled Mitchell\u27s case. After describing the English safeguards applicable to eyewitness identification procedures and to the taking of suspects\u27 statements to the police, we conclude that the investigatory flaws in Mitchell\u27s case would have led to a radically different result in England: it is unlikely that Mitchell would even have been prosecuted, let alone convicted, for the crime with which he was charged. In view of the fact that a number of Massachusetts miscarriages of justice have resulted from unreliable eyewitness identification procedures, and from eleventh-hour revelations of previously undisclosed incriminating statements by defendants, we argue that Massachusetts should consider adopting stronger safeguards to protect the innocent from police error or abuse. In doing so, the state should look to English experience for plausible models

The New Jim Crow

The mass incarceration of poor people of color represents a new American caste system that is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. The War on Drugs and the "get tough" movement explain the explosion in incarceration in the United States and the emergence of a vast, new racial undercaste in which the overwhelming majority of the increase in imprisonment has been poor people of color, with the most astonishing rates of incarceration found among black men