Giving Compass' Take:

· Governing Magazine explains how wrongful convictions are driving numerous states to reform approaches to suspect identification in order to avoid false IDs.

· Are eyewitness identifications reliable enough for the criminal justice system? What factors can influence false identifications during a police lineup? 

· Read more about false IDs and this husband and wife duo addressing wrongful convictions in America's criminal justice system.

After nearly 38 years, on Jan. 30 Malcolm Alexander walked away from a place he never should have been to begin with: the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

Earlier that day, a Jefferson Parish judge had tossed out Alexander’s 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.

Twenty-one when he was sentenced to life without parole, Alexander had been 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 officers that strengthened the victim’s initial “tentative” identification of Alexander in a police lineup into one of certainty by the time she testified at the 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. Among the changes Louisiana enacted earlier this year is requiring police to use “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 deduction or to please police investigators.

Read the full article about police changing lineups by Michael Ollove at Governing Magazine.