Craig Saunders
'Craig Saunders had no prior criminal history and was given 49 1/2 years to 97 1/2 years for a crime not committed. We are not giving up on having him exonerated from on the basis of his innocence. This man had everything that should have screamed innocent as well as two witness alibis, and now a witness from this exact case where, 18 to 23 months after the crime, a line up was done. However, eyewitness identification was proven to not be of great use in trials - as a matter of fact it's deadly, especially if eyes can lie and 18-23 months after the crime was committed - no that's not right. He has a home and a family waiting for him and we are requesting EXONERATION and clemency for him. I will keep doing everything I can to shed light on this wrongful conviction case. We have five little ones who need their dad!
Sincerely Dominique Mackson, his wife'
Craig Saunders has been maintaining innocence for 20 years, in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. His conviction is based only on eyewitness identification evidence, which is known to cause more wrongful convictions than all other sources of wrongful convictions combined.
Craig had a solid alibi. At the time of the crime he was at work with two people from his job who testified on his behalf. There was no DNA evidence, no fingerprints, no confessions, and no statements by co-defendants. He remains in prison because two people picked out his picture 18 months after the crime took place.
If an innocent man is in prison that means a guilty person remains free. Unless the law and the system changes, this could happen to you, your son, father or brother. As it stands today it is extremely difficult for other innocent people to get relief. It is as if the system is designed to be a one-way street. Even when there is evidence of innocence and good reason to doubt a conviction, getting relief is an extremely difficult process. This is possible because not enough people know about the injustices that routinely occur.
Many believe that the criminal justice system is infallible and do not care until it happens to them or one of their loved ones. The system failed Craig and many others like him. There could literally be thousands of people in prison based on inaccurate and unreliable eyewitness identification and other forms of intrinsically unreliable evidence used in criminal trials. The Judges, prosecutors, defence attorneys, police and legislature know how unreliable this evidence is, but very little has changed.
Light needs to be shone on Craig's case, his situation and others in similar circumstances. People need to know that there are over 30 years of research, and over 2000 studies, that prove that eyewitness identification evidence leads to innocent people being locked away in prisons. The scientific research is beyond dispute or debate. People in prison based on eyewitness identification evidence have not been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.
Craig: I was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I graduated from the George Washington Carver high school for engineering and science in 1993. I went to college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1998 with a BS in Physics and a minor in Mathematics. After taking some graduate classes, I moved back to the Philadelphia area in 1999.
In March of 2000, I started working at Dupont Marshall laboratory in Philadelphia. On September 12 2000, a home-invasion robbery occurred in Southwest Philadelphia. At the time I was at work and had evidence to prove it. On February 20 2002, 18 months later, the investigating detectives put my photograph in an array of eight photos and showed it to three of the victims. Two of them picked my photo out; one of them narrowed it down to two, including mine.
I was arrested on March 6, 2002. I started a jury trial in February 2003. It ended in a hung jury - the jury failed to unanimously conclude I was ever in the victim's house. In January 2004, I started a second jury trial and was found guilty. On March 11 2004, I was sentenced to 48 to 97 years in prison. I had no prior felony convictions. I was arrested and convicted based primarily - if not solely - on the eyewitness identification of the three victims.
A little over a year after being sentenced, I came across an article from the Philadelphia Daily News on mistaken identifications:
[1]. The article was about people who had been wrongly arrested in Philadelphia because of the problems with the reliability of eyewitness identification evidence and the procedures used by the Philadelphia police department. It was the first piece of the puzzle to make sense of how I ended up in prison for a crime I did not commit.
The article set me on a path to learn all I could about the psychology of eyewitness identifications, starting with the references in the article. I obtained a copy of a September 2003 manual by the national institute of justice titled Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement, which was referred to in the Daily News article.
[2]. According to this manual, almost the entire procedure by which the detectives handled the identification process in my case was contrary to department of justice recommendations. The NIJ manual had references to psychological studies. In November of 2005, I wrote to the American Psychological Association in Washington DC, which publishes many studies in the NIJ manual. The APA provided me with five articles published in journals about studies that further revealed how there was no way I should be in prison with a 48 to 97 year sentence based on an identification that was made 18 months after the crime.
I also began obtaining law reviews through a program at all state run libraries (which has since bean severely restricted). These law reviews revealed errors that my attorney made, the misunderstanding that the jury likely had about the reliability of the identification evidence, problems with the jury instructions, the process leading to my identification, and how the prosecutor manipulated the psychology of the identification evidence to his advantage.
Over the years, I obtained several law reviews through this program and other psychological studies. Under Pennsylvania's right-to-know law, I obtained copies of police directives from the Philadelphia police department in November 2011. Directive #33 is entitled "police and suspect photographs"; directive #135 is entitled "rules of discovery". From the dates on the directives, Philadelphia has still not updated its policies regarding the procedures it uses to identify people. Moreover, the detectives failed to follow the policy in my case.
In early 2012, I obtained a copy of the report of the advisory committee on wrongful convictions released by the joint state government commission. In September 2012, through the inter-library loan program, I obtained the book eyewitness identification by Elizabeth Loftus, who is considered a pioneer in the field. Most recently, I obtained a report by the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification.
There are many opinions from different courts, one of them over 100 years old, that recognize the dangers of convicting someone based on identification evidence. Even though I used these cases and the studies in my arguments, it seems the courts will only address the problem when an expert in the field of psychology of eyewitness identification testifies, or provides a statement specifically applying the science (as in my case).
I am seeking the help of an expert on eyewitness identification to review my case and prepare a statement. I also want to connect with other people who were convicted based on identification to begin pushing for changes in the laws leading to so many unjust convictions.
Outdated decisions of the United States Supreme Court are one of the main sources of the problem. So far, it refuses to review its 1967 rulings and acknowledge all the scientific evidence that has been produced since that time.
'Psychological research has established that the witness's faith is equally strong whether or not the identification is correct. An important body of psychological research undermines the lay intuition that confident memories of salient experiences are accurate and do not fade with time unless a person's memory has some pathological impairment.
'The basic problem about testimony from memory is that most of our recollections are not verifiable. The only warranty for them is our certitude, and certitude is not a reliable test of certainty ... [t]he mere fact that we remember something with great confidence is not a powerful warrant for thinking it true ... jurors, however, tend to think that witnesses memories are reliable (because jurors are confident of their own), and this gap between the actual error rate and the jurors' heavy reliance on eyewitness testimony sets the stage for erroneous convictions when … everything depends on uncorroborated eyewitness testimony by people who do not know the accused'. (Newsome v. McCabe, 319 f.3d 30i, 305 (7th cir. 2003))
Write to Craig here:
Craig Saunders
Prisoner no: FS1684
PO Box 33028
St Petersburg, Florida 33733
Email:
www.connectnetwork.com (details as above)
Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC)
Craig Saunders was assisted in writing this article by Sean Bw Parker, Editor, False Allegations Watch (FAW).
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