What evidence was there to convict him beyond all reasonable doubt?
If Seabold was able to confuse various Black men in a lineup, how can her original identification be reliable?
Looking at the picture of the lineup, Anthony Broadwater and the man she mistakenly picked from the lineup, Henry Hudson, don't look that like, apart from their race and height. Hudson has much wider eyes, thinner lips, and a rounder forehead.
I feel awful for Seabold and the various ordeals she went through. She doesn't deserve to be made a pariah simply because she was raped. And the truth is, *a* Black man did do this to her, although the crimes of *one* evil Black man should still not be met on every, or any, other Black person.
I do wonder if mistaken identity (i.e. the other-race effect) occurs in the opposite direction. Do Black witnesses mistake white assailants, and in view of how much harder it is to get a conviction on the basis of an identification, would it be controversial to consider race an aggravating factor meriting a higher sentence (i.e. where the GUILTY assailant is a different race to the individual they've victimised). Like I say, it's a controversial proposition, but if we accept that the other-race effect is a thing, is it fair to penalise victims simply because they were particularly unfortunate enough to be attacked by a person of a different race?
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joej2923 (2959)
a year ago
The evidence that I discovered online was her identification of him on the street and in the courtroom and the microscopic hair analysis. People are now saying that the microscopic hair analysis is not reliable BUT the article below noted that the FBI determined that it was roughly 88% accurate.
From the article:
In 2002, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing found that examiners reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html
A lineup is different because the suspects are not walking, talking, laughing, smiling and interacting with the victim. She identified him on the street and she may have interacted with him. A brief interaction might trigger a traumatic memory. As I noted previously, this lineup was confusing since two of the suspects looked like twins and the third guy looked similar. From left to right, the second and the fourth suspects look alike to me while the fifth guy is very similar. Another striking feature is the similarity of the male hairstyles.
Additional charges for hate crimes would be appropriate but adding sentencing enhancements based solely on race would be discriminatory.
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