Unraveled: Bearing Witness to Innocence Lost and Found

In more than seventy percent of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence, the primary cause was a mistaken eyewitness. Last week, we spoke about the journey of holding onto belief when all seems lost. This is a story about what happens when that belief is the only thing left. It’s 1984. A former Marine named Kirk Bloodsworth is sitting at the defendant’s table. One by one, five different people take the witness stand. And one by one, they point their finger at him. They testify that they saw him with a nine-year-old girl, just before she was brutally murdered.

Their testimony is confident. It is unwavering. And to the jury, it is convincing. The gavel falls. Kirk Bloodsworth is convicted and sentenced to death. The state built its entire case on those five identifications. There was no physical evidence. No confession. Just the memory of five people. And as U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once said, “There is almost nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant, and says, ‘That’s the one.’” We now know that eyewitness confidence is a terrible indicator of accuracy.

We know that memory is not a recording, but a reconstruction, easily warped by stress, suggestion, and the simple difficulty of identifying a stranger. The police procedures at the time were flawed, relying on methods we now know produce unreliable results. But the jury didn’t know that. They saw five certain witnesses, and they delivered a certain verdict. For eight years, Kirk Bloodsworth sat in a prison cell. Two of those years were spent on death row. Appeals were filed. Hearings were held. But the five unshakable eyewitnesses were a wall that could not be breached.

Hope... was running out. Then, a new word entered the legal vocabulary. A new science. DNA. At the time of Bloodsworth’s trial, it wasn’t a tool available for forensic testing. But now, it was. The evidence from the crime scene—evidence that had been preserved for almost a decade—still existed. A long-shot motion was filed. A judge agreed to allow the test. It was a flicker of light in a very dark room. The wait for the results was agonizing. Everything, an entire life, hinged on what the lab would find in a microscopic sample. The results came back. The DNA found on the victim’s clothing did not belong to Kirk Bloodsworth.

It belonged to another man, the actual perpetrator. Every single one of the five eyewitnesses was wrong. Their confidence, their certainty, the very foundation of the state’s case… was an illusion. In 1993, after eight years, seven months, and nineteen days in prison, Kirk Bloodsworth’s conviction was reversed. He walked out of the courthouse a free man, the first American death row inmate to be exonerated by DNA. But his freedom leaves us with a chilling question. Eyewitness testimony is still one of the most common forms of evidence used in courtrooms today.

And you have to wonder… how many other walls of certainty are built on sand?