A convicted murderer is scheduled for imminent execution on the testimony of a single eyewitness. Bernadine Skillern insists she saw Gary Graham kill a man in the course of a stickup. By her own testimony, she saw the killer only briefly through the windshield of her car and from 30 to 40 feet away. It was night, too. A good lawyer could have made mincemeat of her testimony, but Graham did not have a good lawyer.
Experience shows that's the wrong way to do a lineup, sometimes a setup to get an intended result.
He picked a man who, upon investigation, turned out to have been at sea on the day of the crime. But the ticket agent had indeed seen the man before. On three occasions, the agent had sold him railway tickets. A North Carolina homemaker, Jennifer Thompson, wrote Sunday in the New York Times about how she had identified the wrong man as her rapist. Yet, she was.