For 18 years, the photographs that lined Steve Avery’s prison cells linked him to the outside world. They helped him see his children grow up. They made him feel as if he hadn’t completely missed those birthdays and Thanksgivings.
The snapshots also are bitter reminders of the moments and memories stolen while he served time for a rape he didn’t commit.
Although 16 witnesses placed him elsewhere on July 29, 1985, when Penny Beerntsen was attacked on a Wisconsin beach, she identified Avery in a lineup and again during the trial. Two decades later, DNA evidence proved she was wrong.
Avery’s case–he was released from a Wisconsin prison in September 2003–dramatically highlights flawed police lineup procedures, where well-meaning witnesses, even crime victims themselves, confidently pick the wrong person, experts say.
“That day I heard the news was worse than the day I was assaulted,” said Beerntsen, who now lives in Naperville. “I felt so horrendous and so guilty about being a part of this miscarriage of justice.”
In a pilot study under way since last fall, a different way of conducting lineups that some say could sharply reduce the number of false identifications is being tested in Chicago, Evanston and Joliet.
Suspects in traditional lineups are arranged shoulder to shoulder in the same room, and witnesses use a process of elimination to select someone who looks most like the perpetrator, said Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has researched mistaken identifications for more than 25 years.
Wells and other researchers advocate another approach, the “sequential” lineup, where suspects are brought in one at a time so witnesses can examine each individually.
Mistaken identification–which was a factor in more than 75 percent of the 155 DNA exonerations across the country since 1989, according to the Innocence Project–can be cut in half or more with sequential lineups, Wells said.
After the Wisconsin Innocence Project took on Avery’s case, a pubic hair saved from the rape kit was tested and matched Gregory Allen, whose information was on file because he was serving a 60-year sentence for a 1995 sexual assault.
When Beerntsen learned the truth, she was devastated. “You can forgive a wrong that’s done to yourself more than you can forgive yourself, albeit unintentional, for something that was done to someone else,” she said.
For his part, Avery never believed a jury would find him guilty. When he was sentenced to 32 years in prison, though, Avery realized his life was forever altered.
Yet when Avery left prison, that anger melted away, he said. “They stole it all from me, but the hate, it isn’t there anymore, not like it used to be,” he said.
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Edited by Lara Weber (lweber@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
