"We know that composites are a problem for innocent suspects and therefore a problem for investigations," Newirth said. The possibility of an innocent person getting caught up in an investigation as a result of having the misfortune of looking like a composite, or that somebody thought he looked like a composite, is very great." "And so you've got people calling from all over saying, 'That looks like my Uncle Bobby' or 'That looks like Dave from high school,' or whomever. ![]() "The composite gets created and then it gets put out into the world with a request for help," said Newirth. Issuing a police drawing that winds up stuck to hundreds of store windows can overwhelm investigators with erroneous tips, some implicating innocent people. That's why sketches, while potentially useful in developing leads or pulling together a police lineup, can also be counterproductive in a criminal investigation. "They could just be made up faces that were created through this process." "These are not photographs," said Karen Newirth, a senior staff attorney who focuses on eyewitness identification in the Innocence Project's strategic litigation unit. What might seem like a large mouth or long nose to one person might not to another. Even assuming a person remembers a face accurately, the ability to relay an image in one's mind to someone holding a pad and pencil, however skilled, presents another obstacle. In fact, mistaken eyewitness accounts were a primary factor in the hundreds of wrongful convictions that have been overturned by DNA evidence, figuring in more than 70 percent of those cases, according to the New York-based Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization. In 2015, one of these sketches, which bore a striking resemblance to Danny Heinrich, who subsequently admitted abducting and killing Jacob, was used to support a search warrant for Heinrich's Annandale house.īut the creation of composite drawings is a misunderstood and sometimes overvalued aspect of police work, representing the tangible result of a highly abstract process.įorensic sketches are based on memory, which does not work like a video recorder and is highly fallible. There were drawings of men suspected of related abductions or attempted abductions, of skulking men who had been seen in cars and of one man described as possessing a "piercing stare." The police even released a Frankenstein-like combination sketch comprising features from three previous drawings. That sketch became one of a number created and publicly disseminated during the Wetterling investigation. He talked about Jacob and said with a chuckle, "I don't think they're ever going to find that boy." The clerk didn't get the man's license plate number, but she worked with police to create a composite sketch of his face. The man acted strangely, said a clerk, as he purchased chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers. ![]() Joseph in October 1989, an older man walked into the very Tom Thumb store where the 11-year-old had rented a video the night he went missing. Alternatively, use Ctrl D ( Edit ▷ Draw ↓) to permanently draw the text on the image.Two weeks after Jacob Wetterling was abducted in St.
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