The Tippit Witnesses --- Conclusion

[Gil Jesus]

Eyewitness testimony is historically among the most convincing forms of evidence in criminal trials. That iconic moment when a testifying witness points to the defendant as the perpetrator of the crime is iconic, and has been dramatized often on television and movies. It is easy to understand why it is so convincing. We trust our own perception and experience.

But being convincing isn’t the same as being accurate.

Eyewitness testimony is more fallible than many people assume. The advent of DNA analysis in the late 1980s revolutionized forensic science, providing an unprecedented level of accuracy about the identity of actual perpetrators versus innocent people falsely accused of crime. DNA testing led to the review of many settled cases.

Since 2006, The Innocence Project of Texas has exonerated or freed 25 innocent people from incarceration who collectively served 341 years behind bars.

https://innocencetexas.org/our-work

19 of those convictions came under the leadership of Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who served as DA at the time of the assassination.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25917791

Nationwide, as of January 2020, 367 people who were convicted have had those convictions overturned by DNA evidence. Of those, 21 people had been convicted and sentenced to death.

https://innocenceproject.org/research-resources/

Eyewitness misidentification played a major role in those original convictions.

Of those 367 people, 69 % had been convicted through eyewitness misidentification and had served an average of 14 years in prison before exoneration.

https://innocenceproject.org/how-eyewitness-misidentification-can-send-innocent-people-to-prison/

The authors of a 2018 study concluded that “eyewitnesses typically provide reliable evidence on an initial, uncontaminated memory test, and this is true even for most of the wrongful convictions that were later reversed by DNA evidence.

The researchers argued that eyewitnesses are usually correct immediately after a crime takes place, but that their memories become contaminated during the process of interviewing and questioning. Inaccuracies in eyewitnesses' memories can, in turn, lead to wrongful convictions.

The more times an eyewitness is questioned, the more likely it is that their memories will become contaminated.

Being asked leading questions, hearing more information about a case from media or other witnesses, and even having to repeat their story many times can all affect a person's memory.

https://www.verywellmind.com/can-you-trust-eyewitness-testimony-4579757

Memory also deteriorates while we store it. Research dating back to the 19th century shows that we rapidly forget what we have seen and heard, and that memory doesn’t improve over time, as this “forgetting curve” illustrates:

https://innocenceproject.org/how-eyewitness-misidentification-can-send-innocent-people-to-prison/



As the graph shows, the average memory declines quickly after witnessing an event, within an hour the retention rate is less than 50 %.

After 31 days, it's about 20 %.

Many of these witnesses were interviewed between 2 and 10 months after the murder.

Which makes the account of Jack Ray Tatum, who claimed to have witnessed the Tippit murder and identified Oswald as the murderer that much more difficult to believe.

Tatum didn't enter the limelight until the House Select Committee investigation in 1977, some 14 YEARS after the murder.

That Tatum could retain his memory for that long is not supported by the science or the research.
The fact that he never came forward before that time makes his "identification" all the more unreliable.

Domingo Benavides was the closest witness to the murder. He admitted under oath that his eventual identification of Oswald came from pictures he had seen in the newspaper:

Mr. BELIN. You used the name Oswald. How did you know this man was Oswald?
Mr. BENAVIDES. From the pictures I had seen. It looked like a guy, resembled the guy. That was the reason I figured it was Oswald.
BELIN. Were they newspaper pictures or television pictures, or both, or neither ?
Mr. BENAVIDES. Well, television pictures and newspaper pictures. The thing lasted about a month, I believe, it seemed like.
Mr. BELIN. Pardon.
Mr. BENAVIDES. I showed I believe they showed pictures of him every day for a long time there. ( 6 H 452 )
 

Cab driver William Scoggins also admitted that he had seen pictures of Oswald in the morning paper before he identified him. ( 3 H 334 )

Improved memory over time ? Not according to the research.

Since eyewitness accounts are more accurate right after the event, let's take a look at the Commission's witnesses and the descriptions they gave of the killer within the first 9 hours of the shooting.

The witnesses who made statements in the first nine hours were Mrs. Markham, the Davises, Ted Callaway and Sam Guinyard.

Mrs. Markham swore out an affidavit to the FBI saying the killer was an 18yo. She told Officer J.M. Poe that the killer was wearing a white jacket. Then she went to view a lineup and chose Oswald even though she testified that she had never seen him before.

The Davises told the Dallas Police that they saw a man on their lawn unloading his gun. Virginia verified Mrs. Markham's description of the jacket as being white. ( 7 H 69 ) Later, she testified that the killer "didn't look like he was over 20". ( 6 H 457 ) The Davises were allowed to view the lineup together and after a long delay chose Oswald from a group that included two blonds and a jail clerk.

Ted Callaway and Sam Guinyard gave questionable testimony. Callaway claimed to have confronted the gunman, but asked Domingo Benavides which way he went. Both of these men claimed to have seen the same thing at the same time, but had the gunman fleeing on opposite sides of the street. They were also told by police before they viewed the lineup that the suspect in the Tippit killing was there. I've proven Guinyard lied under oath. Like the Davises, they were allowed to view the lineups together. Finally, they chose Oswald from a group that included two police detectives and a jail clerk.

Memory is extremely malleable as we store and recall it.
Information we learn after witnessing an event from other witnesses, police investigators and the media as well as the ways in which we are asked questions about what we saw can profoundly alter our memories.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the witnesses' accounts of the murder of J.D. Tippit. Over time, witnesses changed their stories, none of them were consistent with each other and some even contradicted in their testimony months later what they originally told police.

Others, like Benavides, were admittedly influenced by what they saw on television and in the newspapers.

The evidence indicates that the Commission's witnesses were pressured by authorities into choosing Oswald from unfair lineups and photographs that implied his guilt and were influenced by what they saw on TV and in the papers.

In spite of this evidence, the Commission had no problem with these identifications.

Perhaps the greatest injustice of all is the fact that history will always name Lee Harvey Oswald as the killer of Dallas Police Officer J.D.Tippit.
Be that as it may, these "positive identifications" of Oswald as the man who murdered Tippit are anything but positive.

And the evidence AGAINST Oswald being the killer is very strong.

NEXT WEEK: THE CAB RIDE




 

Edited October 16, 2021 by Gil Jesus

[John Butler]

3 hours ago, Gil Jesus said:

As the graph shows, the average memory declines quickly after witnessing an event, within an hour the retention rate is less than 50 %.

Gil,

You should teach school.  The retention rate social studies after a year is 10%.  90% is lost.  I thought the same group of kids in the 7th grade, then again in the 8th grade, and the 9th grade.  This was my introduction on how effective teaching is in school.  7th grade was KY history, 8th was American history, and the 9th was civics or government.  I basically taught some of the same material year after year.  It was a real eye opener.  To deal with that failure of retention I basically derived ways to each the same thing 5 or 6 different ways hoping for greater retention.

Edited October 16, 2021 by John Butler

[Gil Jesus]

5 hours ago, John Butler said:

Gil,

You should teach school.  The retention rate social studies after a year is 10%.  90% is lost.  I thought the same group of kids in the 7th grade, then again in the 8th grade, and the 9th grade.  This was my introduction on how effective teaching is in school.  7th grade was KY history, 8th was American history, and the 9th was civics or government.  I basically taught some of the same material year after year.  It was a real eye opener.  To deal with that failure of retention I basically derived ways to each the same thing 5 or 6 different ways hoping for greater retention.

That's shocking John, because you'd expect kids to retain things longer than adults. Now I know why I was a straight "C" student in high school.

Edited October 16, 2021 by Gil Jesus

[Larry Hancock]

In the classroom It's not necessarily all about "retention",  its also about learning - John noted the need to develop several ways to present information to encourage retention.  Decades ago in my education and training courses it was emphasized that it was mandatory to present material in multiple ways because students are individuals and they simply don't engage with information in the same ways.   We were required to build lessons plans with multiple ways to present (five column plans for that matter).  That even held in my Air Force instructor training.  If you get lucky you hit on some way to express it or demonstrate it in a way that at least gets a few to engage enough to get it - and perhaps even retain it - more engagement equals more retention.

All of which makes matters worse when relying on witnesses who only had one brief shot to capture anything, flesh what they did get (often unknowingly) with conversations after the fact, reading or viewing media, giving testimony, responding to questions, etc.

To think that you can come back later and confirm more than a minimal set of observations is quite well documented - as Gil brought out above.

[John Butler]

16 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

In the classroom It's not necessarily all about "retention",  its also about learning

Larry,

I'm not arguing with any thing you said.  Well said.  The retention of things learned is what it is all about.  My first year in teaching was with special needs children.   I could teach them things, but mostly whatever was taught was gone within several weeks.  With repeated sessions on the same material the result was the same.  But, still I loved the job and it was the best thing I ever did.

[Larry Hancock]

Thanks John,  I was really only trying to draw the distinction because with one time event witnesses its even more challenging as there is no real change for "learning" at the time - however "learning" does occur after the incident - from other sources - and that makes trusting witnesses well after the fact even more challenging.  

First off in the event of a crime or accident they get personally engaged so that distracts them, then you have the retention problem with what little they pick up and finally the "false learning" that they pick up afterwards.  Which is why if you take witness reports its really important to get it down within hours and before they begin talking to people.