MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXII, Issue 2560, 10 April 1928, Page 7

MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

MANY OASES KNOAVN

UNJUST IMPRISONMENT

STRANGE COINCIDENCES

Miss Alyne Pacaud, aged 18 yeairs, the daughter of Mr Lucien Pacaud, Assistant Higlhi Commissioner for Canada in London lately, had the unpleasant experience of being taken by a policeman to Vine Street Police Station, London, the officer stating/he had a warrant for her arrest. To her astonishment, she was told other charges would be preferred against her. Half an hour later it was realised thai a serious mistake had been made, and the policeman and the inspector apologised for it. The fact was that Miss Pacafud had been, mistaken for somebody else, but fortunately the mistake was discovered in time to prevent further unpleasantness for her.

Previous mistakes have arisen throughout the years in the matter of identifications of persons alleged to be guilty of various offences, and in some of the cases innocent people have been sent to prison. Mistakes of identification have probably been a more fruitful cause of miscarriages of justice than all other causes put together. Every work on the laws of evidence cites notorious instances of the kind to prove how liable to error the direct evidence of eye-witnesses may be. In a trial of burglary in the early years of last century the judge, in his remarks to the jury, pointed-out that evidence in the identification of the prisoner had been questioned, and recalled a citee in which, when at the Bar, he had prosecuted a woman for child stealing. She had been identified as a person seen in shops in London and elsewhere, by no fewer than 11 witnesses, and had been convicted. Subsequently another woman was. identified ts the child stealer with equal certainty by 13 witnesses. "These contradictions," commented the judge, " made one tremble at the consequences of relying on evidence of this nature unsupported by other proof.''

"SO MUCH ALIKE." In his book, "The Expert Witness," Mr O. A. Mitchell quotes the Gorse Hall mystery of November, 1909. A millowner, living at Gorse Hill, in a lonely part of Cheshire, was stabbed to death by a man who had forced his way into the house. A relative of the deceased, named Howard, was identified by 'several witnesses as the assailant, and was tried on March, 1910, but he was able to prove conclusively that he was elsewhere at the time. In September of the following year another ex-soldier named Wilde, was put upon his trial for the same offence, and he, too, was identified as the assailant by some of the same witnesses who had previously been positive that Howard was the man. One of these witnesses, a servant, wais asked: "If you saw Howard and this prisoner standing side by side, would you be able to distinguish one from the other " "No," she replied; "they are so much alike, and one might possibly pass for the other." The two men, accused and acquitted, were then placed side by side, and the witness was aske'd- to explain the difference between them. After' a careful scrutiny, she said: "I think they are very much alike." Then there is the case of William Thompson who, in 1912, was convicted of false pretences at the Essex Assizes, and also at the Middlesex Assizes, and sentenced at the first trial to 18 months' hard labour, and at the second to three years' penal servitude. Against these sentences he appealed on the ground of wrong identification.. He had been positively, identified by 22 witnesses, but he proved that they were all mistaken, and that the real culprit was a man. named Russell, who had absconded. This man was known to the police, who ha(d< his photograph, and were in a position to state that the likeness between the two men was so close as to deceive people. The difference in the men's haudwritiugi led the court to quash the sentence. The Court of Criminad Appeal prevented an injustice being done to Thompson, but no such court was in existence when Adolf Beck was sent to prison for a crime of which he had no knowledge, and it was only through the accident of a postponement of sentence that Beck escaped a second imprisonment after serving the sentence for the first wrongful conviction.

In a; murder trial Sergeant Ballan.tine puzzled witnesses who had'identified the prisoner. The village postman was sure prisoner was the man to whom he had talked in a publichouse, but when Sergeantßallamtine, who was defending the accused, asked a man in court to stand beside the prisoner in the dock, and the postman was a.sked to look at the two men, who were exactly alike, he gasped the reply: "I don't know which is the man." It was then proved beyond' all doubt that it was really the second man whom the postman met, and that, by a strange coincidence, he had come down from London by the same train as the prisoner, who was acquitted.