MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20317, 27 January 1928, Page 12

MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

MANY CASES KNOWN. UNJUST IMPRISONMENT. STRANGE COINCIDENCES. Miss Alyne Pacaud, aged IS years, the daughter of Mr Lucien Pacaud, Assistant High 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 that a serious mistake had been made, ana the policeman and the inspector apologised for it. The fact was that Miss Pacaud has been mistaken for somebody else, but fortunately the mistake was discovered in * time to prevent further unpleasantness for her. PREVIOUS MISTAKES. Previous mistakes have arisen through, out the years in the matter of identification of persons alleged to be guilty ol various offences, and in some of the cases innocent people have been sent to piison. Mistakes of identification have probably been a more fruitful cauSe of miscarriages of justice thant 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 case in which, when at the Bar, he had prosecuted a woman for child stealing. Slie had been identified as a person seen in shops in London and elsewhere by no fewer than II witnesses, and had been convicted. Subsequently ■ another woman was identified as 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 C. A. Mitchell quotes the Gorse Hall mystery of November, 1909. A millowner, living at Gorse Hall, in a lonely part of Cheshire, was stabbed to death by a man who had foiced his way into the house. A relative of the deceased, named Howard, was identified by several 1 witnesses as the assailant, and was tried in 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 ofience, 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, was asked: “ If yc-i saw Howard and this prisoner standing side by side, would you be abia to distinguish one from the other V “No,” she replied, “ they are so much alike, and one might possibly pass for she other.”

Two two men, accused and acquitted, were then placed side by side, and Uia witness was asked to explain the diffe, - ence between them. After a careiiu scrutiny, she said: “ 1 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 lie 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 had 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 handwriting ,cd the court to quash the sentence. The Court of Criminal Appeal prevented au 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. WITNESSES PUZZLED. In a murder trial Sergeant Ballantiue puzzled witnesses who had identified the prisoner. The village postman was sure prisoner was the man to whom he uad talked in a publichouse, but when Sergeant Ballantiue, who was defending the accused, asked a man in court to stand beside the prisoner in the dock, and the postman was asked 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. DISTINCTIVE MOVEMENTS. Witnesses are sometimes prepared to vouchsafe evidence 'of identification Decause of some peculiarity in the movement of the person alleged to be connected with offences. In the case of Wood, who in 1907 was found not guilty of the murder of a woman, it was proved that the accused had been in the company of the victim not long before the crime had been committed, and evidence was given that he had been in the same street in the early dawn of that day. The witness who had given this evidence had picked the prisoner out from a number of men of similar build, who had been made to parade round the police station yard, and had identified him by a distinctive movement of the shoulder. But the value of this evidence was entirely discounted when counsel for the defence, the late Sir Edward Marshall Hall, produced a man who lived in the same street, who also had a distinctive swing of the shoulder, and who was accustomed to leave home every momirrg at an early hour to go to work.