Taryn Simon, Charles Irvin Fain, Scene of the crime, the Snake River, Melba, Idaho (detail), 2002. Fain served 18 years of a death sentence for murder, rape and kidnapping.

Taryn Simon, Larry Youngblood, Alibi location, Tucson, Arizona, With Alice Laitner, Youngblood's Girlfriend and alibi witness at trial, Served 8 years of a 10.5-year sentence for Sexual Assault, Kidnapping and Child Molestation, 2002.

Taryn Simon, Larry Mayes, Scene of arrest, The Royal Inn, Gary, Indiana, Police found Mayes hiding beneath a mattress in this room, Served 18.5 years of an 80-year sentence for Rape, Robbery and Unlawful Deviate Conduct, 2002

Taryn Simon, Ronald Jones Scene of arrest, South Side, Chicago, Illinois, Served 8 years of a death sentence for Rape and Murder, 2002,Chromogenic print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Edition of 5, © Taryn Simon.

Taryn Simon, Calvin Washington, C&E Motel, Room No. 24, Waco, Texas, 2002. This is where an informant claimed to have heard Washington confess. He was wrongfully accused and served 13 years of a life sentence for murder.

Museum of Contemporary Photography
Columbia College Chicago
600 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago
312-663-5554
Taryn Simon: The Innocents
August 2-October 1, 2005

I was asked to come down and look at the photo array of different men. I picked Ron’s photo because in my mind it most closely resembled the man who attacked me. But really what happened was that, because I had made a composite sketch, he actually most closely resembled my sketch as opposed to the actual attacker. By the time we went to do a physical lineup, they asked if I could physically identify the person. I picked out Ronald because, subconsciously, in my mind, he resembled the photo, which resembled the composite, which resembled the attacker. All the images became enmeshed to one image that became Ron, and Ron became my attacker.

— Jennifer Thompson on the process of identifying the man who raped her.

During the summer of 2000, I worked for The New York Times Magazine photographing men and women who were wrongfully convicted, imprisoned, and subsequently freed from death row. After this assignment, I began to investigate photography’s role in the criminal justice system. I traveled across the United States photographing and interviewing men and women convicted of crimes they did not commit. In these cases, photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, assisted officers in obtaining erroneous eyewitness identifications, and aided prosecutors in securing convictions. The criminal justice system had failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic images.

For the men and women in these photographs, the primary cause of wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement’s use of photographs and lineups. These identifications rely on the assumption of precise visual memory. But through exposure to composite sketches, mugshots, Polaroids, and lineups, eyewitness memory can change. Police officers and prosecutors influence memory — both unintentionally and intentionally — through the ways in which they conduct the identification process. They can shape, and even generate, what comes to be known as eyewitness testimony.

The high stakes of the criminal justice system underscore the importance of a photographic image’s history and context.

The photographs rely upon supporting materials — captions, case profiles and interviews — in an effort to construct a more adequate account of these cases. This project stresses the cost of ignoring the limitations of photography and minimizing the context in which photographic images are presented. Nowhere are the material effects of ignoring a photograph’s context as profound as in the misidentification that leads to the imprisonment or execution of an innocent person.

I photographed each innocent person at a site that came to assume particular significance following his wrongful conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the alibi location, or the scene of the crime. In the history of these legal cases, these locations have been assigned contradictory meanings. The scene of arrest marks the starting point of a reality that is based in fiction. The scene of the crime, for the wrongfully convicted, is at once arbitrary and crucial; a place that changed their lives forever, but to which they had never been. Photographing the wrongfully convicted in these environments brings to the surface the attenuated relationship between truth and fiction, and efficiency and injustice.

The wrongfully convicted in these photographs were exonerated through the use of DNA evidence. Only in recent years have eyewitness identification and testimony been forced to meet the test of DNA corroboration. Because of its accuracy, DNA allows a level of comfort that other forms of evidence do not offer. In the exoneration process, DNA evidence pressures the justice system and the public to concede that a convicted person is indeed innocent. In our reliance upon these new technologies, we marginalize the majority of the wrongfully convicted, for whom there is no DNA evidence, or those for whom the cost of DNA testing is prohibitive. Even in cases in which it was collected, DNA evidence must be handled and stored and is therefore prey to human error and corruption. Evidence does not exist in a closed system. Like photography, it cannot exist apart from its context, or outside of the modes by which it circulates.

Photography’s ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused as part of a prosecutor’s arsenal, this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences. Photographs in the criminal justice system, and elsewhere, can turn fiction into fact. As I got to know the men and women that I photographed, I saw that photography’s ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

— Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon, Hector Gonzalez, at home, Brooklyn, New York, week of his homecoming (detail), 2002. Gonzalez served 6.5 years of a 15-to-life sentence for murder.

The Innocence Movement

In 1989, Gary Dotson, who had been convicted of rape in Chicago and served eight years in prison, became the first prisoner in the United States whose conviction was overturned based on DNA evidence. In the ensuing years, post-conviction DNA testing has been used extensively to exonerate the wrongfully convicted and has provided conclusive proof that the American criminal justice system sometimes fails and mistakenly convicts innocent people. In states that employ capital punishment, wrongful convictions can have grave consequences. While only approximately 20% of all serious criminal cases involve biological evidence that could be used to convict or exclude a suspect, post conviction DNA testing has roused political action, and has raised awareness in factors such as mistaken eyewitness identification, racial bias, incompetent legal counsel and police and prosecutorial misconduct, all of which can lead to wrongful convictions.

The Death Penalty in Illinois:
Recent Developments

Between 1977, when the death penalty was reinstated in the US after a five-year moratorium, and 2000, Illinois executed twelve Death Row inmates. During that same period, the state also freed thirteen Death Row inmates who were ultimately found innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted. In 1998, the Northwestern University School of Law hosted a national conference on wrongful convictions that brought together twenty-eight former prisoners from across the US — some who had come within hours of execution — who had been sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit. The conference was the brainchild of Northwestern Law Professor Lawrence C. Marshall, who had recently won three separate high-profile cases proving the innocence of Rolando Cruz, Gary Gauger and Willie Rainge, each of whom had been wrongly convicted of murder. The national media extensively covered the conference, raising public awareness of the innocence issue, especially in death penalty cases. Following the conference, in 1999, Northwestern founded the Center on Wrongful Convictions to identify and rectify wrongful convictions and other serious miscarriages of justice.

That same year, the Chicago Tribune published several articles exposing serious problems in the criminal justice system that affected scores of Illinois capital cases. Aware of the mounting evidence, in 2000 Illinois Governor George Ryan, who had been a staunch supporter of capital punishment, suspended the use of the death penalty until he said that he could be certain that no innocent person would face execution in Illinois. Illinois became the first state with a moratorium on state executions and a focus of international attention on the issue of death penalty reform. In 2003 Ryan commuted the sentences of all of Illinois’ 156 death row inmates to life in prison and issued a comprehensive list of suggested reforms. He stated that, “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die...” He further claimed that the innocence issue “is shaping up to be one of the great civil rights struggles of our time.” Ryan was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in death penalty reform.

Taryn Simon, Tim Durham Skeet shooting, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 11 alibi witnesses placed Durham at a skeet-shooting competition at the time of the crime, Served 3.5 years of a 3,220 year sentence for Rape and Robbery, 2002, Chromogenic print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Edition of 5, © Taryn Simon.