Anyone who has seen the moving video of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino has to know the pain a victim must feel when it's revealed that the victim's mis-identification of the assailant has led to a wrongful conviction. In the case of Larry Youngblood--which has become a tragic precedent leading to an even greater number of wrongful convictions--the young victim actually committed suicide after learning that the wrong man had spent more than a decade in prison.
Unfortunately, authorities who, it might be argued, are most culpable for a wrongful conviction, sometimes simply brush off its tragic results. I've written before about the case of Timothy Cole. In 1999, Cole died after spending 13 years in a Texas prison for a rape he didn't commit. He was recently exonerated by DNA.
Your heart has to go out to Michele Mallin, the rape victim. Here's how the Lubbock Online describes her involvement in the conviction and the callused rationalization given her by Lubbock authorities:
Much of the prosecution's case against Cole relied on his identification by Michele Mallin, the victim. She had returned, again and again over the last year, to a crime she had long ago put behind her. Mallin remembered focusing in the hours she spent in the dark car parked in an empty, remote field on how she must, must remember the man's face so that he would go to jail and not attack anyone else. "I've gone over my head a million times, 'How could I have misidentified him?'" she said days before the hearing. "That's all I remember thinking, because that's what's going to get this guy in prison, if I can identify him." But the photo and in-person line-ups that led to Mallin choosing Cole may have improperly encouraged her to choose him, testimony showed. Mallin described her shock last spring to learn from one of the original investigators on the case that police had had another suspect, that Cole had died in prison from an asthma attack, and that he had not raped her. She began to cry, alone in her home, overwhelmed with guilt as investigator George White gave her the news, she testified. "'You shouldn't feel bad about this, Michele,'" she said White told her. "'[Cole] let himself be in that lineup.'"
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