Early yesterday, Miguel Solorio, a 44-year-old man, who had spend unnecessarily 25 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, finally got justice. As informed by ABC7, Los Angeles County prosecutors concurred with Solorio's wrongful conviction for a fatal drive-by shooting in Whittier, leading Superior Court Judge William Ryan to reverse his conviction and order his release.
Interestingly, prior to the media coverage of Solorio's case, four eyewitnesses presented with his photo failed to identify him as the suspect. Some identified a different individual. Despite this, law enforcement officials persisted in showing the witnesses Solorio's photo until some eventually identified him, according to ABC7. Sarah Pace, an attorney with the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, referred this incident as "a tragic instance of law enforcement officials becoming fixated on a single suspect".
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office confirmed in a letter, reported by Fox LA, in 2020 a new scientific consensus arose that "a witness's memory for a suspect should be tested only once, as even the test itself affects the witness's memory".
