Did you ever wonder about "eyewitness identifications" when court cases are being discussed in the media. I've had a nagging worry stuck in the very back of my mind for a long time. What happens if an "eyewitness" identifies you as being the person that committed a crime, even though you didn't, and you can't adequately provide an alibi.
An event that happened when I was 19 started this train of thought that has wandered in and out of my "things to worry about" lobe and a recent event has once again planted it firmly at the top of my brain matter holding list.
The worry centers mostly around the situation of someone sees a crime committed and the person actually committing the crime resembles you enough that the description and police artist sketch are a pretty good match. Some time passes and you are identified as the suspect based on the witness description and you can't provide an alibi... could you absolutely prove where you were at at 8pm on December 11, 2008?
Mistakes in identification are very possible. When I was 19, the submarine I was assigned to visited Esquimalt, Canada. It's a quaint little town nestled on the western coast. I was sitting in a bar, peacefully drinking an adult beverage of my choosing when all the sudden there is a lady pounding on my back. Having attacted my attention and aroused my curiosity as to the reasons for this assault, I turned around. A very surprised look came to her face and she started apologizing profusely.
It turns out that from 20 or so feet across a semi-dark bar, I looked exactly like her boyfriend..who was supposed to be at sea on a fishing vessel. Upon discovering "him" drinking in a bar she expressed her displeasure about his apparent lying by attacking "him" which turned out to be me.
Presuming that one should be able to identify resonably well someone that could be labeled "boyfriend"...the idea that she could mistake me for him at a distance of 20 feet (in less than favorable lighting conditions, true) means we must have looked a lot alike.
Now we come to the moron that killed 8 people in a nursing home in North Carolina. I found a picture of him, in the on-line Honolulu Advertiser of all places, that disturbs me a bit. While I don't think he looks exactly like me (I think my eyes are much kinder), he does enough that someone catching a look at him while trying to find cover to keep from getting shot, would no doubt have provided a description that would have matched me, and if confronted with my face in a police line-up could have easily been convinced I was the person they saw at the shooting.
This is even a bit more disturbing when you consider my current life. There are sometimes periods of 3 or 4 days when I absolutely cannot prove where I was. When Cyrilee travels I often drop her at the airport on Monday and retreat to the hill with no in person contact with anyone until I pick her up on Friday.
Anyway you decide... seperated at birth?...
LOL Loopt is the answer. Loopt updates every six hours will show your location.
ReplyDeleteYour eyes are kinder.
I wonder if LoopT has been used to prove a person's location for good or ill to that person.
ReplyDeleteSeems that I remember a story about Twitter, a reporter in another country was being arrested and his tweet started efforts to locate and free him.
I have thought about using LoopT to "mark" things so I can refind them later...but haven't needed to do so in the 4 days or so since I figured it out.
I know exactly what you mean -- I had a similar situation in the spring of 1995. I was in Virginia, about to return to Italy on a major communications install/upgrade project.
ReplyDeleteI was booked to fly Norfolk/JFK/Rome and drive a rental car to Naples, carrying close to $400k of electronics in my luggage.
Due to wear and damage, I had also gotten a brand new passport issued while I was stateside.
Nothing suspicious or illegal about that... under normal circumstances.
When the police sketches of "suspect #2" (who turned out to be Timothy McVeigh) were nationally publicized, they looked enough like me that I started getting phone calls from friends and wisecracks from colleagues at the lab.
While I was in my boss's office, one of my coworkers said, "Dude, you're gonna get arrested and beat down in New York. I wonder if you'll even make it to jail alive, Mr. Biggest-mass-murderer-in-American-history-fleeing-the-country!"
My chain of command got so paranoid that they established a strict communication schedule for me until my safe arrival in Naples. If I missed a scheduled phone-in time by an hour, they were going to start calling the authorities to locate me.
They even had me starting to sweat the trip a little bit.
Fortunately, McVeigh was arrested about 36 hours before my departure. {collective sigh of relief}
(And yes, your eyes have a permanent mischievous smile in them. His look mean.)
Figures that your Doppleganger would turn out to be accused of an heinous crime...
ReplyDeleteAnd I dunno about the "kind, smiling eyes" stuff, big, hairy dude. Are you the guy in the top picture or the lower?