Mary Stephens

In May of 2000, Mary Stephens was shot to death while on in Jacksonville, Florida in what was presumed to be a robbery attempt. With her at the time was her husband, James Stephens who was the sole eyewitness to the crime. He gave a description of the assailant to the first uniformed officer on the scene. This description would later be repeated in court as follows: Black male, shorts that went down to the knees, a dark shirt with no logo, and hat with "narrow brim". Mr Stephens also testified that the assalient told his wife to give him her pocketbook. Within a few hours of the crime 15 year old Brenton Butler was spotted walking down the street and stopped by a police officer because he was a match for the description given by James Stephens. Butler willingly answered questions from detectives and got into a police car. Butler was then identified by Mr. Stephens and subsequently arrested and charged. Immediately there were problems with both how the identification was obtained and the testimony of the witness. For starters, Butler was not identified out of a line up, but rather a show up identification. One of Butler's lawyers, noted that the description match many men in Florida and Butler could have possibly just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This leads to the issue of race. Stephens is white while Bulter is black.

Experiment 1 showed that in the case where there was a weapon, subjects were more likley to look at the weapon then the assailant. This helps contradict Stephens' testimony that he was looking at the assalient's fact the entire time. Supplementing this is the results of the lineup. Both experiments show that even without a weapon present subjects had a very difficult time identifying the suspect. The highest persentage of correct answers in either experiment was just 38.9%. In the case of a weapon it was an abysmal