Unbelievable!

There are some things you just don't imagine you will see. Yesterday, coming home from the dentist at about 4:40 in the afternoon with my son driving, we stopped at a red light at an intersection in the northwest part of town (Marks and Herndon). We were in the left lane, with 2 lanes of left turners next to us. My son and I tease around alot, so when he said that the person in the car next to us was doing some kind of drugs, I thought he was kidding. Then I looked. Being the goody-two-shoes who has never done anything like that or been exposed to it, I can't tell you exactly what we saw, but the driver of this car was putting something in some kind of drug paraphernalia and smoking it! I have no idea what it was....meth? crack? I dunno.

I was so stunned to see that in my part of town, in the middle of the day, out in the open, by someone who was driving, I didn't even know what to do. She turned left when her light turned green. Later I kicked myself for not getting her license plate number and calling it in to police. All I could remember was that it was an older dark blue Honda with a white female with long brown hair driving it.

I thought it interesting how last night's Crim Pro last tied in with this experience. The professor came in for a couple minutes, set his stuff down, went out to get his roll sheet, came back in, and left to get a soda, but before he left the second time, he gave a stack of papers to someone and asked them to distribute them and have us fill it out. On there we were to provide: the color of his shirt, his tie, his suit, his hair, etc. I wasn't paying that close attention, but did get most of it right.

The class was about suspect identification and the issues it raises. Both the class experiment and my experience earlier in the afternoon showed me that I myself don't pay that much attention to details, and really, most witnesses don't either. There will probably always be discrepancies in descriptions because no 2 people will have the same motivations to remember things nor place the same importance on what is worth remembering.

Interesting, and really proved the professor's point that if all you have is the witness's identification, you are probably out of luck.