A Suggestive Lineup Leads to a Misidentification

On November 2, 1987, a woman received three anonymous calls at her home and one at the restaurant where she worked. Answering the fourth call to the restaurant around 7:15 p.m. a  male voice on the phone told her there was a bomb in the restaurant that was going to explode at 7:30 p.m. The woman cleared the premises and then called the police who did not find a bomb.

At 1:15 a.m. the woman arrived home and, as she unlocked the door, felt a gun to her head. A man pushed her into her house, took $120 from her purse and raped her. After the attack, the survivor called police, who took her to Ada Hospital, where they collected a rape kit. At the hospital, the survivor, who is white, described her attacker as a Black male between 5’ 7” and 6′ 2” with a front partial gold tooth. The survivor couldn’t determine his hair length or body size because he was wearing a cap and a jacket, and, by her own admission, she was “not a good character judge” of physical build and was “a poor judge” of height. 

Following the attack on Nov. 4, while filming a Crime Stoppers reenactment video about the crime near the survivor’s home, Detectives Mike Baskin and Jeff Crosby noticed “a Black guy parked on 15th Street.” Detective Crosby approached the car, spoke with the man — who was later identified as Mr. Lott — and noted he had a gold tooth. When questioned about his whereabouts during the crime, Mr. Lott explained that he had been with his fiancée the night before, from 3:30 p.m. until 6:30 a.m. the next morning when he left for work. His fiancée confirmed his story. She also made clear that Mr. Lott, who did not have a phone at his own residence, did not make any calls on the day of the crime.

The next day, Mr. Lott agreed to join detectives at the Ada police station for further questioning and was placed in a lineup. None of the other men in the lineup had gold teeth but were given gold foil from a local flower shop to cover their teeth as a means of simulating the partial gold tooth described by the survivor. As a result, Mr. Lott was the only one in the lineup who could fully open his mouth because he did not have gold foil on his teeth. After about thirty minutes, the survivor identified Mr. Lott as her attacker, and police arrested him. Intentionally suggestive witness identifications like this one occur twice as frequently in the cases of Black and Latinx exonerees as they do in the cases of white exonerees, according to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE).

In 2014, the survivor would tell an investigator that she was scared to pick the wrong man in the lineup and nothing specific made her choose Mr. Lott as the attacker. 

Eyewitness misidentification is the leading contributing factor of wrongful convictions and has contributed to 64% of the Innocence Project’s 245 exonerations and releases. And cross racial identification, as in this case, is particularly challenging. The NRE’s report on Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States 2022 found that 60% of sexual assault exonerees are Black, but less than a quarter of people in prison for sexual assault are Black. This suggests that Black people are almost 8 times more likely than white people to be falsely identified and convicted of sexual assault.

At trial, the State’s case rested entirely on the survivor’s identification of Mr. Lott as the perpetrator, despite a number of inconsistencies. The survivor described the perpetrator as clean-shaven, but Mr. Lott had a mustache. Police also acknowledged that he was the only person in the line-up without gold foil on his teeth. Regardless of Mr. Lott’s alibi, after one day, the jury convicted him of first-degree rape, second-degree burglary, and other related charges. He was sentenced to a term of 100 years. Mr. Lott unsuccessfully appealed his conviction.