No, not showing up to adjourn a case when the real attorney can’t make it, but line-up fillers. They have to come from someplace, you know.  The  New York Times profiles Robert Weston, who has been the go-to guy for fillers in the Bronx for 15 years.

But for all the attention that lineups attract in legal circles, Mr. Weston’s role in finding lineup fillers is largely unknown. Few defense lawyers and prosecutors, though they spar over the admissibility of lineups in court, have heard of him.

Mr. Weston says he is always on call; his Bluetooth earpiece comes off in public only when he goes to the barber for his weekly $16 trim. His cellphone, he says, holds the numbers of some 100 potential lineup fillers, mostly friends and acquaintances from the Mill Brook Houses, the public housing project in the South Bronx where he has lived most of his life.

He often complains about how people hound him for the chance to make a few dollars through lineup work.

This is the first I’ve ever heard of him, though it makes perfect sense that there’s a cottage industry in being a line-up filler, along with blood and sperm donor.  Weston gets paid $10 per line-up, and each filler he produces gets $10.  Weston puts himself in the mix whenever possible, which allows him to buy an extra nip afterward.

Did you think this was rocket science?  Of course, fillers need not be perfect matches, and can vary by a few shades of color or a few hundred pounds.  It’s not like anybody picks out the perp based on his actual appearance anyway, as long as you can get past the Wade hearing.

While Weston is used because he’ll always answer the phone, his ability to produce passable fillers isn’t always reliable.

But detectives are not always satisfied.

“Every time I call him and I tell him I need light-skin Hispanic of that description, he always brings dark-skin,” a Bronx homicide detective, Luke Waters, testified earlier this year, according to a court transcript. “He wants to make money as quick as he can, and when he brings them in I don’t like them.”

Detectives said that colleagues sometimes had to remind Mr. Weston that as a middle-aged black man, he could not sit in a lineup for a light-skinned Hispanic man or a much younger suspect.

But for Weston, this isn’t about making sure a defendant has as fair a line-up as possible, or that the cops can sneak it through the court.  It’s about the $10. Really, what is our legal system if not an opportunity for the entrepreneurial?

While the Times’ article is interesting as background in how sausage is made, there’s a part that strikes a bit too close to home:

And lineup participants in the Bronx typically wear a knit cap or a Yankees cap so that hairstyles are hidden. But here, the detectives say, they have to be careful: the suspect may pull the cap down over the brow, a gesture that could suggest that this person has something to hide.

“If we didn’t help them, the perp is the guy with the skully over his eyes, every time,” the detective said.

In other words, IDs aren’t based on anything real, like a victim or witness who can actually recall the details of a person’s face sufficiently to pick them out of a legitimate line-up.  Come on, that’s kids stuff, the sort of story we tell juries to make them all emotional and confident that they’ve convicted the right guy. 

But you will never hear the detective say those words on the witness stand, that the tilt of a “skully” over the eyes is enough to cause a witness to ID the wrong guy every time.  That would never do, as it leaves the entire concept of eyewitness identification in doubt. Without it, no one would ever be convicted, and what would happen to all those prison guard jobs?

Old school line-ups are such an inherent part of criminal law culture that new studies demonstrating how worthless they are, and how much better double-blind sequential identifications are, meet enormous resistance.  Even so, there is no testimony more powerful than an alleged victim of a crime looking over the rail of the witness box, straight at the defendant, and exclaim in a loud, clear voice, “I will never forget that face. He did it.”

It’s a shame that the testimony is so often wrong.  But at least a bunch of guys from the projects for paid to make sure the witness had ample opportunity to study the face of the bad guy after the crime, when all she could remember was his skin color and that he worse a green sweatshirt, so that she could believe as she sat before the jury that her testimony was true.

And the fillers walk out with $10 in their hands, hoping Weston will get another call and they can go get another dime bag to make it through the night.  It’s a sweet deal if you can get it.

H/T Ed at Blawg Review