Larry Youngblood Incident

At the age of 32 in 1985, Larry Youngblood, a middle aged black man was convicted of child molestation, sexual assault, and kidnapping David Leon a 10 year old boy. On October 29 1983, David Leon had snuck out of church and went to a carnival that was being held in the parking lot of the church. There a black man with a right disfigured eye, had asked David if he would be able to help him transport something out of his car for $5. David, knowing that he shouldn't be getting into strangers cars had declined the strange man's offer, but the man was persistent and David eventually followed him to his vehicle. David was then thrown into the vehicle raped twice and taken to a random house where he was sodomized repeatedly. David was later on dropped

(2006) David identified “his assailant as a black man named Damian or Carl who had greasy grey hair, facial hair, no facial scars, and whose right eye, to David’s best recollection, was almost completely white.” David also said “that his assailant wore brown leather or plastic loafers”. Youngblood was in his thirties he had “dry black hair, a scar on his forehead and a bad left eye.”. The sketch would be seen as a unreliable because the sketch did not show a noticeable scar that Youngblood had on his forehead. Youngblood also walked with a limp due to a childhood injury and David never mentioned this to authorities about his assailant. The clothes collected from David were also unreliable because they were never preserved which caused the semen what was on his clothes unable to identify the blood type of the assailant. The police department waited nine days to create a photoline for David to see which could of distorted his memory of the perpetrator. David's testimony is unreliable because he had described the car to authorities as a two door van with a loud radio and country music was playing. Youngbloods car is a four door van and hasn't been driven in six weeks due to electrical

Detectives emphasized to David that the assailant may or may not be in the photo line up. Detectives also "told him they had arrested the man who raped him, and asked him to pick the assailant out of a photographic lineup." David then picked Larry Youngblood as his assailant out of the photo line up. Although the photo lineup that David was given was reliable many other parts of this case were not. When evidence is collected it should be preserved so that it may be used if needed in the future. Also if a witness feels that the sketch is not exactly what the witness sees in their mind they should tell the sketch artist to fix it so that it does look like the person they have in mind. Larry Youngblood was one of the lucky ones and was exonerated with advanced technology allowing them to test the semen samples found in the clothing of David (Innocence Project