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As Johnson handed him an expired driver's license, Smally, then an officer-in-training, noticed that Johnson had a chrome bar in his car. He asked Johnson to get out and stand near the curb while he inspected the Fiat's interior for a weapon. The metal bar turned out to be a ratchet wrench.
Meanwhile, Berry heard a call go out on the radio scanner: San Pablo police were looking for an African-American rape suspect driving a small, white car. Berry looked up at the vehicle stopped in front of him and called the San Pablo police immediately. Berry waited until Smally had inspected the car for a weapon, and then told the police trainee about the turn of events. By that time, another Richmond police officer had arrived on the scene as backup, and two officers stood watch over Johnson as they waited for the San Pablo police to arrive.
After several minutes had passed, Johnson asked the cops why they were still holding him. "[The police] said, 'We just got a call over the radio, and your car and you fit the description of a [rape] that just took place,'" Johnson says. "And I'm like, 'What?' And so that's how it all began."
The San Pablo police were just about to take Sharon G. to the hospital for a victim's exam, but the officer assigned to the case, David Krastof, decided to drive her to the intersection where Johnson stood near his parked Fiat for what police call a "show-up identification." Research reveals that show-ups are a "problematic procedure," as Iowa State University's Gary Wells, a leading expert on eyewitness identification, puts it, but officers use them when they don't have probable cause to hold a suspect but don't want to let a potential criminal go free.
About six minutes later, Krastof arrived in a patrol car with Sharon G. He reminded her that the person she would see might not be the perpetrator, and then asked her to look carefully at Johnson as he stood next to his car. Studying Johnson as the patrol car drove by, Sharon G. told Krastof that she was certain Johnson was her rapist. She also said Johnson's car was the one she was raped in (she described it in court as looking like a "Datsun five-speed"). Satisfied with the strong identification, Krastof drove away without coming to a complete stop.
Johnson was arrested immediately and taken to the San Pablo Police Department, where he was booked, and then to a nearby hospital so police could get a DNA sample from him for comparison with the rape kit. (Despite Johnson's repeated requests for this test, it was never performed; the rape kit was destroyed before any comparison could be made.) The next morning, Johnson refused to give a statement, and kept asking for an attorney.
Johnson would become the only suspect in the Sharon G. rape case. Two months later, he had been charged with the crime, and after a four-day trial in November 1992, he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in state prison.
Word of the arrest had spread quickly within the police department, and on the day Johnson was detained, it had suddenly occurred to a Richmond detective that Johnson might be the culprit in an unsolved rape case from December 1991.
In that incident, Johanna V. had been jogging at the Richmond High School track one morning when an African-American man walked up to her and asked if they could talk. She said no, but the stranger told her he would shoot her if she didn't stop. The assailant made Johanna V. walk to an area behind a nearby building, where he raped her and forced her to perform oral sex. Afterward, the rapist made Johanna V. give him her watch and a gold chain, and they walked back to the track, where he talked about sports and how he was angry with his ex-girlfriend. After half an hour, the rapist told Johanna V. to leave. When she got home, her brother called the police.
Joe Curtin, the Richmond police detective investigating the case -- who has known Johnson since childhood -- had been unable to find a suspect in the Johanna V. case until Johnson entered the scene in the San Pablo arrest. He said during grand jury hearings that it "never occurred" to him to investigate Johnson until then. Curtin put Johnson's photo into a lineup and brought Johanna V. back into the station to review it.
Curtin conducted the lineup in the worst way possible, Innocence Project researchers say. According to the grand jury transcripts, he made suggestive comments about Johnson's photo before and after the procedure, remarking to Johanna V. that he thought they had caught her rapist. He encouraged her to pick out Johnson's photo, even though she told him that Johnson's height and skin color did not match her assailant's. (Police reports not introduced at trial show that Johanna V. had described the rapist as a clean-shaven, dark-skinned black man between 6 feet 2 inches and 6 feet 4 inches tall. At the time, Johnson sported a visible mustache, was often described as light-skinned, and stood about 5 feet 10 inches.)
According to Johnson's Innocence Project attorneys, Curtin misinformed Johanna V. in several ways. Among them, he told her that Johnson was lighter-skinned and bulkier than she remembered because he had been in prison, where he didn't get much sun and had been working out. (In fact, Johnson had never been incarcerated before.) After Johanna V. hesitatingly picked out Johnson's picture from the lineup, Curtin told her that she had picked the photo of the man they were holding in custody.
Johanna V. later told Innocence Project attorneys that she felt pressured by police to select Johnson's photo. "We feel very strongly that the police used suggestive ID procedures in the [Johanna V.] case," says Nicole Herron of the Northern California Innocence Project, in an e-mail. "They felt that they had their guy, and they ignored significant discrepancies between the victim's initial description and Albert's actual profile." (A Richmond Police spokesman declined to comment because he was not familiar with the case.)
