Tony was sentenced to death under a flawed system:
Tony was convicted solely on the basis of tainted and suggestive identification procedures, intentionally tilted to cause him to be identified. The only witnesses against him were found by a police canvas of the neighborhood using a single photo of Tony (not even a photo line-up), followed by group photos containing the same single photo that they had previously been shown. These were not legitimate identification procedures, but rather procedures in which the witnesses were told who it was the police wanted them to pick out. Eyewitness identification of a person previously unknown to the witness (stranger on stranger ID) is the most highly suspect category of evidence. The defense was not allowed to present its expert on the unreliability of certain eyewitness identification at trial. To this day, the defense has never been allowed to see the entire police investigation file.