Summary to be provided by Steve
Who Should Stand Next to the Suspect? Problems in the Assessment of Lineup Fairness
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To someone who was not familiar with the process of using lineups, the idea of lineup fairness and organization probably wouldn’t jump to their mind. You would think a lineup would be a lineup, and if they pick the suspect out of it, then it’s considered a positive identification. They may take the other foils in the lineup under consideration, as obviously if one person stands out when compared to the others, there’s a greater chance of that person being selected. But the idea of how the members of the lineup are arranged would probably never cross their mind. The authors of this study cite a suggestive lineup that occurred in 1968 when attempting to identify a suspect in the robbery of an office in California. Those that put the lineup together used only two foils, both of whom were six inches shorter than the suspect. This sort of context, especially when the description of the subject included the word “tall”, made for a very obvious selection. Gonzalez et al’s study focusing on the context of the lineup and its effects on the fairness shows that adjusting those foils that are surrounding the suspect can cause a dramatic effect on the identification rate of the suspect. The authors also cited another study which they conducted that involved forty-four detectives. All of the detectives said they attempted to match skin color, eye color, and other physical characteristics when composing a photo lineup, but only thirteen of the forty-four said they check for “contextual fairness”, including features such as background color and age of photograph. This obviously presents a problem, as shown in this study and others. Another variable looked at in this study was the sort of verbal description given of the subject. Subjects were either presented with a low diagnostic description, which was very general, and a high diagnostic description, which provided no only the general description but some more specific details, such as “full lips” and “rounded chin”. They found that the high diagnostic description helped individuals to identify the suspect more consistently, and seemed to diminish the arrangement context effect. When being presented a lineup, witnesses cannot be fed more specific descriptions than the ones that were generated, as that would lead them to identify a suspect based on the physical description instead of their memory. So while it alleviates the arrangement effect, providing a more detailed description doesn’t seem (to me) to be easily directly applicable to current lineup situations.
SB
Lineup construction is an interesting topic, and before this class I knew little about it. This article expanded on my knowledge of eyewitness identification and also confirmed gained knowledge on the topic.
The article talked about how the context of a lineup must be fair in order to present a good lineup. According to Doob and Kirshenbaum (1973), a fair lineup is one in which all individuals in the lineup match the verbal description of the perpetrator. Matching up lineup photos is more difficult than just matching up a few facial characteristics.
Contextual fairness needs to be taken into consideration too by making sure all photos show individuals of similar age, physical appearance, height, clothing, race, etc. Contextual fairness also means having the same number of photos in each lineup. Context such as these can have a profound effect on those choosing from the lineup because it can make the perpetrator standout over the other fillers.
The article also talked about how verbal description of the perpetrator can affect fairness too. If the diagnostic description given to a mock individual is detailed, it protects the instability cause by the order of the photos.
Many new terms were brought to my attention in this article such as “Functional size” which was explained as the “reciprocal of the proportion of mock witnesses who pick the suspect”. A high functional size was said to indicate that the investigator set up a good lineup because the foils resemble the target. However, this can be affected by other variables such as order of the lineup. The “diagnosticity” of verbal descriptions is how easily mock individuals select the perpetrator based on the verbal descriptions alone.
I found it interesting that although detectives want to do their jobs correctly by creating a fair lineup, they do not follow a specific method and many times they rely on other detectives and defense attorney’s intuitions on if it is a fair lineup or not. I found this shocking, as I feel that police need to have some sort of training so that they learn to be confident in making good/fair lineups while considering contextual issues as well verbal descriptions. I feel that the topic of lineup construction should be made a priority to all police officers because they often construct lineups and could benefit from the awareness and training.
SD