By Thursday of every week, you should have completed the activities associated with 1 project. You should blog about your experience as a comment to the blog posting of that particular project. Your blog comment can be largely experiential--tell us what it was like to do the project and what you learned. Products associated with the project and a more detailed analysis of the project will go in your portfolio (see the Portfolio blog post).
Project #8 - Construct a Lineup
Construct a lineup using federal guidelines and conduct a mock witness evaluation (information about both is available on the blog). Comment about your experience. Include all documentation, analyses, etc, in your portfolio.
Read about lineup fairness here: http://eyewitness.utep.edu/consult04A.html
Read about evaluating lineups here: http://eyewitness.utep.edu/consult05B.html
Go here for photos: http://www.dc.state.fl.us/AppCommon/
Choose a guy (search on some characteristics, or a name).
Then find fillers to match
Copy and paste into a word document
Print.
Show to friends (at least 10), collect data
Calculate lineup bias: http://eyewitness.utep.edu/documents/bias-calc.xls
I conducted a mock witness evaluation on a suspect lineup. It was very interesting to find out the results of my lineup. I had 20 people as my mock witnesses which were to look at the description of the suspects features and pick him out from a lineup. The lineup was constructed of 6 random men who were around the same age, height, weight, and looked similar.
The features that I included were:
-Black male
-Middle 50's
-Between 150-200lbs.
-Between 5'8"-6'2"
-Round face
-Squinted eyes
-Bald/Shaved head
-Big nose
All of the men except one had shaved/bald heads. I was surprised to see that out of my 20 mock witnesses 4 of them still chose the man who had hair.
Of all 20 mock witnesses only 7 of them correctly identified the suspect. The next highest person that was chosen to be the suspect, but was incorrect, had 5 people choose this man.
I thought this activity was very eye opening to the legal affects of correctly identifying the suspect, and what happens to the other people in the lineup who may be wrongly convicted because they have similar features to the perpetrator/suspect.
My results from the mock witnesses showed that my critical ratio for different from chance was 1.719 which should be at least 1.96 for beyond a chance probability of .05 to reveal bias. For beyond a chance probability for .01 it should have been higher than 2.58 for the mock witnesses to reveal bias.
This shows me that my lineup does not have bias, and the mock witnesses did not show bias when choosing the correct suspect.
I conducted a line up of six people. These six people were taken from the Florida database. I tried my best to find people that looked somewhat similar, but yet not too similar. I was very interested with the "chin out" theory talked about in class, so I decided to make the guilty woman the one with her chin sticking out, and with that tough look on her facec. The people that picked her (9 out of 20) all said she simply "looked guilty."
The following are the characters I told people before askin them to identify the person they thought was guilty:
African American woman
Short black hair
Round face
Light to medium skin color
Upper teens to mid 20s
Weight 120-150 lbs
My data results were as follows:
Suspect 1 - 0
Suspect 2 - 9
Suspect 3 - 5
Suspect 4 - 1
Suspect 5 - 4
Suspect 6 - 0
I was surprised at how many people actually did vote for the woman with her chin sticking out. The other two suspected were voted for because they basically fit all the critera listed above too.
I would like to focus on the psychological aspect of what makes a person look guilty. I found that the suspect with a pleasant look on her face was voted for only once. The other three that were voted for all looked like they had some sort of attitude in their photos. First impressions are formed very quickly in the human mind. All I know is that if I've ever arrested, my mug shot will be smiling :)
I actually felt like this project would be much more difficult than it really was. It was easy to assemble a lineup using the website, because you can search by various description factors, which makes it a lot easier to make a difficult lineup. The most difficult things are trying to make a lineup that I feel was too hard. However, I did do my own little experiment. I added one trait into one version of the lineup, and not in another, and then compared the results. The adding of that trait made it much more likely that 2 of the 6 suspects would be picked. On the version without that trait, the distribution was fairly even. It was a pretty neat project.
Here were my two descriptions:
White male.
Short hair, dark hair.
Between 5’11’’ and 6’3’’
150-180lbs
No facial hair
Goofy Ears (This was the variable between the versions)
I chose a black female with long brown hair in dreadlocks as my suspect. This was a good exercise for really beginning to understand just how many variables really do need to be accoutned for in order to get a lineup that won't be radically skewed in favor of one of the pictures.
After realizing I needed to limit the pictures I looked at to people from the same correctional facility to get similar lighting, frame proportions, camera angle, etc., I put together a list of 12 photos knowing I'd eventually eliminate half of them. Even though I had a firm picture in mind (and could go back to it whenever necessary) a few of the 12 that I picked, upon a second look when constructing the lineup, looked almost nothing like the girl.
Moving from picture to picture you first look for one or two characteristics as definitive for that person. Then after a while your photo's slowly turn to be representative of that characteristic (e.g. just hair length, or just corn-rows/dreadlocks) inadvertantly ignoring darkness or complexion, weight, general "evil-looking-ness" of the person, etc. If you aren't very careful you will slowly get more and more away from the target.
I'm very interested to finish calculating the results after all my participants have finished veiwing the lineup. I'm trying to get some with no description and some with the description listed in the original perp's data sheet from the website including the "has long dreadlike style hair" descriptor.
I thought this project was a lot of fun! The only challenging part about it was finding six people to have the same facial characteristics or at least very similar to make sure there were no bias photos. I carefully selected six different men from the Florida database. These six men were all:
White Male
20-25 years in age
140-155 pounds
5'11-6'1 for height
shaved head
Slender Face
Bulging ears
I will be showing these photo lineups to 10 different mock witnesses and see what kind of results I get. There are three men in my photo line up that have some strong similarities. I purposely put them in three different corners of my paper line up so that my mock witnesses will look at them individually and not get confused on look a likes.
I conducted a mock lineup of six individuals. The first thing I did when I got onto the Florida database was search white males that had been charged with murder. This search led me to a man named James C. Acker who had been convicted of murder. Using his information I was able to find five other white males in which to build my line up.
These were characteristics I shared:
Description:
- White Male
- Mid to Late 40’s
- Brown eyes
- Hair bald/shaved
- Round face
- Wanted for murder
- Height: 6’1”
- Weight: approx 220-240
The data was as follows: Suspect 1 – 3, Suspect 2 – 7, Suspect 3 – 3, Suspect 4 – 2, Suspect 5 – 0, Suspect 6 – 0. When I had asked the people in interviewed why they had not picked suspect 5 or 6 they had said that the suspects looked too old to fit the description. When I asked why Suspect 2 had been picked the most, it was because they said he looked the most threatening out of the group. Some of the components of psychology that really played into effect here was the threatening face of Suspect 2 and the older looking traits of Suspects 5 and 6.
All in all, my Exact Probability of my results was .24 with a critical ratio of .323. If I’m interpreting my data right that means, there is less than a 5% chance of my data being biased by more than a 1% chance of my data being biased. If I interviewed more people, I think my results might have shown more biasedness in Suspect 2.
I learned a lot from this project. It was really interesting to put together my own lineup and try to create the best one possible. It is always really easy for people to question the validity of other people's lineups but when I had to create my own I realized it is somewhat difficult. The description I gave my participants were:
-White Male
-Shaved/buzzed hair
-Hazel Eyes
-Oval shaped head
-Large ears
-Around 150-160 lbs
-About 5'11-6'1''
My results were: Suspect 1: 4, Suspect 2: 3, Suspect 3: 1, Suspect 4: 3, Suspect 5: 5, and Suspect 6: 2. Overall, most people chose suspect 5 because they thought he was the most threatening. Also, suspect 1 was chose frequently because he had a confusing look on his face compared to everyone else who looked tough. I feel as if maybe my suspects looked too similar which may have caused confusion.
I found this project extremely fun! I enjoyed finding the pictures, creating a lineup and description of the suspect. I didn't have to hard of a time finding my lineup in the set of pictures but here is the describtion I gave my participants:
-white
-25-30 years old
-150-200 lbs
- 5'6-6'0
-Bald/shaved head
-Thick eyebrows
-Strong face
The results I got were surprising to me. Suspect 1: 1 suspect 2: 6, suspect 3: 11, suspect 4: 0, suspect 5: 4 and suspect 6: 1.
When they would look at the picture they were more forced on the thick eyebrows that most of the other describtion didn't matter anymore. Their ideas of some of the describtion threw some of them off. But I thought it would have been a pretty hard line-up by looking at how they all looked. But it was a fun project! suspect #2 was the right one!
I constructed a line up that consisted of 6 men. I asked 13 different people to try to correctly identify the suspect. Of these 13 people, seven correctly identified the man I described. The characteristics I used included:
Race: Hispanic
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Brown
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 170 lbs.
Other Characteristics: Fair skin, big ears and eyes, dark eyebrows.
With these characteristics given, there seemed to be two men my witnesses were drawn to. The correct suspect in the lineup was #6, but many picked #2. After telling them to re-read the characteristics, most of them failed to take into account the "fair skin" description. These two men both had the large eyes and ears, and also both had dark eyebrows. But the correct suspect, #6, had fairer skin than did guy #2, and many people ignored this characterstic.
Witnesses in an actual line up need to take into account all characteristics of a suspect. Leaving out one simple characteristic, such as skin color, can cause a false identification, and possibly put an innocent man behind bars.
Here were my results:
#1: 1
#2: 4
#3: 0
#4: 0
#5: 1
#6: 7
My lineup consisted of 6 men. These were their characteristics:
Hispanic male
20-30 years old
Between 150-200 pounds
Between 5'7"-5'10"
Short black hair
Brown eyes
No facial hair
I asked 11 people to be my mock witnesses. The results for that were:
Suspect #1: 1
Suspect #2: 4
Suspect #3: 2
Suspect #4: 2
Suspect #5: 0
Suspect #6: 2
Out of the eleven that I asked, four of them chose the correct suspect, #2. I noticed that no one picked #5 because many people thought his skin color was too "white" instead of hispanic looking. The same went for suspect #1 because he looked more black than hispanic, but one person did choose him. All of my suspects had very short, buzzed black hair and each one had similar expressions. I asked each of my witnesses that chose #2 why they chose him. They all said that he was the one that looked the most aggressive out of everyone. They also said that he was the one that had the most prominant face and he looked the most filled out, so he matched the weight requirements. I was surprised that so many people got the suspect right on the first try.
First of all, I really liked doing this project...it was probably my favorite so far! I especially liked picking people for my lineup...I always guessed what they were in prison for and looked to see if I was correct. Finding people who were similar took some time, but was also fun and interesting.
The characteristics of the perpetrator in my line up included: African American, female, big lips and nose, medium color skin, black stringy hair of medium length, 150-170 pounds, and 5'6''-5'10''
Twelve people viewed my line-up. The results were as follows:
Suspect 1: 0
Suspect 2: 2
Suspect 3: 1
Suspect 4: 1
Suspect 5: 5
Suspect 6: 3
The perpetrator I chose was suspect number 5, so 5 of my mock witnesses identified the correct perpetrator.
It was interesting listening to my friends and family debate over which suspect was the perpetrator. My dad read the descriptions and looked at the photos and said "It's all of them!" This made me realize how terrible we are at decifering facial features of races opposite us. All of my friends and family who participanted are Caucasian, so perhaps I should have stuck with a Caucasian line-up.
My lineup consisted of 6 men. The person I used to be my suspect had the following characteristics:
-White male
-Early to mid 20s
-Short brown hair
-Blue eyes
-Between 5'5" and 5'7"
-Between 140-170 lbs
-Big ears
I thought finding people for my lineup was pretty easy. The different search options definitely helps to find the characteristics you want. It was actually fun to put it together and then ask people to choose the suspect. I had 18 mock-witnesses. Here are the results:
Suspect 1: 0
Suspect 2: 3
Suspect 3: 3
Suspect 4: 5
Suspect 5: 1
Suspect 6: 6
My suspect was the 6th person. I think the reason it had the most guesses was because of the big ear characteristic, because the suspect had huge ears. The fillers also had larger ears but the suspects were bigger. I think the reason that suspect 4 received more votes than others is because he looks mean, which would make him seem guilty of the crime.
My data revealed that the critical ratio is 1.5.
My line up was six men
-White Male
-almond shaped eyes
-short black hair
-Big ears
-Large nose
-highly visible eyebrows
I still need to find a few more people to look at my line up but so far there seems to be a bias toward number 2. The suspect is in fact number one I think this my be because number 2's eyebrows are best described as comically large and are distracting people from other markers. Hopefully as I get more people it will even out.
My line up consisted of 6 men
-Black Male
-scrawny looking
-short hair
-5'6"
-135lbs -145
-18-25 yr
I picked all the ones that looked like they were 16 and innocent. It took quite a while of searching to get it done. One of the guys look like theyre crying but it is not very noticeable. When I showed some of the people this they were laughing because they said these looked like children and what kind of crime could they commit.
I did a photo lineup of 6 men. My description included: a black male in his forties, black hair but shaved bald, big brown eyes, an oval face, 5’7”, and about 215 pounds. The correct suspect was #2, but only 3 of my 10 mock witnesses chose him. Half of the suspects were bald but two of the eight still chose a man that wasn't bald. Interestingly enough, the correct suspect (who is currently on death row for 1st degree murder) was the only man that didn't look mean. I really enjoyed doing this project.
I thought this project would be a lot harder than it was. I had a lot of fun doing it and learned a lot from it. It was interesting to see who people picked out of the lineup. I showed the lineup to police officers and they did a good job of picking the same guy. There was some variation, but the majority of them did a good job of picking the same person. My description included
-a black male
-in his 20 or 30's
-bald head
-brown eyes
-big nose
-round face
-5'8
-around 200 pounds
Two of my guys you could tell was not the guy, but the other ones looked vary similar. Since the majority of the officers pick the right guy it shows that they have some good training or they are just good guessers.
I actually had a lot of fun doing this project! The lineup I constructed was based off of a male named David V. Adofson. My description was:
-white
-male
-graying
-5'8-6'1
-180-210 pounds
I have yet to show this to 10 people I know, but I'm pretty excited to because some of the suspects I included look like they would commit a crime a lot more than the actual criminal.
I had a lot of fun doing this project. The people that I interviewed were interested in the results, so that was really cool too! Most of the people I talked to picked the right guy, but a few people didn't. I had six men. My description was:
-black
-male
-20s
-facial hair
-around 180-200 pounds
-short hair
-5'8"-6'0"
Most of the guys I had in the lineup looked like my guy, but some only looked similar. Surprisingly, one of the guys that didn't really match the description was chosen. I was surprised by that, as I thought it was obvious that he was not the guy.
Doing this project was interesting. Looking up people on the Florida database was a little unsettling. Looking at their profile pictures from the state just seem so much more real than when you see the pictures releases on the internet for the tv.
After looking up the profiles I put together a set of six men. The description is as follows:
Black Male
Short hair
25-30 years of age
150-160 pounds
Overall the people outcome was decent. The outcome of my line up was spread out a little bit but the suspect did come out with the most number of people choosing him.
I constructed a lineup using the records from the Florida Correctional database. I chose a group of six men who seemed to be African American. I used the following description to describe the possible suspect:
1. Male
2. African American
3. Has lighter skin
4. Brown eyed
5. Round shaped head
6. Around 5'8-6'0
7. Short dark hair
8. Bushy eyebrows
9. Muscular build
10. Age ranged from 18-25 years old
According to this description the suspect was person number 3. After asking ten people who they thought the description described three people guessed right. No one guessed suspect number one, two, or five. Suspect number four was chosen four times and suspect number six was chosen three times. I asked the participants what helped shape their decision and what made a person pick suspect number four over supspect number three and most said that number four's eyebrows were the bushiest, but others disagreed and chose number three because suspect number four looked more Mexican than African American. What was interesting to me was hearing almost every participant say immediately that all the guys looked a lot alike and that a decision was difficult to come to. After pairing groups of men who physically look alike it is obvious that picking the right suspect can be hard to do and if chosen correctly doesn't necessarily mean there is that much facts that support the witnesse's decision other than their own personal opinion.
For my last project I constructed a lineup and am in the process of asking people to pick a suspect. I found it difficult to find 6 people in the Florida database that all looked the same; however, I eventually found 6 that I hoped looked similar enough not to bias my lineup.
I said the man had been charged with sexual assault and attempted rape and had the following characteristics:
African American male
25-25 years old
5'8'' to 6'3''
220-290 pounds
big nose with large nostrils
long oval shaped face
hardly any hair or bald
I based my pictures off trying to find men with relatively the same face shape with a big nose and large nostrils. So far in my data collection, the two guys who seem to have the most obvious oval shaped face have been picked. This may bias my results some however I am still in the process of collecting data. Nonetheless, this was a fun and informative project. By doing this, I feel it gives me a better understanding about how technical lineups need to be and how it easy it is for witnesses to identify the wrong perpetrator.
I constructed a lineup and am still asking people to choose a guy. I had a somewhat difficult time finding pictures, but eventually found 6 that would work.
Here are the characteristics:
White
Male
30-35 years old
5'8" to 6'0"
150 to 180 lbs
Brown eyes
Short brown hair
All of the fillers match this description, as well as the "suspect" obviously. So far, I've asked 7 people, and all but one of the suspects have been chosen so I feel like it's a mostly unbiased lineup. I do understand now how much work lineups are, especially if they're unbiased.
I constructed a lineup from the Florida Department of Corrections website. My description of the subject was as follows:
African American
Young looking
20-30 years old
5'7-6'0
short black hair
small build
150-175 lbs
All the people in the lineup matched the description and I am in the process of asking people to identify him... results will be in my portfolio
Due to the makeup of my National Guard unit, I decided to do this project twice with the same 10 participants. I had 5 African American and 5 Caucasian participants. I constructed two lineups with six individuals each; one being Caucasians and the other being African American. I noticed two things after I collected the data; Caucasians had more confidence as well as identified the Caucasian perpetrator more while the same was true about African Americans with their lineup counterparts. In the case of my Caucasian lineup, there were 4 suspects that received votes while the African American line up had 3.
The greatest challenge to this project is constructing a fair lineup. It's difficult to tell whether there was bias on my part until I conducted this experiment.
I found out that out of my 10 white participants only 50 % could get the suspect right. The suspect was balck between the ages of 21-29. Short hair. 150-190 pounds. 5'5" to 5'9" in height. it took people a very long time having never actually seen them but just to fit the description they said was very difficult. I do beilieve there was bias on my part due to the fact that i had to give lots of hits for people to just make a choice becasue of the fact that they were just trying to fit a face to a profile.
For my construct a line up project I picked out a white male being charged with a drug related crime, he has blue eyes, brown hair, height is between 5’7” and 5’10”, and he is also between the ages of 25 and 30. The guy a chose as the guilty one is number one in my lineup.
I asked about seven people who they thought was the guilty guy just from the details I gave them and the results varied. Two people thought it was number two, one person thought it was number five, two people thought it was number four, and only two people got it right and thought it was number one.
I asked why people chose who they chose and most people said that the guy they picked just looked guilty. And the two people who chose number four said the guy looked like a drug dealer. I asked why they didn’t pick number six and they all said he doesn’t look twenty-five, but they did say he looked like a drug dealer.
I thought this project was a cool experience because I got to see how my friends stereotyped drug dealers. I had fun doing it and I’m glad I haven’t been in a situation where I have to be put into a line up. I think it is pretty crazy that there are so many rule and regulations for lineups, but I do think it needs to be that way so it is fair. It kind of sucks that there are a lot of police stations don’t follow the regulations all of the time.
For this project I did a lineup of 3 murderers and 3 men that committed manslaughter. I found the information at the Florida database and tried to keep the characteristics the same, The race was black, male, with black hair, eye color is blue, with a height range of 5'07'' to 6' and the weight was around 180. The actual murderer is the first man on the lineup that I chose. The characteristics that I gave my witnesses were, a man with short hair, ears that protrude outward, height is around 5'7'' to 6', weight about 180 and he was african american. I also said the age was 21 to roughly 30 years old; well the fact that I said roughly 30 years old made some pick the way they did. I was actually surprised from the results that I have found. Many chose the fourth one because he pretty much fits the description, out of the ten people I had look at the lineup, 7 picked the fourth man and only 3 picked the second. I believe this occurred because I threw in a couple small details, the first man had hair but he had it shaved when he went to prison, and also he was put with men who were darker skinned than himself and thus this threw the whole lineup off. I also said roughly 30, well most of the men are somewhat young looking compared to the fourth whose facial features are older than the others. People would look at the key point, man is african american with short hair, well the actual murderer is shaved and is not as dark so no one would think to look at him. When I asked them why they didn't pick the first man, most of them told me it was because he was somewhat white and others said he was wearing an orange shirt, maybe to throw us off and make us choose him. The fifth candidate wasn't chosen because he was also white, even though he fits most of all the characteristics. This just goes to show you that a lineup is pretty much useless I think. To recall one's memory of how another man looked and to pick them out of 6 men is something of a challenge for us. My final data, Suspect 1-0, Suspect 2-3, Suspect 3-0, Suspect 4-7, Suspect 5-0, Suspect 6-0. So 100 percent of the witnesses chose the wrong person. Maybe I could have made this easier in a sense of putting men who are lighter colored in the lineup, but it just goes to show you how people think differently on what african american really is, there are light and dark colored african americans, most people only see the dark colored though.
I really enjoyed this project! It was fun, as well as difficult, to find my fillers. I threw out two line-ups before I chose one that I believed to be fair. I experimented a lot with the descriptions I gave. However, my line-up was still not reliable. Or, possibly, all of my friends are expert witnesses.