Recently in Suspect Identification Category

For my book report for this course I am reading Mind Hunter by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.  In the book, Douglas describes his interviews with criminals in the prison system in order to develop profiles for serial killers as part of a huge research project.  This was part of an effort to develop a Psychological Profiling Program, to make it easier for investigators, police, and the FBI to catch criminals faster and easier, by being able to "get inside their heads" and track their next moves. This got me interested in criminal and psychological profiling so I decided to google it.  I came across digital physiognomy software and free downloads.

 

 

Digital Physiognomy was developed as entertaining software, allowing people to create a portrait of a person and then provide a description of the person's character, traits, preferences, likes and dislikes, etc. You can choose different facial features and put them together, similar to the composite software that we can borrow from Dr. Maclin for our projects and what police use to make sketches of suspects. 

Testing out digital physiognomy or composite software gives us a real life account of creating a "picture" of a suspect.  I checked out the composite software from Dr. Maclin and found it difficult to do.  Difficult for the "witness" to come up with a description and difficult for me to choose accurate features from the extensive list.  Of course composites are biased to either the witness's perception or memory and the composite creator's training and expertise; however, both are useful in coming up with a tangible idea of the suspect. 

A free demo version is available at http://www.uniphiz.com/.  I did not have a chance to download it or see if it works, but I encourage people to check it out and see what it is all about!

 

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/photos/eye/text_06.html

I found this article by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham in their book "Witness For the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory On Trial." It discusses everything we have been talking about in class the last 2 weeks: memory as evidence, witness misidentification, and wrongful conviction. It's kind of long, but it covers a lot of information, and provides cases and examples of the different topics discussed. The authors discuss how memory works, and how studies have shown that people have a hard time identifying objects they would see on a regular basis, such as: pennies, the letters that correspond to the numbers on a telephone, etc.

They also discuss how people can create memories from stories/information they are told.

 "...Child psychologist Jean Piaget, in his Plays, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, related a personal story about the malleability of memory:

'...one of my first memories would date, if it were true, from my second year. I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a men tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened around me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. When I was about fifteen, my parents received a letter from my former nurse saying that she had been converted to the Salvation Army. She wanted to confess her past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given as a reward on occasion. She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected into the past in the form of a visual memory.'..."

Another topic they discuss is what psychologists refer to as "event factors,"  defined as 'those factors inherent within a specific event that can alter perception and distort memory.' The case used as an example of this follows.

"Two men in their mid-twenties were hunting for bears in a rural area of Montana. They had been out all day and were exhausted, hungry, and ready to go home. Walking along a dirt trail in the middle of the woods, with the night falling fast, they were talking about bears and thinking about bears. They rounded a bend in the trail and approximately twenty-five yards ahead of them, just off the trail in the woods, was a large object that was moving and making noise. Both men thought it was a bear, and they lifted their rifles and fired. But the "bear" turned out to be a yellow tent, with a man and a woman making love inside. One of the bullets hit the woman and killed her. When the case was tried before a jury, the jurors had difficulty understanding the perceptual problems inherent in the event; they simply couldn't imagine how someone would look at a yellow tent and see a growling bear. The young man whose bullet killed the woman was convicted of negligent homicide. Two years later he committed suicide." 

The two hunters were in the woods all day, looking for bears, thinking about bears, wanting to see a bear. In the low light, they saw a large object moving and heard noises, they assumed it was a bear, and shot.

Loftus and Ketcham also discuss witness misidentification and wrongful conviction. They use the case of Jimmy Landano, an ex-convict who spent time in prison, who was wrongfully convicted by four eyewitnesses and three accomplices as the man that killed a police officer in 1976. Despite overwhelming evidence and an alibi proving his innocence, he is still in prison writing letters to lawyers and other wrongfully convicted people trying to prove his innocence.

 

 

 

I'm not an investigator or remotely close to being labeled one, but something tells me a case with 2 or 3 suspects doesn't seem near as bad as having to deal with 26. How would you even begin? Where would you begin?! The news story I chose deals with the murder or Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Investigators had it "narrowed down" to eleven suspects when Dubai police announced that they had 15 new suspects. Investigators now have the daunting challenge of narrowing down this huge list of suspects. Police in Dubai, India suspect that secretive Israeli foreign intelligence unit is behind the attacks. Not only is the amount of suspects an issue to deal with, but also the fact that these suspects are carrying passports from various point around the world (passports from Australia, France, Ireland, Great Britain). Countries that are helping out with the investigation also noted that those passports were created in a legal manner - what a shocker.

Check out this story - there are videos along the left side you can view for further information.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/02/24/uae.murder.plot/index.html

In class we have been talking a lot about the different procedures that law officials go through from the first 911 call to the end of the trial. Recently, we have talked about the importance of memory and eyewitness identification and all the implications these two forms of evidence can have. Below is a link to an article written by Gary Wells, Mark Small, Steven Penrod, Roy Malpass, Soloman Fulero and C. A. E. Brimacombe, (1998). This article is often times referred to as the "white paper". This article is meant to be an eye opener to people, and for them to realize the many implications in conducting lineups. Also, it goes into great detail explaining the many ways our legal system can avoid contaminating memory evidence and limit the amount of false witness identifications. (This is kind of long, but is worth your read if you are interested in this sort of topic).

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/academics/colloquium/Gary%20Wells/Gary%20Wells%202.pdf

Wells, G., Small, M., Penrod, S. Malpass, R., Fulero, S., & Brimacombe, C. (1998).       Eyewitness identification procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior, 22

After our discussion in class on Tuesday about how the brain can fabricate false memories, I decided to look up more about this topic.  I came across an interesting website from pbs.org that showcases the show "Don't Forget!"  This series covers such topics as short term memory loss, the role of the hippocampus in remembering and identifying faces, new potential treatments for Alzheimer's and how to evade memory loss, why emotional memories are more easily recalled, and how our memories are sometimes subject to suggestions.

I watched a short clip about how memory lies.  In this clip, researcher Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine is trying to get Alan to believe that a certain event happened in his childhood that he does not recall.  It turns out she was just making up the event; however, Alan's mind was partially influenced by her suggestive memory.  Loftus is trying show that there is an increased confidence in a memory that is suggested to a person but was completely made up.  Sometimes you can get people to change how they behave based on those false memories.  I thought that this clip related to the story that Dr. Maclin told in class about the two girls who accused their grandfather of taking pornographic videos of them when they were younger because of leading questions by interviewers. 

Just as this clip and Dr. Maclin's story suggest, misleading and misguided suggestions can often lead witnesses to wrongfully accuse and prosecute innocent people because of their false memories.  I think the clip of Loftus trying to trick Alan gives us a good perspective on how are brains can create AND believe false memories.  Something as little as a suggestive or persuasive comment from even a stranger can cause us to second guess ourselves.  We saw this example between adults, imagine the effects of implementing a false memory could have on a young child whose brain is still developing and maturing.  If our own brain lacks confidence in little scenarios such as turning off the stove before leaving or using a blinker at that last turn, it is only plausible that other people who are persistent and persuasive in their suggestions could have a profound impact on our "memory." 

This is a very interesting article about how the point of a finger gave a man a 50 year prison sentence on a rape charge.

Three days after the rape, Detective Gauldin called the rape victim Jennifer Thompson in to do a photo lineup. He lay six pictures down on the table, said the perpetrator may or may not be one of them, and told her to take her time.

Thompson did not immediately identify a photo, taking her time to study each picture.

"I can remember almost feeling like I was at an SAT test. You know, where you start narrowing down your choices. You can discount A and B," Thompson said.
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I find it so interesting that the flaws of eyewitness identification can be so obvious. When taking a multiple choice test you being narrowing down the answers. When you come down to the bottom two you seem to make an educated guess. When dealing with 50 years in prison, I would hope the question only has one obvious answer, and isn't multiple choice.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/06/60minutes/main4848039_page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

Throughout this class we have dealt with many aspect of witness identification. Through the construct a line up project I was amazed at how many people actually guessed the suspect right. So not only is this whole process biased in that a person basically picks as a multiple choice guess sometimes, but also that a line up can be very biased. Many line ups are made with an obvious answer to be picked. Many of think us probably think, so what! That person is probably guilty. However, in this above case we see that a man was wrongly picked from a line up and the consequence was major jail time. When picking out of a line up the person is basically choosing the course for the person. We also learned in class that eye witnesses are of HUGE impact to a jury. This can also lead to false testifying which can easily sway a jury. It starts to make you really reflect upon our justice system and the ways that eye witnesses, juries, and even line ups can be extremely biased.