Recently in Composites 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!

 

 

This link will take you to a story featured in FRONTLINE, as a result of a mistaken identification from an eyewitness.  In the story, Jennifer Thompson was trying to identify her rapist, but because of faulty lineups, she chose an innocent man instead of her actual rapist. It really is an interesting story because they give you the lineup with the mistaken rapist and they also show you the real rapist. It also gives the composite, and how the two relate to it. 

You should check out the website and click around on some of the links about the case and what Thompson saw in the lineup. 

This link will take you to an article that went along with this story and goes along with what we've been covering in class about constructing lineups. 

The article is written by Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University.  He, like Dr. Maclin, believes that there are faults in our legal system because of the methods of eyewitness identification.

As this case and prior data and findings suggest, several people are wrongfully convicted based on wrong eyewitness identification and faulty lineups.  The two play off each other as well.  For example, say a witness believes they can identify their attacker, however the police constructed a lineup where one suspect completely stands out from the rest, therefore the witness is more compelled to pick the person who stands out more, not realizing that this is actually not the man who attacked her. 

The witness's perception could also bias their pick out of a lineup.  If a guy looks meaner than the rest, or has more tatoos, the witness may associate this person with being more aggressive and therefore, more likely to be the offender.  As this area of research continues to grow and collect more results, better methods of obtaining eyewitness information and constucting lineups are being developed in hopes of improving of our justice system.  The growth of DNA testing and its use as evidence is also becoming more widespread and accurate to put the right people behind bars. 

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

Because we view faces holistically rather than by individual features (nose, eyes, lips, etc.), some psychologists believe that current composite software is flawed.  FACES, a commonly used composite software, is no exception to this.  It gives witnesses a number of choices in terms of hair, face shapes, noses, and lips, but no choices to view a face as a whole.

A new approach, referred to as the whole-face approach, is slowly but surely being developed.  Dr. Frowd is developing a system, called EvoFIT, that gives witnesses 72 choices (18 at a time), and are asked to pick the 6 that best resemble the perpetrator.  When the 6 have been chosen, the software fuses the faces together which creates 72 more faces and the witness is asked to pick the best six again.  The witness is then asked to pick the one face that best resembles the perpetrator as he or she remembers them and this images is used as the final composite.

Dr. Solomon is working on a similar, but slightly different software that supports the holistic approach.

Though these new software systems are currently being tested, the EvoFIT has been used in a sexual assault case where the composite apparently came so close to the perpetrator that it "caused the victim distress" (Dr. Frowd).  It will be interesting to see the effectiveness of these new software programs down the road when they are used more frequently. 

Below is a link to the article with more information about this new approach and a little about why current software is not the most accurate.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07084/772371-84.stm

http://truthinjustice.org/shomberg2.htm