Recently in Lineups Category

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

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.

This is a facial memory test that shows how well you can remember faces.  This test starts out by showing you a face and you have to guess from three faces which one was the original face.  The test then starts to get harder and harder by showing you six faces for 20 seconds and you have to pick which face was in the lineup of six.  It tn gets harder by putting colors into the faces so you cannot see the details very well.

I got a 76 percent on the test.  It said that a normal person would be able to get around 80 percent.  I think this is a good way of showing how difficult remembering faces can actually be.

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/fgcfmt/fgcfmt_intro.php 

 

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/09/nj_hearings_to_resume_on_polic.html

"TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- While DNA evidence is increasingly used to exonerate prisoners across the country, defense attorneys say the way to stem wrongful convictions is to first prevent misidentifying suspects..."

This article talks about many police departments not following correct procedures when having witnesses identify possible suspects in lineups. Also, the Supreme court-ordered special inquiry is looking into new procedures to prevent false and unreliable identifications. The article mentions that more than 2/3 of the 242 DNA exonerates released were sent to prison because of false identification by witnesses. The article says that most police agencies in the nation are using a simultaneous lineup, when they should be using a sequential lineup. Many people think that a standard should be put in place to be used by police agencies across the country. I think that if a new method can be implemented to prevent future witness identifications, then it should be used. I wouldn't want to go to jail because someone mistook me for someone else in a lineup.

This is an article about a man that was falsely identified in a lineup and spent 22 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. I couldnt imagine the amount of frustration and agony that he experienced during the 22 years that he served! DNA finally exonerated him of the crime but only after he served his sentence. The article shows how not only a witness can falsely identify the perpetrators but also how the victim themselves can also be mislead or mistaken of the actual criminal. I thought this article was very interesting because of the amount of time it took to exonerate the accused and also that the victim was in a way unknowingly persuaded to pick the wrong person in the lineup. Its pretty scary to think that this actually occurs and the amount of actually innocent people in prison is higher them we probably assume.

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/gwells/The_Misidentification_of_John_White.pdf

 

This article reports on research of digitally altering lineup photographs to add or remove distinctive facial features. The reason behind this is that if the witness or victim recalls a distinctive facial feature such as a scar, there is a tendency for them to focus just on that feature. So, if the police pick up an innocent person who has a similar feature, the eyewitness is likely to mistakenly identify the innocent person on the basis of this feature. This technique would either remove the scar from all of the photos in the lineup or add a scar to all of the photos in the lineup.  It turns out that adding the same distinctive feature to each of the faces led to more accurate performance than removing the distinctive feature. People correctly identified the face they had seen about 50% of the time when all of the faces had the distinctive feature, but they identified it correctly only about 30% of the time when the distinctive feature was removed from the target face.

He had a big scar

This article is about the misconceptions of eyewitness testimony and some cases exemplifying its inaccuracy.  False eyewitness testimonies have put innocent people behind bars, but with the growth of DNA testing and its use as evidence in criminal cases, eyewitness testimony has been found to be highly inaccurate.  This article also describes a few cases and studies researching the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.  According to a study published earlier this year in the journal Law and Human Behavior, false eyewitness testimony contributed to 77 percent of the 230 wrongful convictions exposed by DNA evidence over the last decade (the number of exonerations has grown since the study was conducted). These of course are only those cases for which DNA testing was available, which are usually murder and rape cases. In crimes where investigators are more likely to rely only on eyewitnesses, robberies or muggings, for example, it's likely that the problem is even more pronounced. Studies have also found that subtle, unintentional feedback from police or prosecutors can lead to false identifications.

Psychologists suggest some ways of improving the validity of eyewitness testimony, which include making witness and photo lineups double-blind, where neither the officer conducting the lineup nor the witness knows which person is the suspect. Lineups should also include people that the police know are innocent. If a witness selects a known innocent, police and prosecutors will then know that particular witness's memory isn't reliable enough to be used as evidence.  However, it seems as though the police and prosecutors have yet to change their procedures.   

 

http://reason.com/archives/2009/04/08/eyewitness-testimony-on-trial 

 

I think this article is beneficial in increasing awareness about the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimonies.  The suggestions that were offered should be implicated to see their effect as opposed to traditional methods.  I think we have come a long way by discovering techniques to obtain DNA and use them to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners, however, I still feel that we have a long way to go in increasing awareness about the epidemic of putting innocent people behind bars and how to curb that trend.  

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/188678.htm

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/178240.htm

Roy Malpass has put together a very useful site on how to evaluate the fairness of a lineup that you or someone else has created.  Description of how to conduct the evaluation, the statistical spreadsheet necessary to analyze the data, discussion and references.

http://eyewitness.utep.edu/consult05B.html

http://www.le.ac.uk/pc/cap/hf49/

One line of Heather's research focuses on face processing in criminal identification lineups. The goal is to develop strategies for constructing lineups that minimize the rate of erroneous eyewitness identifications. In addition to laboratory research on lineups, Heather has conducted field and archival research studying the behavior of actual eyewitnesses in criminal cases prosecuted in the United States. Other recent lines of research include examining the role that victim characteristics play in the prosecution of rape cases, as well as determining the factors that affect decision making in the criminal justice system.

http://truthinjustice.org/shomberg2.htm