Eyewitness identification: Psychological research and legal policy on lineups.

Abstract

The risk of eyewitnesses making false identifications is influenced by the methods used to construct and conduct lineups. The legal system could impose 4 simple rules to reduce false identifications: (a) Eyewitnesses should be informed that the culprit might not be in the lineup, (b) the suspect should not stand out in the lineup, (c) lineups should be administered by someone who does not know who the suspect is, and (d) witnesses should be asked how certain they are of their choice before other information contaminates their judgment. The U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged the dangers of mistaken identification but has not used exclusionary rules to control unnecessary risk. Judicial rulings should focus on risky lineup methods and impose standards to eliminate potential justice system contributions to false identification. In 1984, Frederick Rene Daye was identified from a set of photos and served 10 years in a California prison for a rape, kidnapping, and robbery that he did not commit. Daye was released in 1994 after a DNA test proved his innocence. In 1980, James Newsome was convicted of murder on the basis of eyewitness evidence. Fifteen years later, he was released after his fingerprints were submitted to new computer technology that implicated someone else as the murderer. Although there is no way to estimate the frequency of mistaken identification in actual cases, numerous analyses over several decades have consistently shown that mistaken eyewitness identification is the single largest source of wrongful convictions (see Borchard, 1932; Brandon & Davies, 1973; Frank & Frank, 1957; Huff, Rattner, & Sagarin, 1986; Rattner, 1988). Rattner's review of 205 cases of proven wrongful conviction, for example, showed that 52% were associated with mistaken eyewitness identification.1 Although we cannot be certain that these cases are representative of all cases of wrongful conviction, they provide our best estimate of the proportion of wrongful convictions that are attributable to eyewitness identification error. Assuming that false eyewitness identification accounts for half of all wrongful convictions, there ought to be considerable interest in the study of factors that can reduce the likelihood of false identifications. This article reviews much of what we have learned from experiments in which people witness a staged crime or other event and later are asked to identify the target person. It is not the thesis of this article that eyewitness identification is unreliable, but rather, that the reliability of eyewitness identification is significantly influenced by methods used to obtain the identification that are controllable by the criminal