Eyewitness Identifications: One More Lesson on the Costs of Excluding Relevant Evidence

Abstract

Recent research has revealed that sequential lineup eyewitness identifications are less likely to falsely identify an innocent suspect as the culprit than are traditional simultaneous lineups. This has led numerous reformers to advocate (and many jurisdictions to accept) that the latter procedure should be replaced by the former. Clark has rightly pointed out that mis-identification data has another twist that almost everyone else has ignored; to wit, sequential lineups are much more likely to lead to false negatives than are simultaneous lineups. If, as we have every reason to believe, both types of lineups are more likely to include a guilty party than to include only innocent suspects, there are powerful reasons to say, as Clark does, that sequential lineups are apt to have higher aggregate error rates than simultaneous lineups do. That should give pause to the growing movement to replace the latter by the former.