The police lineup is becoming suspect practice

States are considering scrapping side-by-side lineups in favor of a one-at-a-time variety.

from the February 6, 2007 edition

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How new bills change lineups

To minimize errors, the new bills in the five states propose that police must employ a "blind" lineup administrator, who in a small town could be a retired police officer or even a barber. This person would not know anything about the case, and therefore would be unable to influence the witness, for example, to "take another look at No. 5." Also the measures would replace the lineup in which people or photos are shown side by side with a procedure where suspects are shown one at a time. This "blind sequential lineup" strategy reduces "relative discrimination" in which witnesses identify somebody who looks most like the perpetrator out of a group, researchers say.

"Let's learn the lessons not only about the fallibility of eyewitness identification, but also of the ... research that shows how to eliminate the inadvertent suggestiveness of traditional police lineup procedures," says Stephen Saloom, policy director at the Innocence Project in New York.

In recent years, research has showed that blind sequential photo lineups produce half as many mistakes as the traditional "parade" of suspects, but they also result in 3 percent fewer total identifications.

But the blind sequential photo lineup resulted in more false identifications when it was employed in Illinois in the squad rooms of Chicago, Joliet, and Evanston in 2005. Using this method, witnesses made positive identifications 62 percent of the time; the sequential method yielded identifications 53 percent of the time, according to a study by the Illinois attorney general.

With this study in mind, some criticize states' efforts to mandate a specific procedure that would replace the experience detectives have from "thousands of years of court with 25 years of studies on human memory," says Rick Malone, director of the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia. "A clinical study in a research laboratory versus someone walking out of a liquor store who shoots the fellow across the street – those aren't the same conditions."

The change could also trigger a flood of appeals from convicts who say they were mistakenly identified, says Terence Campbell, a forensic psychologist in Sterling Heights, Mich., offering a reason prosecutors are against the legislation.

The exoneration of 'Pete' Williams

During his trial, Mr. Williams said he was playing cards with friends at the time of the rape, but his testimony could not overcome the jury's perception of the victim's "120 percent" certain identification. Williams wrote a letter from prison to the Georgia Innocence Project saying he was "a poor black man with a criminal record" who was convicted of a crime he did not commit. The group then used DNA technology to test the evidence again. "We are all human," Williams said after his release, as he forgave the witness for the mistake.

The story of Williams, an aspiring gospel singer who broke into a bar of "Amazing Grace" after his release, is likely to influence whether Georgia lawmakers vote to pass the bill, experts say.

"When you have someone just released from prison who was unjustly put in there, [the success of a reform bill] comes down to how much sympathy defense attorneys can garner in [the house judiciary] committee, and they could garner a lot," says Frank Rotondo, of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police.

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