UC Riverside, May 30, 2012
New research by a University of California, Riverside psychologist raises serious questions about eyewitness identification procedures that are being adopted by police departments across the United States.
These new procedures are designed to reduce the kinds of false identification errors that can lead to wrongful convictions of innocent people.
While it has long been held that these changes reduce false identifications with little or no loss of correct identifications, UC Riverside psychology professor Steven E. Clark suggests that that is not the case.
The loss of correct identifications can be significant, Clark says. Importantly, the new procedures may, under some circumstances, lead to identification evidence that is less accurate than the identification evidence from the procedures they are designed to replace. Policymakers need to look very carefully at the data from empirical studies as they consider adopting new procedures, he cautions.
Clark's study, "Costs and Benefits of Eyewitness Identification Reform: Psychological Science and public Policy," appears in the May issue of the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science.
Clark has been involved in more than 200 criminal and civil cases, has consulted with prosecution and defense attorneys, and has testified as an expert in federal and state courts in six states, including California. Much of his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
In the paper, the psychologist notes that the reforms are directed at fundamental aspects of the identification process: How lineups are constructed, what witnesses are told and how they are instructed prior to the lineup, the way that the lineup is presented, and what police officers should and should not say and do during the identification procedure.
"Whether policymakers decide to adopt or not adopt these new procedures is up to them," he says. "In order to make those policy decisions, they need to know clearly what the benefits are and what the costs are."
For some of the new procedures the cost-benefit trade-offs are clear. For other procedures, Clark suggests that the critical research has not been done. For example, one of the new procedures coming into use requires that the police officer who shows the lineup not know which person in the lineup is the suspect. In this "blind" procedure, the police officer would not know whether the suspect was second, third or sixth in the lineup. The blind procedure prevents police officers from deliberately or inadvertently cuing witnesses about who they should pick from the lineup.
"The principle behind blind lineup administration is solid," Clark says. "If the criminal justice system is concerned that the police might inadvertently communicate their expectations to witnesses, then a good solution is for the police to not have expectations by not knowing which person in the lineup is the suspect. However, many ideas that seem right in principle don't actually work, or have unintended side effects. The principle behind the blind lineup may be solid, but solid data would be better."
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