By Karen Berkowitz, Pioneer Press Online (Illinois)
The scene is such a staple of television crime shows that even people who’ve never been asked to view a police lineup have a general sense of how it goes.
A detective who has doggedly worked to crack a case escorts the victim into a room to view a row of “suspects” through one-way glass.
One person in the lineup is the actual suspect nabbed by police. The other five are fill-ins of the same general height, weight, complexion and age bracket.
Through a process of elimination, the witness rules out a few candidates, then narrows the focus before perhaps concluding: “That’s the one.”
The trouble is, witnesses viewing a physical or photo lineup tend to pick out the person who most resembles the offender, even if the actual perpetrator is not present, according to psychology researcher Gary Wells, who has studied aspects of witness identification since the 1970s.
“Witnesses use a strategy,” said Wells, whose studies of simultaneous and sequential lineups are the basis of a pilot study now under way in Evanston, Chicago and Joliet.
“They compare one person to another to make a determination of who looks most like the perpetrator,” said Wells, a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University.
“There is always someone who looks more like the perpetrator than the others.”
Research conducted by Wells and others suggests that fewer misidentifications occur when witnesses are presented with individuals one at a time and forced to decide “yes, it’s him” or “no, it’s not” before moving on to another person.
On Nov. 1, the Evanston Police Department began using sequential lineup procedures in one-half of its cases as part of a statewide pilot study that criminal justice professionals around the country are watching.
Under the sequential system, witnesses viewing either a physical or photo lineup are presented with a single person or photograph, but informed there are others. If the witness rules out one person or photo, another one is presented.
To assure randomness for scientific purposes, the department is using sequential procedures with odd-numbered cases and traditional, simultaneous lineups with even-numbered incidents. State Rep. Julie Hamos, D-18th, first proposed that Illinois require sequential lineup techniques during the 2003 session, when lawmakers were wrestling with criminal justice reforms in light of disturbing findings by a blue ribbon panel looking at wrongful convictions.
“Even then, I realized it would be better to field test it,” Hamos said. Ultimately, the test study was written into the death penalty reform package that was enacted to address flaws in a state that had seen 17 death row inmates exonerated since 1977. A panel found the system so riddled with flaws that former Gov. George Ryan concluded he had no choice but to commute the death sentences of 167 inmates before he left office.
Against that backdrop, Illinois legislators were looking at “all opportunities to reduce the possibility of innocent people being caught in the criminal justice system,” said Hamos, who brought Wells’ research to her colleagues’ attention.
“What is interesting is that this comes at the problem from a different perspective,” Hamos said. “Police and states’ attorneys felt they were being singled out to blame for errors in the system. (The mistakes made during lineups) are made by the most well meaning of witnesses who are making inadvertent errors” in the interest of being helpful, she said.
To reduce the possibility that witnesses will pick up on signals from the detective conducting the lineup, sequential lineups are conducted by a “blind” administrator who does not know the suspect from the fill-ins. “The blind administrator doesn’t know the fillers, doesn’t know the suspect and is not familiar with the victim,” said Cmdr. Joseph Bellino, who is heading up the study for the Evanston Police Department.
“There is some issue as to whether the investigating officer could, whether consciously or subconsciously, be giving cues.” The three jurisdictions participating in the pilot developed a common protocol to ensure the consistency of the data collected. Social scientists will analyze the information.
Already, finding a “blind administrator” is proving somewhat problematic at a time when a suspect’s identify, characteristics and photo can be disseminated quickly via an e-mail communication to police officers throughout the area, Bellino said.
“If we have a serious offense, we can take a photograph off the computer, prepare fliers and not only circulate them through the department but (also) circulate them to jurisdictions in the area,” Bellino said. “Now I am making even more police departments aware of who we are looking for.
“Just here in house, every police officer on the job is going to see that photo and that flier.”
Wells acknowledged that sequential techniques also cause some loss of accurate identifications when the offender actually is in the lineup. So far, studies have been limited to fictitious crime enactments that test the accuracy of witness recall.
Wells attributed the “occasional loss of an accurate identification” to the fact that witnesses no longer are guessing. Nothing aside from a confession carries as much weight as an eyewitness identification when a case goes to trial, Wells said.
“We all understand how powerful (an eyewitness identification) can be,” Wells said. “If you believe that eyewitness testimony is tantamount to guilt, then it’s a little disconcerting to think there are these kinds of problems with this evidence.”