critical thinking

Witnesses to Pick Suspects

GINA KOLATA AND IVER PETERSON

Gina Kolata is a science writer for the New York Times. She has also written several books including Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead (1998), Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (1999),

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and Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Exercise and Health (2003). Iver Peterson is also a writer for the New York Times who frequently writes about New Jersey issues. In this article, they describe a simple change in the wav that witnesses view suspects that may reduce the number offalse identifications and help to find the real criminals.

Getting Started

Do you think a lineup is a fair way to narrow down the suspects in a crime? Why do you think this? What makes you think that eyewitness reports can or cannot be trusted? Do you think people can make mistakes in reporting what they have witnessed, even if they firmly believe in what they say? What examples of this do you know about? Have you seen the mug shots that victims search through to help identify the perpetrator of a crime? In what ways might these help or hinder law enforcement? Some people criticize the police drawings that are made from eyewitness reports by saying that racial and social biases can creep into those drawings. What do you think about that?

rompted by new insights into the psychology of eyewitnesses to crimes, New Jersey is changing the way it uses witnesses to identify suspects.

Starting in October, the state will become the first in the nation to give up the familiar books of mug shots and to adopt a simple new technique called a sequential photo lineup, said John J. Farmer Jr., New Jersey's attorney general. Sequential viewing of photographs has been shown to cut down on the number of false identifications by eyewitnesses without reducing the number of correct ones.

The difference between the old and new systems is subtle but highly significant, according to researchers who have studied the psychology of witness identification. At present, eyewitnesses browse through photographs of suspects, comparing, contrasting and re-studying them at will.

Under the new system, victims and other eyewitnesses would be shown pictures one after the other. They would not be allowed to browse. If they wanted a second look, they would have to view all the photos a second time, in a new sequence. Also, the pictures

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would usually be shown by a person who would not know who the real suspect was.

"It's just a reality that eyewitness identifications are made un- 5 der situations of incredible duress, when people are trying to recall what someone looked like, and they can be more or less accurate," Mr. Farmer said. "So what we're trying to do with these guidelines is to give law enforcement a way in which we think we can at least narrow the risk that a mistake will be made.'

The new rules also change the way physical lineups, called showups, will be done, although the use of suspects and standins is so rare in New Jersey these days that some prosecutors cannot remember the last time they were used. As in photo lineups, the new rules require that in showups, individuals must be presented to the witness one at a time, usually through a oneway mirror.

The New Jersey program, which is already being used in Camden and Hunterdon Counties, grows out of a quarter-century of psychological research and is supported by recommendations published two years ago by the United States Department of Justice for police forces nationally.

The federal recommendations followed a 1998 study by the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, which asked police officials, defense lawyers, prosecutors and researchers to review 28 criminal convictions that had been overturned by DNA evidence. The study found that in most of the cases, the strongest evidence had been eyewitness identification.

The Justice Department published a guide titled "Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science" in 1999, summarizing its recommendations for change, saying, among other things, that sequential lineups were an acceptable option.

New Jersey, working with a pioneer in the field, Gary Wells, a 10 psychologist and researcher at Iowa State University, soon began drawing up its own guidelines.

New Jersey's program was developed by Debra L. Stone, deputy director of operations and chief of staff in the state's Division of Criminal Justice. Ms. Stone said that the plan elicited howls of protest when it was introduced to county prosecutors, and local police departments and prosecutors, who feared that the new procedures would make it harder to win convictions because fewer suspects would be identified. They also expressed concerns that the procedures would impose additional burdens on the short-handed police departments.

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"But we had a program for them where we had Professor Wells come in to tell them some of his horror stories about misidentifications, and about the way people's memories work, and in the end they were very supportive," Ms. Stone said.

Chief John Miliano of the Linden, N.J., Police Department said: "Every time you see something coming along that makes your job a little harder, you kind of cringe a little. It's going to take extra time and personnel, but if it's going to make a case a little more solid or if it's going to eliminate a bad identification or a situation where an officer may try to influence an identification, then it's beneficial.'

Mr. Farmer and Mr. Wells said they believed that New Jersey will be the first state in the nation to use the new lineup techniques.

Over the years, researchers like Mr. Wells, and Rod Lindsay, a psychology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, have demonstrated that sequential lineups made a huge difference.

Professor Lindsay would stage a mock crime—like a pursesnatching—in front of a group of people who had agreed to participate in a study. He would then show the witnesses a traditional lineup of suspects, like a group of photographs or a number of people standing in a row, but he would not put the "pursesnatcher" in the lineup. About 20 percent to 40 percent of the witnesses mistakenly identified someone as the criminal.

When the same suspects were put in a sequential lineup, and the eyewitnesses were shown photographs one at a time, and only once, the rate of false identifications dropped to less than 10 percent.

Other experiments showed that witnesses who did remember the criminal were just as likely to pick that person out of sequential lineups as they were from traditional simultaneous lineups.

The reason that sequential lineups work is rather simple. In simultaneous lineups, Professor Lindsay said, witnesses are able to compare individuals, choosing one from the group who looks the most like the person they think they saw commit the crime. But a sequential lineup limits the ability to compare.

The psychologists think that the chance of misidentification is reduced the most by allowing witnesses to view photos only once. New Jersey, however, plans to let witnesses see photos more than once, although the sequence would be changed between viewings. And even if witnesses declare a decision in midsequence, they are required to view the sequence through to the end, to assure that each picture has been seen the same number of times.

Harold Kasselman, deputy first assistant prosecutor in Camden County, which has been using the new system since December, said, "Our feeling is that if they request it, we shuffle all eight photographs again and show them again in random order." A witness

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who makes an identification is told to sign and date the chosen photo, and to initial the other seven. All eight photos become evidence in the case.

Another crucial innovation, the researchers found, was to be sure that a neutral third party conducted the lineup, in what is called a blind test. If the detective knows which person is the suspect, it could allow the detective, consciously or not, to guide the witness.

"Let's say you're the detective and you've got your person in position three" in the group of photographs, Professor Wells said. "You show this spread to the witness and the witness says, 'Well, No. 2.' A natural reaction is to say, 'Be sure you look at all the photos.' On the other hand, if the first words to come out of the

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like his might have a hard time finding an officer with no knowledge of a given case to conduct the lineup.

But as Richard P. Rodbart, deputy first assistant prosecutor for Union County, said, police officials know that once the new guidelines have fully gone into effect, any other approach will become a liability that defense lawyers will pounce on.

"I don't want an officer getting on a witness stand after he's used the old way and being asked, 'By the way, sir, are you familiar with the order from the attorney general that there has been a new way to do identifications?"' Mr. Rodbart said. "And then the officer says, 'Yeah, I heard something about that.' And then the defense attorney's voice rises, 'Did you follow that order?' and bang, he's on track to knock the case down."

Questions

1. What was the original method for witnesses to view suspects for identification? What changes is the New Jersey Police Department making in how witnesses view lineups or groups of photographs? What is the role that psychology plays in making the new method more accurate than the previous method?

2. What is a sequential lineup? How do we see differently when we see something one at a time? Or in a group? What is a one-way mirror? How do you think that seeing someone through a one-way mirror is different from seeing them standing in front of you looking at you?

3. The authors write that "witnesses can be just as certain about a mistaken identification as a true one. And being told that a false identification is correct makes witnesses even more certain" (paragraph 25). How do you explain that? Have you ever made such a mistake in misidentifying someone? How did it happen? What does this suggest about vision, about how the external environment affects how we see and interpret what we see?

4. The article describes what happens when a mock crime is staged in front of a group of people participating in research. Witnesses often misidentified the person who actually did the crime. They even chose someone from a lineup or group of photographs when the actual criminal was not included in the group. Why do you think this might happen?

5. What does this article suggest about the attitude of law enforcement toward witnesses, suspects, and the judicial process itself? Why do you think there are cases of the wrong person being identified, convicted, and even jailed? How has DNA evidence been used in such cases? What is the difference between relying on DNA evidence and relying on human vision and recollection? If DNA evidence is so compelling, why are images still used?