Today's New York Times reports, "Police Lineups Start to Face Fact: Eyes Can Lie." It's written by Erica Goode and John Schwartz.
The decision by New Jersey’s Supreme Court last week to overhaul the state’s rules for how judges and jurors treat evidence from police lineups could help transform the way officers conduct a central technique of police work, criminal justice experts say.
In its ruling, the court strongly endorsed decades of research demonstrating that traditional eyewitness identification procedures are flawed and can send innocent people to prison. By making it easier for defendants to challenge witness evidence in criminal cases, the court for the first time attached consequences for investigators who fail to take steps to reduce the subtle pressures and influences on witnesses that can result in mistaken identifications.
“No court has ever taken this topic this seriously or put in this kind of effort,” said Gary L. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who is an expert on witness identification and has written extensively on the topic.
Other courts are likely to follow suit, and in November the United States Supreme Court will take up the question of identification for the first time since 1977.
But changing how the nation’s more than 16,000 independent law enforcement agencies handle the presentation of suspects to witnesses will be no easy task, many experts say.
Around the country, the notion of change has met with resistance from police officers who remain skeptical about the research and bridle at the idea that they could affect the responses of witnesses, even unintentionally, which studies find is how most influence occurs.
In many communities, lineups are conducted in the same way they have been for decades, although typically these days they involve photos, not actual people. According to some estimates, only about 25 percent to 30 percent of jurisdictions have police departments that have revised their policies to protect the integrity of lineup procedures.
And:
Model policies for changing lineup procedures have been created by professional organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and in 1999, the National Institute of Justice released guidelines that were sent to every police department in the United States.
But the process of reform, Dr. Wells said, is “all over the place, it’s very spotty.” He added that he suspected many police departments simply deposited the federal guidelines, which he helped develop, “into their round files.”
Some large departments, like those in Dallas and Denver, have already made changes, often under the leadership of an administrator eager to keep up to the national standard or after DNA exonerations revealed mistaken identifications.
In Dallas, for example, detectives take elaborate precautions to make sure that identifications remain untainted and that they will stand up in court.
Witnesses are sent to a special unit of the Police Department devoted entirely to lineups, where they are read instructions and shown photographs by trained lineup officers who have no relationship to the cases.
Photos are presented one at a time instead of all together, and the witnesses then indicate how confident they are in their judgments. The whole process is videotaped, so that it can be viewed by defense lawyers and by the court, if necessary.
Lt. David Pughes, commander of the department’s homicide unit, said 5,000 lineups had been conducted in this manner since April 2009, when the policy was instituted, a major departure from the days when the investigating officers in criminal cases conducted lineups and no consistent procedures were followed.
Initially, Lieutenant Pughes said, the new practices were resisted by detectives, who felt that their integrity was being challenged.
“The only way to overcome that was through an elaborate training program that talked about memory and physiology and all different types of things,” he said. After the training, he added, “I could see that the lights were going on.”
More on Gary Wells' research on memory at his university website.
The Times article has a sidebar, "5 Suggested Techniques to Aid in Identifying Suspects."
ThomsonReuters Legal News posts, "NJ decision on eyewitness identification could have broad impact," by Carlyn Kolker.
The decision was hailed by criminal justice groups such as the Innocence Project. Though the court's ruling has no binding influence outside of New Jersey, other state courts could take the opinion into consideration, said Kip Cornwell, a law professor at Seton Hall University in Newark.
States including California and New Mexico have grappled with reforming their witness identification guidelines, as the advent of new social science data has prompted criticism from criminal defense bar on mis-identifications.
A task force in New York convened by New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman made several recommendations earlier this year to police groups and prosecutors about witness identification, as well as to judges about juror instructions. The state's district attorneys association also developed new guidelines about photo identifications and lineups in 2010.
Wednesday's New Jersey Supreme Court opinion, State v. Larry R. Henderson, stemmed from a case in which an eye-witness testimony was the primary evidence in a homicide trial. Before the trial, the witness said a detective was "nudging" him to identify the defendant.
Earlier coverage of the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling begins with the preceding post. Related posts are in the eyewitness identification index.
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