The study's results - which suggest the old method was both more accurate and more likely to produce an identification - are a boost to police departments that have resisted lineup changes. Others say the study was flawed, and they worry that it will be used as an excuse to halt all eyewitness-identification reforms. For now, supporters say more study - and more action - is needed, and they hope that a single study won't derail years of effort to improve what they say is a highly flawed system.
"My fear is that the debate over sequential blind will obscure everything, and you'll have police departments who are reluctant to change at all, or not adopt anything," says Barry Scheck, a professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York and co-director of the Innocence Project.
More expert criticism in the Chicago Tribune:
Former U.S. Atty. Thomas Sullivan, who co-chaired former Gov. George Ryan's Commission on Capital Punishment in Illinois, criticized the report's methodology because police did not uniformly adopt the "double-blind" method of having the officer conducting the lineup be unaware of which person was the suspect.
"Human memory is simply not videotape. Human memory is trace evidence," said James Doyle, a defense lawyer and expert on eyewitness identification.
This letter to the editorby a Northwestern Law Professor in today's New York Times also spells out the flaws in the study.
Illinois should be applauded for implementing a field test to compare eyewitness judgments using simultaneous versus sequential lineups. Unfortunately, the test was so fundamentally flawed that it was doomed to fail. The results ultimately have no value, and provide what is probably misleading information on the relative accuracy of identifications using these two procedures.
It is well known that administrators who are aware of the identity of a suspect in a lineup, even without intending to do so, increase the likelihood that the witness will identify the suspect, whether or not the suspect is in fact guilty. Yet in the Illinois study, the administrators of all of the sequential lineups knew the identity of the suspect in those lineups, while the administrators of the simultaneous lineups were all "blind" to suspect identities.
Thus, the "aware versus the blind administrator" difference parallels the "simultaneous versus sequential" difference, and may entirely explain the higher number of identifications (and lower number of identifications of non-suspect lineup members) with the simultaneous lineups.
This first study should not be taken as a sign that sequential and double-blind lineups don't increase reliability of identifications. What is needed is a study in which both procedures are uniformly utilized.
