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Study Casts Doubts on Sequential, Double Blind Lineups

Many more people are just now learning of the flaws in eyewitness identification procedures used by police around the country due to the Duke Lacrosse case (background here).

A study has just been released in Illinois, touted as the first of its kind, that casts doubt on the efficacy of sequential, double blind lineups, which researchers have determined in recent years are necessary to improve the reliability of eyewitness identifications.

The report is available here. (pdf.)

The problem is, many say the study was flawed. Particularly because the double-blind procedure wasn't uniformly utilized. In the double blind procedure, the person administering the test does not know the identity of the suspect. That way he can't influence the eyewitness' selection.

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.

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    So there are two issues: one) sequential vs. simultaneous, and two) double blind vs. not. I can well believe that sequential lineups may be worse in terms of accuracy than simultaneous lineups. I understand their is some perceived problem of comparing photos to each other rather than to memory, but I also think that may be a good thing, in terms of how malleable and forgetful eye witnesses are, and in how the "draw the suspect" method as I understand it also allows the witness to compare small changes. If the study shows that double blind studies are less accurate than non-double blind studies, I think they need to submit their paper to Science. If so, they have truly overturned the apple cart that science rests on. My conclusion: everyone should go to double blind lineups, and more study may be needed on sequential vs. simultaneous.

    Re: Study Casts Doubts on Sequential, Double Blind (none / 0) (#2)
    by Scrutinizer on Mon Apr 24, 2006 at 01:47:59 PM EST
    Anecdotal eveidence is no evidence at all, so I'll offer some. Back about 25 years and two careers ago, I was getting a law enforcement certification in North Carolina. During one of the sessions on identification, a woman that I was dating at the time had lunch with me, and we walked back to the classroom together. I was a few minutes late, and Sharon had left some things, so she came into the room with me to pick up her stuff. I walked her back to the door (she was in the room for four or five minutes tops), and after she left, the instructor asked everyone in the class (around 75 people) to write down what she looked like. A large number weren't even able to get the color of her hair and clothes, much less be able to provide an accurate physical description. Not a statistically significant sample, but that (and other "quick ID" games we played that week) left me skeptical of almost any eyewitness evidence that didn't have physical evidence to go along with it.