Protecting innocent defendants, nailing the guilty: a modified sequential lineup
✍ Scribed by A. M. Levi
- Book ID
- 101278441
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 140 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Can the traditional lineup procedure be modi®ed in such a way as to still secure positive identi®cations of guilty persons while minimizing the risk of misidenti®cations? Witnesses interacted with a `culprit' who they were later called upon to identify from a 20-person sequential video lineup. Both culprit-present and culprit-absent lineups were employed and witnesses could choose more than one suspect. In 61 culprit-present lineups 43% chose only the suspect, while in 93 culprit-absent lineups no-one did. In culprit-present lineups 25% chose him along with foils, while 5% did so in culprit-absent lineups. Larger lineup size, and the ability to make multiple choices, helped lower the probability of choosing only an innocent suspect. Using Baysian analysis, the probability that a chosen defendant was innocent, based on the lineup alone, equalled 0.03, compared to 0.258 in traditional lineups.