Mistaken eyewitness identification has played a central role in more than 70% of the convictions of innocent people who were later exonerated by DNA testing. Long before forensic DNA testing was developed in the 1990s, social and cognitive psychologists were conducting eyewitness identification experiments and warning that eyewitness identification from lineups can be prone to error.
The American Psychology–Law Society, a division of APA, solicited a review paper to examine the science on eyewitness identification and issue recommendations on how police can best collect eyewitness evidence to address the problem of mistaken identifications. The review, published in the February 2020 issue of Law and Human Behavior, describes nine research-based recommendations to help prevent mistaken eyewitness identifications.
The authors based their recommendations on the proposition that most mistaken identifications occur because of problematic procedures used when conducting identification tests. They recommend that law enforcement officers
- conduct a thorough pre-lineup interview of the eyewitness
- decide when or even whether to conduct a lineup
- use a neutral administrator to conduct the lineup
- select lineup fillers so that the suspect does not stand out
- give nonsuggestive pre-lineup instructions to eyewitnesses
- take a confidence statement from an eyewitness immediately upon an identification decision rather than later
- video-record the entire procedure
- avoid repeated identification procedures with the same witness and suspect
- avoid “showups” (an identification procedure with a single suspect) in favor of lineups when possible
The article, which provides detailed justifications for each recommendation, constitutes the most comprehensive set of recommendations to date on how to best conduct eyewitness identification procedures.
Some of the recommendations are quite basic, such as the need to use lineup fillers who fit the eyewitness’s description of the culprit, so that an innocent suspect will not stand out in the lineup. Others are subtler but still effective, like the need to prevent lineup administrators from giving unintentional verbal or nonverbal cues that could influence eyewitnesses’ identification decisions and their confidence about those decisions.
One of the authors, Margaret Bull Kovera of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, notes that “perhaps the most novel recommendation suggests that police officers have an articulable, evidence-based suspicion before placing a suspect in an identification procedure,” which would increase the ratio of guilty to innocent suspects in lineups.
The American Psychology–Law Society named six senior researchers and eyewitness experts to conduct the review. Lead author Gary Wells notes that the eyewitness identification problem is best addressed by both cognitive and social psychologists because “mistaken eyewitness identification and confident-yet-false testimony involve not only memory processes but also social influence processes.”
The authors are social psychologists Gary Wells (Iowa State University), Margaret Bull Kovera, and Amy Bradfield Douglass (Bates College); and cognitive psychologists Neil Brewer (Flinders University), Chris Meissner (Iowa State University), and John Wixted (University of California–San Diego).
Citation
- Wells, G. L., Kovera, M. B., Douglass, A. B., Brewer, N., Meissner, C. A., & Wixted, J. T. (2020). Policy and procedure recommendations for the collection and preservation of eyewitness identification evidence. Law and Human Behavior, 44(1), 3–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000359
Note: This article is in the Forensic Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Forensic Psychology topic area.