M6: Identification Procedures

Definition and Scope: Eyewitnesses are individuals who were present at the scene of a crime when it occurred. Their testimony is a primary form of evidence used by police alongside interrogations.
Common Identification Methods:
- Lineups: A physical group of individuals including a suspect.
- Photo Arrays: A collection of photographs shown to a witness to identify a perpetrator.
- One-on-One Confrontations: A procedure where police present a single suspect to a witness. This is typically reserved for emergency situations where a formal lineup or photo array cannot be constructed.
The Impact of Eyewitnesses in Trial:
- Prosecutorial Preference: Prosecutors value eyewitness testimony because witnesses often appear highly credible to a jury.
- Dramatic Effect: There is significant emotional and dramatic weight when a witness points at the defense table in court and identifies the defendant as the perpetrator.
- The Risk of Error: Despite its persuasive power, eyewitness testimony is identified as the single largest cause of wrongful convictions in the justice system.

Error Rates: Research conducted both in laboratory settings and through the analysis of real cases indicates that eyewitnesses pick innocent distractors (foils) instead of the actual perpetrator approximately $20\%$ of the time.
Cognitive Requirements: Successful identification depends on three distinct cognitive processes, all of which are prone to error:
- Perception: The initial act of seeing and comprehending the event.
- Memory: The retention of the perceived information over time.
- Recall: The ability to retrieve and describe the remembered information.

Environmental and Physical Limitations: Perception can be hampered by poor lighting, physical distance from the event, or the witness's own poor eyesight.
Cognitive Bias and Expectation: People often perceive what they expect or want to see rather than what is actually happening.
- Example: Sports fans watching a football game may swear a referee made a wrong call against their favorite team, only to be proven wrong by a high-definition replay moments later.
The Role of Stress: While some might assume high stakes increase clarity, research shows that high-stress situations actually degrade a person's ability to perceive events accurately.
Weapon Focus: When a weapon (such as a gun or a knife) is involved in a crime, witnesses tend to focus their attention on the weapon to the exclusion of the perpetrator's facial features.
Cross-Racial Identification (Own-Race Bias): Studies show that individuals are significantly worse at perceiving and recognizing faces of a different race. Specifically, white people have more difficulty recognizing black people than they do other white people, and the same effect applies in reverse.

Rapid Decay: Memory begins to deteriorate within minutes of an event.
- Analogy: This is compared to a student who "crams" the night before an exam only to find much of the information gone the following morning, or a diner who looks at their waiter while ordering but cannot identify them five minutes later.
Memory Filling/Substitution: Gaps in memory are often unconsciously filled by the brain using preconceptions and stereotypes.
The Subway Study: In a famous study, subjects were shown a picture of a white man holding a razor arguing with a black man on a subway.
- Results: When asked to describe the scene moments later, over half of the subjects reported that the black man was the one brandishing the razor.
- Significance: This demonstrates both the fragility of memory and the influence of racial attitudes on cognitive retention.
Certainty vs. Accuracy: Research suggests an inverse relationship between a witness's confidence and their actual accuracy. A witness can become completely convinced that a false memory is true.

Verbalization Difficulties: Even if perception and memory are accurate, witnesses often struggle to translate those mental images into words (describing height, weight, etc.). This difficulty is present even among trained police officers.
Preventing Contamination: While police cannot fix poor memory, they must avoid "infecting" the identification at the recall stage by avoiding suggestive techniques.
- Example of Suggestion: Asking a witness to "look at that person again" can plant an erroneous seed in their mind.

Blind Administration: The officer conducting the lineup or photo array should not know who the suspect is, and the witness should be informed of this lack of knowledge.
Effective Distractors: Distractors (non-suspects) should be chosen based on their resemblance to the witness's initial description of the perpetrator, rather than their resemblance to the suspect.
Numerical Minimums: A lineup or photo array should include at least five distractors in addition to the suspect (a total of at least six people).
Instructional Neutrality: Witnesses should be explicitly told that the perpetrator may not be present in the lineup. This reduces the pressure on the witness to pick someone regardless of certainty.
Witness Separation: Multiple witnesses must be kept separate to prevent them from influencing each other's accounts or identifications.
Confidence Statements: Immediately after an identification is made, the witness should provide a statement regarding their level of certainty.
The "First Time" Rule: It is critical to get the identification right the first time. Once a witness identifies someone, that image becomes "stuck" in their head, making them likely to identify the same person in subsequent lineups and in court, even if the initial identification was wrong.

Judicial Stance: Many jurisdictions and courts do not strictly require the best practices listed above. The Supreme Court has allowed identifications from highly suggestive one-on-one confrontations even when they were not strictly necessary.
The Five Factors of Reliability: According to the Supreme Court, an identification is admissible—even if the procedure was suggestive or unnecessary—if a judge deems it reliable based on five factors:
1. Opportunity to View: The length of time and physical conditions the witness had to observe the perpetrator during the event.
2. Degree of Attention: How focused the witness was on the perpetrator during the crime.
3. Accuracy of Description: How well the witness's initial description matches the individual they later identify.
4. Level of Certainty: The witness's expressed confidence at the time of the identification.
5. Time Elapsed: The duration between the occurrence of the crime and the identification procedure.