False Identification and Biased vs. Unbiased Lineup Instructions

Introduction: Eyewitness Misidentification and Wrongful Convictions

There are many instances where people have been wrongly accused because they were falsely identified, or because there was not enough evidence to prove them guilty. George Allen Jr. was convicted in 1983 on charges of capital murder, rape, sodomy, and first-degree burglary. The reason for his false conviction has been attributed to a false confession, invalid or improper forensic evidence, and government misconduct (Innocenceproject.org, 2013). Another case is that of Barry Gibbs, who was charged with second-degree murder in 1988. He was wrongly charged due to eyewitness misidentification and government misconduct. Barry Gibbs served 17.5 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2005 (Innocenceproject.org, 2013).

These cases illustrate that eyewitness misidentification is a significant cause of wrongful convictions across the country and around the world. It has been argued that eyewitness identification is often unreliable because the human mind does not function like a tape recorder — it cannot remember or recall events exactly as they occurred. Even though eyewitness accounts may seem like reliable evidence, several factors can render them inaccurate.

Given that crime is increasing worldwide, eyewitness identification plays an important role in identifying the guilty. Yet even when eyewitness testimony has led to conviction, that conviction may have been false. With the advent of improved forensic techniques such as fingerprinting and DNA testing, many people have since been exonerated. Research has shown that the confidence and retrospective reports of eyewitnesses vary depending on how jurors and investigators handle them (Wells, Olson, and Charman, 2002). Many factors have been found to affect eyewitnesses' responses, and these identification responses appear to vary according to the ease and bias of the questioning they encounter.

Although eyewitness testimony has helped solve crimes in some cases, the phenomenon has also contributed to considerable injustice worldwide. It is widely considered an unreliable and easily biased form of evidence (Brandon and Davies, 1973). Sobel, Vogelman, Ruoff, and Pridgen (2011) argued that identification is one of the major determining factors in jury verdicts, viewing eyewitness statements as the most persuasive kind of evidence. It should be noted that two kinds of errors can occur in this process. Malpass and Devine (1981) observed that a witness can either wrongly accuse another person or fail to identify the correct person. When presented with a lineup of possible offenders, witnesses may choose the wrong person or state that they do not recognize anyone. In either case, the outcome is that either the guilty party goes uncharged or an innocent person is accused of a crime they did not commit.

Fallible eyewitness testimony thus puts the entire concept of criminal justice at risk. Two categories of variables have been identified as reducing the accuracy of eyewitnesses: estimator variables and system variables.