Objective: Recent work has established that high-confidence identifications (IDs) from a police lineup can provide compelling evidence of guilt. By contrast, when a witness rejects the lineup, it may offer only limited evidence of innocence. Moreover, confidence in a lineup rejection often provides little additional information beyond the rejection itself. Thus, although lineups are useful for incriminating the guilty, they are less useful for clearing the innocent of suspicion. Here, we test predictions from a signal-detection-based model of eyewitness ID to create a lineup that is capable of increasing information about innocence. Hypotheses: Our model-based simulations suggest that high-confidence rejections should exonerate many more innocent suspects and do so with higher accuracy if, after a witness rejects a lineup but before they report their confidence, they are shown the suspect and asked, "How sure are you that this person is not the perpetrator?" Method: Participants (N = 3,346) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk watched a 30-s mock-crime video of a perpetrator. Afterward, they were randomly assigned to lineup procedures using a 2 (standard control vs. reveal condition) × 2 (target present vs. target absent) design. A standard simultaneous lineup served as the control condition. The reveal condition was identical to the control condition except in cases of lineup rejection: When a lineup rejection occurred, the suspect appeared on the screen, and participants provided a confidence rating indicating their belief that the suspect was not the perpetrator. Results: The reveal procedure increased both the accuracy and frequency of high-confidence rejections relative to the standard simultaneous lineup. Conclusions: Collecting a confidence rating about the suspect after a lineup is rejected may make it possible to quickly clear innocent suspects of suspicion and reduce the amount of contact that innocent people have with the legal system. Public Significance StatementWe found that changing the standard lineup procedure may allow a greater number of innocent suspects to quickly be cleared of suspicion. The procedural change, which is easily implemented, is simply this: When a lineup is rejected, but before the witness is asked about their confidence, the suspect is revealed to them along with this question: "How sure are you that this person is not the perpetrator?"
Eyewitness misidentifications have contributed to many wrongful convictions. However, despite expressing high confidence at trial, eyewitnesses often make inconclusive misidentifications on the first test conducted early in a police investigation. According to a new scientific consensus, it is important to focus on the results of the first test because, if the perpetrator is not in the lineup, the test itself leaves a memory trace of the innocent suspect in the witness’s brain. Thus, all subsequent tests of the witness’s memory for that suspect constitute tests of contaminated memory. Unfortunately, when an initial inconclusive identification comes up at trial, the Federal Rules of Evidence require that the witness be given an opportunity to explain the inconsistency. In response, witnesses often provide a believable story about why they did not confidently identify the suspect on the initial test despite doing so now (e.g., “I was nervous on the first test”). However, witnesses lack expertise in—and have no awareness of—the subconscious mechanisms that underlie memory contamination. Therefore, the explanations they provide at trial have minimal information value. The combination of a sincerely held (false) memory and a believable (but erroneous) explanation for a prior inconsistent statement is often persuasive to jurors. This is a recipe for a wrongful conviction, one that has been followed many times. The Federal Rules of Evidence were enacted almost a half-century ago, and it may be time to revisit them in light of the principles of memory that have been established since that time.
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