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?"
The legal system relies heavily on eyewitness evidence to identify and prosecute criminal perpetrators, but wrongful convictions resulting from eyewitness misidentification have led many to conclude that eyewitness memory is unreliable. Advances in eyewitness identification research have produced a more nuanced understanding of eyewitness reliability, however. Whereas pristinely collected eyewitness identification evidence provides diagnostic information about a suspect’s guilt or innocence, numerous contaminants of eyewitness memory can undermine the reliability of eyewitness identification evidence. One such contaminant is confirming post-identification feedback—feedback given to or inferred by an eyewitness that communicates that their identification decision was correct. Confirming feedback is inevitable in real cases involving eyewitness identification and compromises the diagnostic value of eyewitness memory to such an extent that it undermines evaluators’ abilities to differentiate between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses (Smalarz & Wells, 2014). The current research tested whether cross-examination, a fundamental legal safeguard for preventing wrongful conviction based on eyewitness misidentification, can help remedy the contaminating effects of feedback on eyewitness testimony. Evaluators (N = 128) viewed direct examination testimony or direct- and cross-examination testimony of accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses, some of whom had received confirming feedback following their identification. Although the majority of eyewitnesses admitted during cross-examination that some or all of their recollections may have been influenced by the feedback, viewing the cross-examination did not improve evaluators’ abilities to differentiate between accurate and mistaken eyewitness testimony. Cross-examination appears to be an insufficient safeguard for preventing wrongful convictions based on contaminated eyewitness evidence.
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