The reveal procedure: A way to enhance evidence of innocence from police lineups.

Abstract

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 language of accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses.

“…This should not be the case if participants base their decision to “identify” or “not identify” on the strength of one underlying, continuous memory signal. However, Yilmaz and Wixted (2021) find evidence that participants use a combination of memory signals generated from multiple faces in the lineup to reject the lineup. If that is true, then participants’ confidence in lineup rejections reflects a much noisier signal than the signal participants use as a basis for their confidence in lineup identifications.…”

The rule out procedure: A signal-detection-informed approach to the collection of eyewitness identification evidence.

“…We also found that the confidence-accuracy relation for rejection decisions was stronger when witnesses made decisions about individual faces compared to when witnesses made decisions about sets of faces. Others have inferred from this pattern that the reason the confidence-accuracy relation is weaker for lineup rejections than for suspect identifications must have to do with differences in how witnesses generate confidence judgments (e.g., Brewer & Wells, 2006; Lindsay et al, 2013; Sauerland et al, 2012; Yilmaz et al, 2022). According to this dual-process account, suspect-identification confidence is based on the degree of match between the suspect and the witness’ memory for the culprit, but lineup-rejection confidence is based on integrating the individual match values for each lineup member into one global confidence judgment.…”

The role of suspect development practices in eyewitness identification accuracy and racial disparities in wrongful conviction

“…To significantly reduce the number of people wrongfully convicted (and incarcerated), we must reduce the rate at which mistaken witness identifications are made and introduced into evidence. To date, efforts to reduce mistaken identifications have primarily focused on identifying new and improved methods of collecting eyewitness evidence (e.g., Ayala et al., 2022; Brewer & Doyle, 2021; Smith et al., 2023; Yilmaz et al., 2022). There is no doubt that efforts to find new identification procedures that enable witnesses to make more accurate identification decisions are worthwhile.…”