Lies of the Lineup.

• Author: Grifantini, Krishna

PEOPLE WRONGFULLY ACCUSED of a crime often wait years--if ever--to be exonerated. Many of these cases stem from unreliable eyewitness testimony. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified a new way of presenting a lineup to an eyewitness that could improve the likelihood that the correct suspect is identified and reduce the number of innocent people sentenced to jail. Their report is published in Nature Communications.

"Misidentification by eyewitnesses is a longstanding problem in our society. Our new lineup method uncovers the structure of eyewitness memory, removes decision bias from the identification process, and quantifies performance of individual witnesses," says Thomas D. Albright, co-corresponding author of the study and professor and director of Salk's Vision Center Laboratory. "This study is a great example of using laboratory science to bring about criminal justice reform."

In the U.S., nearly 70% of DNA exonerations are due to misidentifications by eyewitnesses, according to the Innocence Project. To overcome this societal dilemma, research has focused on factors that influence the likelihood that a witness will identify the correct person. One key factor is the way individuals are presented to the eyewitness during the lineup, according to Albright, who co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee to examine the validity of eyewitness identification. Albright, a specialist in the fields of visual perception and recognition, taps into decades of research suggesting that people commonly misperceive visual events, and memories of those events continuously are augmented and deteriorate over time.

Currently, the two most-common (or traditional) methods used by law enforcement are known as simultaneous and sequential lineups. In the simultaneous method, the eyewitness views six photographs of individuals at the same time; in the sequential method, the eyewitness views six photos, one at a time. The witness then either identifies a suspect or rejects the lineup if no face matches his or her memory of the crime scene. The research team sought to create a new lineup method that would help estimate the strengths of memories for each face and eliminate unconscious biases that shape decisions without awareness.

"Traditional lineups just reveal the top choice--the tip of the iceberg--but the cause of the witness' decision is ambiguous. It may reflect strong memory for the culprit, or it may mean...