Research studies since the 960s (Brandon & Davies, 973; Huff; Rattner & Sagarin, 986) have demonstrated that there are significant reasons to question the accuracy of eyewitness testimony used in court trials. Eyewitnesses are often very confident in the accuracy of their memories when identifying a suspect, but in reality, the malleability of human memory and individual perception makes eyewitness testimony a very unreliable source of evidence (Garrett, 20). Forensic science can disprove the myth that memory provides an accurate recording of experience, like a video camera and instead support psychologists in their claim that peoples memories and visual perception can even be manipulated and biased. Due to this, many countries are now attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in court. But, despite a concrete and growing amount of evidence demonstrating the faults of traditional eyewitness identification procedures and the availability of basic strategies to reform them (Innocence Project, 2009). Research still shows that people naturally rely on witnesses statements about their confidence, view, and the degree of attention they paid while witnessing to make judgments about whether to believe the witness (Bradfield & Wells, 2000). Therefore, the purpose of this report is to outline which problems influence the accuracy of eyewitness identification and prove that other procedural measures must be undertaken to minimize the likelihood of an inaccurate identification.
The most common
line-up procedure used in the criminal justice system is having all of the lineup members are displayed to the eyewitness at once in a simultaneous lineup. However, during a simultaneous lineup witnesses use a relative judgment process, meaning that they compare lineup photographs or members to each other, rather than to their memory of the offender. This is a problem when the perpetrator is not present in the lineup because often the witness will choose the lineup member who most closely resembles the perpetrator (Wells & Seelau, 995). Research instead suggests law enforcement should implement a sequential line-up procedure (Carlson, Gronlund & Clark, 2008), where the witness is shown only one person at a time and are required make a yes, no, or not sure response to each one before moving on to the next. Lindsay, Lea, Nosworth, Fulford, Hector, LeVan & Seabrook (99) conducted five staged-crime experiments to examine the effect of lineup biases and sequential presentation on eyewitness recognition accuracy. They discovered across their five experiments biased lineup procedures consistently produced higher rates of false identification from simultaneous presentations (5.0%) than from sequential presentations (2.9%). Correct rejections of the biased, criminal-absent lineups were less likely in simultaneous presentations (29.0%) than in sequential presentations (77.%). Even when the lineups were not biased, false identifications occurred more often with simultaneous (23.3%) than sequential (4.2%) presentations.