Lineup Construction and Lineup Fairness

Abstract

Police lineups come from English criminal law and procedure. According to Devlin (1976), lineups were instituted through a Middlesex magistrate’s order in the mid-nine-teenth century. They were intended as a fair replacement for the practices of courtroom identification, and showups, which were widely used in nineteenth-century England but widely recognized as potentially unfair to the defendant. Their origin indicates that the notion of fairness is their raison d’être. They are intended to secure an identification that can potentially incriminate someone but is fair to those who are subjected to it, particu-larly those who are innocent of the crime. Study of the case law in many countries, as well as recent DNA-based exonerations in the United States, indicate that lineups are not invariably fair—many innocent peo-ple are convicted after identification from a lineup by an eyewitness. The problem is sig-nificant because eyewitness evidence is cited as the most significant source of wrongful conviction (Scheck, Neufeld, & Dwyer, 2001). The DNA exoneration cases where the false conviction is established with near certainty show that eyewitness evidence has been largely responsible for false conviction in more than 70 % of cases (www.innocenceproj.org). Wrongful identifications result from a number of failures of police procedure; how-ever, many of these are minimized when the lineups presented to witnesses are fair. If witnesses are induced to make a lineup identification, a fair lineup will expose the inno-cent suspect to an identification risk of 1/the number of persons in the lineup. A lineup biased against the suspect (because s/he stands out in some manner) adds additional risk. A lineup in which only two members (the defendant and one other) fit the witness’s

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