Research note: evidence for moving to an 84-person photo lineup

Abstract

The traditional six-to-ten person lineup is known to be extremely unreliable. Witnesses who choose someone when the suspect is innocent are too likely to choose that suspect. One solution is to enlarge the lineup in a manner that reduces mistaken identification far more than it lowers correct identification of the culprit. This experiment was built on past research, and it displayed to witnesses lineups consisting of sets of 12 photographs in an album, either two sets (24 photos) or seven sets (84 photos). No difference was found between witnesses for the 24-person lineup or the 84-person lineup in either their ability to identify the target whom they had seen previously, or in the number of mistaken choices of someone in lineups where the target was absent. Since the chance that the witness might mistakenly identify the suspect is far less in the 84-person lineup, lineups should consist of at least that number.The major question in criminal trials often is determining who has committed the crime. The testimony of a witness as to the identity of the offender frequently determines the verdict. If the witness knows the perpetrator personally, all the witness has to do is state that "John Smith did it".The police lineup was invented for when the perpetrator was seen for the first time by the witness, because witnesses can err, in particular regarding a stranger, and can actually "identify" an innocent person. The person the police suspect to be the guilty party is placed in a line with additional persons known to be innocent (foils) The witness is then asked whether he or she can identify the culprit.

Running head: Relative judgment. When the relative judgment theory proved to be false

“…In previous experiments testing large lineups (Levi, 2006b;2007a;2012), target identifications never reached the 30.5% found in this study. The most reasonable explanation for this, which occurred in lineups as small as 12, was likely the very difficult lineup event.…”

Does Lineup Size Matter with Child Witnesses

“…Results indicated no significant difference in identification accuracy and false positive identification rates. Levi (2007) also examined identification accuracy and false identification rates as a function of lineup size. Participants engaged in a short interaction with the experimenter and a confederate.…”

Much better than the sequential lineup: a 120-person lineup

“…As the lineups doubled in size in each subsequent experiment, the number of pages was kept constant, while the number of photos shown on each page doubled. Thus, in the 84person lineup there were 12 photos per page Á 12)7 (Levi, 2007), while in the 168person lineup there were 24 Á 24)7. 3 There remained a choice between what we shall term 'simultaneous' and 'sequential' judgments.…”

“…A standard album on the local market enabled viewing six photos simultaneously with the album opened (three photos per side of page), so six was chosen arbitrarily (Levi, 2006a). That determined the seven pages for two studies (Levi, 2006a(Levi, , 2007, and a 168-person lineup study described below. As the lineups doubled in size in each subsequent experiment, the number of pages was kept constant, while the number of photos shown on each page doubled.…”

“…That size also enabled keeping the number of photos per page the same in the smaller and larger lineup in each study. Thus, when in the second study (Levi, 2007) the number of photos per page was 12 (12 )7 084), the smaller lineup consisted of 12 photographs on each of two pages (12 )2), a lineup of 24. When in the third study the number of photos per page was 24 (24)7 0168), the smaller lineup consisted of one such page.…”