How many times have you been told to come down to the station for a lineup? If you have yet to experience this consider yourself fortunate. From experience, I've been in that situation before and I know I was not the perpetuator they were looking for. The police insisted I was as result of my criminal history but that was overt bias on their part. During this time I was in college taking Sunday courses and went to work directly after. I remember that day as vivid as yesterday. The reason I wanted to expound on this topic is the fact that over 72% of prisoners have been wrongfully accused by the hands of witnesses. This is a disproportionately enormous number and you wonder why the first thing that comes out of prisoners mouths is "I didnt do it!" The process of a standard lineup is bias and rigged. Research has proven that police officers provide hints to eyewitnesses as to whom to pick out from a lineup. When pictures are shown to a witness, they often feel pressured to choose someone even if the person slightly resembles the actual perpetrator. They're reluctant to base their conclusions on their own account of who actually did them harm. Nine times out of ten, some unfortunate person will be the fall guy of police misconduct. Eyewitnesses often make false accusations and assumptions that the perpetrator is someone in the lineup. How unjust is that? We live in a society where your supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but the reality is quite the contrary. Your guilty until proven innocent as a result of incompetent officers who are not properly trained. Your best interest is not their concern as long as someone is Suspended In Time whether they actually committed the crime or not. All they care about is a collar and going home at the end of the day. So now your locked up as a result of this simple fact and until you can prove otherwise, that is where you'll remain. To further compound the situation, your then appointed a court appointed lawyer who works with the judicial system. Unless you can afford a private lawyer, your doomed. The Innoncence Project supports a series of reforms to improve the accuracy of witness identifications. These reforms have been recognized by police, prosecutorial and judicial experience, as well as national justice organizations, including the National Institute of Justice and the American Bar Association. The benefits of these reforms are corroborated by over 30 years of peer-reviewed comprehensive research. I have a good friend serving a 25 year to life sentence and has been Suspended In Time for the past 19 years as a direct result of witness intimidation. Hopefully this new reform will substancially decrease the number of wrongful convictions ensuring fair lineups in the future.
1. The “Double-blind” Procedure/ Use of a Blind Administrator: A “double-blind” lineup is one in which neither the administrator nor the eyewitness knows who the suspect is. This prevents the administrator of the lineup from providing inadvertent or intentional verbal or nonverbal cues to influence the eyewitness to pick the suspect.
Today the Innocence Project released a new report entitled Reevaluating Lineups: "Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification". The new report discusses several attempts at reforming lineups, including:
• Double-blind presentation: photos or lineup members should be presented by an administrator who does not know who the suspect is.
• Lineup composition: “Fillers” (the non-suspects included in a lineup) should resemble the eyewitness’s description of the perpetrator and the suspect should not stand out. Also, a lineup should not contain more than one suspect.
• Witness instructions: The person viewing a lineup should be told that the perpetrator may not be in the lineup and that the investigation will continue regardless of whether an identification is made.
• Confidence statements: At the time of the identification, the eyewitness should provide a statement in her own words indicating her level of confidence in the identification.
• Recording: Identification procedures should be videotaped.
• Sequential presentation (optional): Lineup members are presented one-by-one (by a “blind” administrator) instead of side by side.
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