Eyewitness Identifications

[The effectiveness of simultaneous and sequential line-ups: A review of research]
The Innocence Project has assisted over 300 men and women be freed and acquitted of crimes they did not commit (Arduengo &Adam, 2014: Malpass, Roy, 2006). In approximately 75% of these cases, faulty eyewitness identifications were a significant cause to their false imprisonment. One can clearly see that today’s lineup procedures do not effectively protect innocent individuals, nor do they take into consideration the different abilities of individuals to memorise faces . Despite the known problems with eyewitness memory, courts and juries will continue to rely on eyewitness identifications (Arduengo &Adam, 2014). The two methods an eyewitness can identify a criminal

Dobolyi and Dobson (2013) aimed to identify the association between accuracy and confidence in positive identifications. To test this, 320 undergraduate university students participated in the experiment. Using a standard lineup model, Doblyi and Dobson (2013) examined accuracy using signal detection and ROC analyses, along with the tendency to choose a face with both simultaneous and sequential lineups. They found two major findings. They initially observed a sequential mistaken identification overconfidence effect. This meant that even though there was an overall reduction in false alarms, confidence for false alarms that did occur was higher with sequential lineups than with simultaneous lineups, with no disparities in confidence for accurate identifications. This sequential mistaken identification overconfidence effect was expected due to the use of a more conservative identification criterion with sequential than with simultaneous lineups. Secondly, it was observed that there was a steady drop in confidence for mistaken identifications, (foil identifications and false alarms) from the first to the last face in sequential lineups, while confidence and accuracy of correct identifications remained fairly solid. Overall, it was perceived that sequential lineups were both less accurate and produced higher confidence false identifications than simultaneous

In this experiment 72 university students aged between 19 and 32 watched a film of a robbery in a public park and returned to the laboratory the following day to answer questions about the film. The results of this experiment suggested that there were less false identifications in sequential lineup procedures in comparison to simultaneous lineups. Sporer (1993) also claimed that subjects who made correct identifications made both their positive selection and their rejections quickly and with fairly high confidence. The memory of these witnesses’ may not have been strong enough to stop them from arriving at a wrong positive selection but however caused enough doubt to delay the decision time relative to the average rejection time for the other lineup members. These relative time variances were also revealed in the differences in confidence these witnesses attributed to the false face they wrongly selected and the rejected lineup faces. This information concludes and provides support to the notion that it is theoretically possible to assess identification accuracy on the basis of witnesses' decision times and the confidence conveyed for individual decisions (Sporer,