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Suddenly, a big impact on criminal justiceWork by exper imental
psychologists may forever change the w ay police
gather eyewitness testimony--and help to prevent the wrong
person from
being indicted for a crime.
By KATHRYN FOXHALLMonitorStaff
January 2000, Vol 31, No. 1
Print version: page 36
PRINT
Interviewing a witness with open-ended questions and avoiding
questions that would lead the w itness.
Researchers have found that open-ended questions can elicit much
more information, but police tend to ask
few open-ended ques tions and to interrupt witnesses who try to
give narrative answers. On the other hand,
studies have found that leading questions can change what the
witnesses have to say.
Having only one suspect at a time be in a line-up and ensuring
that "fillers" be people who fit the general
description the witness has given. Researchers concluded that
line-ups with more than one suspect
increase the probab ility of a mis taken identification being
taken s eriously. And if fillers in a line-up don't look
like the general description, the witness is likely to pick the
suspect if he looks m ost like that description.
Telling the witness that the perpetr ator may not be in the
line-up. The research indicates witnesses
A witnes s to a crime looks i ntently at a police li ne-up of
people, and says, "Yes, number five. That's the person who did i
t."
And that's practically the end of the story. Case closed. If the
witness can pi ck the person out of a line-up, poli ce have their
perpetrator. At leas t on television s hows .
But late last year, in light of questions raised about the
reliability of such evidence, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
publis hed the first-ever national guidelines on gathering
such testimony in an attempt to make the process m ore
scientific.
Psychologist Gary L. Wells, PhD, who was on the panel that wrote
those guidelines , believes that rarely, if ever, has experimental
psychology had such a definitive impact on
national pol icy.
"The benefit for innocent sus pects is immense," says Wells ,
professor of psychology at Iowa State University, "and it could be
argued that this is one of psychology's greates t
research-to-action achievements."
A flash of light
Research psychologists have been studying the reliability of
eyewitness testimony for about 20 years. Their experiments have
included having people watch videos of enacted
crimes o r staging mock crimes and asking them to identify
perpetrators from photos, testing various interviewing techniques
with eyewitness es and with police interrogators, and
exploring whether eyewitness accounts could be mis led by
questions after the event.
Early on, they found that eyewitness identification often was no
t very good. Studies showed that witness es often identified the
wrong person from the photos (in one study, almost
half the time) and that police interviewing techniques often ham
pered information gathering.
At the sam e time, researchers found tha t they could improve
eyewitness inform ation by changing the way it is ga thered. The
researchers bu ilt, in the psycholog ical litera ture, a
strong case for better police practices and they testified on
the reliability of eyewitness testimony in court cases.
But by and large, police departments haven't exactly knocked
their doors down to find out what law enforcement was doing wrong
in getting testimony to convict people.
Further, the justice system rarely gave police incentives to
explore better methods, says Wells. "Courts alm ost never suppress
identification evidence, even when the m ost
egregiously biased line-up procedures are used."
But then came the 1990s and the widespread use of DNA testing.
In cases acros s the country, the technique found that mistakes had
been m ade. People had gone to prison for
years for crimes that they did not com mit.
Today, more than 60 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence.
And mos t were convicted with eyewitness testimony.
Janet Reno steps in
In 1996, Gary Wells flew to Washington, D.C., at the request of
DOJ staff for discus sions related to his research. He was
surprised to find he would be meeting with Attorney
General Janet Reno. A prosecutor for mos t of her career, Reno
had grown concerned about what the exonerations im plied about
eyewitness tes timony. She had read articles by
Wells in the American Psychologis t and elsewhere and wanted to
talk about his findings .
Soon after, she mandated that a national technical panel be
brought together to recomm end "best practices" for investigations
involving eyewitnesses . The DOJ invited Wells to sit
on that panel and perm itted him to bring in five other
psychological researchers.
Wells notes many of the researchers found the turn of events
hopeful, yet "odd." They generally believed, he says, that the
"experimental literature in ps ychology had already made
a stronger and more informative case for reform than any
collection of case studies [such as the DNA exonerations] could pos
sibly mus ter."
But at least the exonerations had brought press ure on the
system to undertake that reform.
Panel does its work
Over the next year-and-a-half, DOJ's panel of 34 people from
four professions fought it out. Researchers, prosecutors, defens e
attorneys and law enforcement officials, in meeting
after meeting and over drinks afterward, discussed and
argued.
Wells says the researchers found--much to their astonishm
ent--that "they were in the driver's seat." They had done the only
resea rch on the topic and that research gave the talks
their foundation. The panel's reading material cons isted of the
psychological studies.
On the other hand, says Wells, he was pleasan tly surprised by
the police officers' reactions. The officers' own brand of research
i ndicated som ething needed to be done: They had
been there when a witness emphatically declared "Number Four" in
a line up to be the perpetrator, when "Number Four" was a fellow
police o fficer being used as filler.
It was the pros ecutors who were more o ften at loggerheads wi
th the researchers, out of fear that police failures to meet overly
demanding guidelines would cast shadows over the
prosecutions' cas es.
Through the battles, says the DOJ project director Richard Rau ,
PhD, the police often served as the final arbiters. And, in
October, DOJ published the guidelines .
DOJ acknowledges ps ychological research's primary impact on the
guidelines. Reno, in her mes sage about the impetus for the work,
cites the "growing body of research in the
field of eyewitness identification."
The guidelines ' introduction states, "During the pas t 20
years, research psychologists have produced a substantial body of
findings regarding eyewitness evidence," that offers the
legal s ystem a "valuable body of empirical evidence."
The 38 pages of recomm endations call for, for example:
FEATURE
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som etimes feel it is their job to pick the person who looks mos
t like the perpetrator.
The panel's res earchers, however lost a battle for a recommenda
tion that line-ups be double-blind: Police officials res isted that
addition, believing it would im ply they couldn't be
trusted.
Psychological researchers als o could not persuade the group
that identification procedures should present the persons or the
photos one by one, rather than in a group.
Research shows that sequential presentation produces more
reliable results.
However, indicates Rau, after the guidelines have been used for
a few years, the DOJ may undertake processes for imp roving and
expanding them.
In the meantime, Wells believes, the recomm endations m ark a
sharp increase in the visibility and credibility of psychology
within the legal s ystem.
They are, he believes, a "huge turning point" because, after
this time, psychology will be much m ore integrated into criminal
jus tice on questions of memory and the law. And, after
all, he says, "Every witness on the stand is operating from mem
ory."
The guidelines are on the DOJ web site at
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij) . Click on
"What's New."
The DOJ pub lication on exonerations, "Convicted b y Juries,
Exonerated by Science," is at www.NCJRS.org(http://www.ncjrs.org/)
in the abstracts database.
Gary L. Wells presented his research at the recent APA/American
Bar Association conference, "Psychological Expertise and Criminal
Justice" in the session en titled, "Psychology,
Law and Eyewitness Identification." Information on the
conference course book s and audiotapes (single or entire set) is
available at (800) 374-2721 , x5991.
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Running commentary--Div. 18: A
dedication to public se rvice
Inequality in prison
A Clos er Look at Divisi on 41--Science
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