Can You Identify the Criminal Justice Professor who is Working to Decrease Wrongful Convictions, Ma'am? Take Your Time.

Dr. Haigh

The Usual Suspects.  Witness.  A Fish Called Wanda.  The Player.

You’ve seen the movie before.

It’s a classic way that police identify suspects: lining a bunch of shady-looking characters into a viewing room, usually against a background striped with height-lines, then bringing the little old lady who had her purse snatched into a secret room behind a one-way mirror.  The detectives are like, “Take your time, ma'am.  Do any of these men look familiar to you?”

The lady is like, “Let me get my glasses.”

The detectives are like, “Were you wearing your glasses at the time your purse was snatched?”

And the lady is like, “Oh, heavens no.  I had left them at the Bingo parlor.”

And the detectives look at each other and say something like, “Well, look at Number 3.  Doesn’t he look like the man who snatched your purse?”

And the lady squints and is like, “Well, he sure does look like an unpleasant character.  I wouldn’t put it past him.”

And before you know it, Number 3 is doing hard time, while some emboldened purse-snatcher is free to continue his campaign of violently appropriating the flip phones, CVS receipts, and Werther’s hard candies of the nation's old ladies.

It’s not just in the movies, as UB Professor Cassidy Haigh explained to an attentive standing-room-only crowd at the latest installment of the College of Science and Society's Lunch-&-Learn program.  Lineups are a common tool in the Criminal Justice arsenal, although they more often take place through the medium of mugshot photography rather than the morose chorus line familiar from the movies.  And, as you might suspect as soon as you start to think about it, the process of getting reliable information from lineup witnesses is fraught with various challenges.  Witnesses have cloudy memories.  Subtle cues in either the photographs or the coordination of the live lineup can make one person seem more conspicuous, and hence more likely to be perceived as guilty, than another.  The description of the perpetrator may happen to match up more closely with the (not-necessarily-guilty) suspect than it does with the “fillers,” the non-guilty people who are included in the lineup like the wrong answers that teachers write for a multiple-choice quiz.  And, most problematically, the law enforcement officers coordinating the lineup may have a vested interest in gathering evidence that proves that their suspect is guilty, and there are all sorts of conscious and unconscious ways that they can prod the eyewitness to choose the person they want them to choose.

Dr. Haigh’s presentation was titled “Eyewitness Science in (In)action: State Statutory Law on Identification Procedures.”  Photographic or in-person lineups, Dr. Haigh insisted, can be useful strategies for identifying legitimately guilty people, but she began her talk by pointing out that over 3,000 wrongful convictions have been recorded since 1989, that wrongfully convicted people spend an average of 17 years in prison before their wrongful convictions are ever overturned, and some of these people die in incarceration before they are exonerated.  More than 27,000 years of American lives have been lost to wrongful conviction, which is staggering and horrifying.  These are all innocent people whose lives are torn away from them irreparably, and they could easily be you or me.  Improving lineup protocol can play an important role, Dr. Haigh argued, in mitigating these chilling statistics.

Dr. Haigh worked with a team of grad students to comb through the statutes of all 50 states to determine the extent to which existing statutes required law enforcement officers to align their lineup practices with evidence-based research regarding the kinds of protocols that are least likely to result in wrongful identifications.  It turns out that only 27 states in the US have statutory laws on eyewitness ID procedures, and that these existing laws vary wildly from state to state.  “Best practices” such as double-blind lineup administration, the standardization of pre-lineup instructions, and the requirement to video-record lineup testimony, are only mandated in some states, and not in others. 

Dr. Haigh made an urgent case that citizens have a responsibility to demand that their elected representatives work to develop statutes that protect citizens against arbitrary or even abusive techniques for manufacturing – even if unconsciously – damning testimony against innocent people.

Following the Lunch and Learn, we left the Discovery Pavilion full of gratitude for Dr. Haigh and her students for striving to make the world a little more just.  We also might have been clutching our purses ever so slightly more closely.

            The Lunch & Learn series is supported by the University of Bridgeport's College of Science and Society for the purpose of disseminating faculty scholarship and cultivating interdisciplinary discourse.