Recently an article appearing in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law summarized the results of 72 different scientific studies concerning the major reasons for wrongful convictions of accused persons in this country. Several messages became painfully clear. First, the primary cause of wrongful conviction is the inaccuracy of eyewitness identification, especially during police photo array sessions and personal line-ups. Witnesses in these situations frequently select someone as a perpetrator, whom later evidence will prove to have been innocent. Second, the cause of the problem is more procedural than it is factual. When witnesses participate in simultaneous photo arrays or line-ups, where they are shown all the photographs of potential culprits or see them in person all at once, they will make relative rather than absolute judgments about guilt or innocence. They will assume that the guilty person is present and that it is their responsibility to identify her even if they have doubts about accuracy. In contrast, when the same witnesses are shown one photograph or person sequentially and asked to make an absolute judgment in each case, they are much more likely to be more careful in their decision making and more willing to select no one at all if they do not feel the culprit had been presented to them.
One would think that with such a preponderance of evidence behind the accuracy of witness identification resulting from sequential as opposed to simultaneous line-ups that police departments would have stopped using the former in favor of the latter a long time ago. After all a good portion of this research has been around for almost three decades and has been widely publicized. Yet, according to some estimates, less than 1% of all police departments across the country have adopted the new style of line-up. In fact, police chiefs and their associations have often been the most vociferous opponents of the findings of such studies, attacking the methodologies used by the researchers, their personal motives and even their individual integrity.
Why such a strong rejection of what might on the face of it seem such a simple change of formal procedures for the purpose of fairer and more accurate criminal justice outcomes? A good portion of the answer lies in what happened in Cook County (Chicago) during this controversy. Analysts in the city's police department conducted their own study of line ups. They claimed to have discovered incontrovertible scientific proof concerning the validity of simultaneous verson sequential line-ups. When asked by other social scientists to share the data behind their study, they refused claiming it would violate the accused persons' privacy, even though no one in the line-up were identified by name. Flabergasted at this "unscientific" response on the part of their colleagues in Cook County, the outside researchers filed a Freedom of Information suit, only to have a local court reject their request on the grounds that statistical data collected by the police analysts was privileged information.
And so the matter might have rested, unforgotten in the annals of academic research, were it not for the fact of what it symbolizes about how we go about developing and conducting public policy in this country. As political partisanship has grown and the power of moneyed elites to influence electoral and legislative outcomes has flourished, the inability to agree on even the most basic "facts" of a situation, such as where a President was born, has tainted any hope of using scientific research for the greater good of the community rather than for the personal benefit of the indivdual. It becomes clear in listening to debates in Congress that scientific research has simply become a form of political ammunition for winning ideological debates rather than for making sound policy decisions.
In Great Britain over the course of the recent Labour Government under Tony Blair, there was a sustained effort to introduce what was known as evidence-based policy in government. It resulted from the simple acknowledgement that practice flows from policy and that uninformed policy can easily result in destructive practice. In 1997, Labour rode to victory with the slogan "what count is what works." It sought to replace political ideology with evidence by establishing a Centre for Management and Policy Studies and a Strategic Policy Making Team in the Cabinet Office, the highest level of government. Labour believed that a rapidly changing and more complex society demanded the use of systematic and well-focused evidence and analysis to meet it challenges. It was determined to restructure the relationship of political power to knowledge and information at the policy as well as the practice level of governmental operation by means of cross-functional and cross-sectoral collaboration designed to produce specific measurable outcomes.
While these intiatives were certainly ambitious and many of the concrete results proved dubious in light of some questionable Labour manipulations of "facts" in its decision to intervene in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Husein, such an effort has never occurred to any sustained degree in national government circles in the United States. Quite the contrary, partisan distrust seems to have eviscerated any hope for seeing scientific research as a source of "objective" data and analysis. Rather it has become just another tool for deriving ideological advantage in a fierce struggle for obtaining and maintaining political power at all costs.
No one knows how many innocent Americans languish behind bars or have even been put to death because of the potentially "destructive practice" of something as simple as the operation of a police line-up. But until we figure out a way to trust the integrity of fellow Americans who are engaged in sound scientific research, the numbers of falsely convicted men and women in this country due to improper witness identification will only continue to grow.
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