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Eyewitnesses are prone to error. When they make mistakes, the actual perpetrator is more likely to go free. Because eyewitness misidentification is so pervasive, social scientists have spent the last 40 years studying which police practices can be improved to increase the reliability of identification evidence. Based on this scholarship, the American Psychology-Law Society commissioned a panel of eyewitness scholars to review the extant literature and make evidence-based recommendations about the practices that officers should use for conducting better identification procedures. One of these recommendations is a call for evidence-based suspicion. Specifically, eyewitness experts argue that there should be evidence-based grounds to suspect that an individual is guilty of the specific crime being investigated before including that individual in an identification procedure. Because there are many possible examples of what could qualify as evidence-based suspicion for the purposes of justifying the placement of an individual in a lineup identification procedure, we will discuss what does and does not constitute as sufficient. We will also discuss the role that facial recognition technology plays in suspect development and outline the potential benefits and limitations to its use in the eyewitness lineup context. Because eyewitness expert witnesses can now testify about how the suspect was developed, seminar attendees will leave better equipped to avoid common pitfalls that could harm the reliability of eyewitness evidence in the courtroom.

PRESENTERS: Dr. Jacqueline Katzman, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Dr. Margaret Kovera, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

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