How Police Lineups Work

two thirteen or fifteen something, ungodly time ago. It's my replacement. Yeah, it was the April Fools joke for the three D printing episode. So this is your second time on the show. Yeah, the Internet shredgy Ben was it were? They were like a target of abuse. I want to thank everybody for the very polite emails and as as we could tell, thankfully, Chuck is fine. They yeah, they took it easy on him.

We have very nice listeners. Something. And then know, this might be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast, even though you've guess produced it like a million times. I think I may have mumbled something in the background the time. Really, so we're having you two on let's cut, let's get down a business because you two have a podcast together, right, I know you also are on Mini

Crushed movie Crush. Yeah, you're also in real World's colliding right now, Right, there's a lot I'm going over them all. You're on stuff they don't want you to know. But you two, Ben and Nol have come together and made ridiculous history, which isn't awesome. Oh yeah, that's right. We're just missing that. God I'm starting to sweat. But you guys are on ridiculous history together. We are tell us about that. So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events,

often not covered in your typical history class. Sounds for Mimilier, right, because for one reason or another, people thought that's no way that didn't really happen. The first recorded instance of a mooning did not result in the death of hundreds of people, is surely not? Surely not? But it did, And surely the US government did not have a plan to shoot a nuclear missile at the moon, right, That was just a Mr Show sketch, Sure not, but it

also was It was kind of parallel thinking. Is the Mr show sketch happened before this story became declassified Project day one nine. So our continuing mission with Ridiculous History, not to sound too star trekky about it, is to find those moments, the bizarre people, places, and things throughout the span of human civilization that at least crack the both of us up on a continual basis. And sometimes we do have to stop recording just for a second

because we're so tickled. Yeah wow, that's that's actually high qualities, mainly because we tickle each other physically. That's cheating, Ben, You're making it sound so serious. It's actually a lot of fun. It's a fun show, right Yeah, Okay, Yeah, I mean I'm giving been a hard time, but yeah, that's definitely like we touch on from time to time.

It'll it'll go into a heavier territory. Like, for example, we did an episode about how women in Kansas in the nineteen twenties were imprisoned in labor camps for having STDs. Well that certainly falls under ridiculous, not exactly fun or funny right now, ridiculous, But so it's it's it's all

of those things. Some of them are you know, crack you up hilarious moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by bunnies or you know, the aforementioned stt labor camps or racist special Olympics that were held here in the States. And we're a complete uh well tomorrow phrase we use on the show each ship show. So so wait a minute, I think you are like, you need to name the

state that hosted that. It was St. Louis. Yeah. St Louis, And it's because the World's Fair was happening in St. Louis and they were going to have it in Chicago. But the people hosting the World's Fair said, if you don't do your Olympics as part of the World's Fair, we're going to totally blow you out of the water with how awesome our World's Fair is. And no one's

gonna come to your Olympics. Scared them in the early days of like, you know, not the earliest days of the Olympics, when they brought it back like in them, you know, it was not ancient room. It was not

in fact ancient Rome. And it was also it was not a good example of the Olympics either because the white supremacists who were in charge of the whole shebang decided that this would be the perfect time to prove their cockamamie ideas of like eugenic ideas of kind of like white superiority and like they would have indigenous people competing in these Olympic events, but of course they didn't teach them how to, you know, do the events, so they didn't just automatically know how to pull vault or

throw a javelin or whatever. So and one supremacists can ruin anything. Anything they put their hands on, they really can just turns to poop. Yeah, we are doing an episode on flash events later, so stay tuned for there. So, so before we give everything away, you guys tell everyone where they can find ridiculous history and when. You can find ridiculous history at our website. No, it's ridiculous history show, I think, so the website. It's definitely keep prepared for this.

I've got steck of notes right here. Yeah, you can find us an Apple podcast. You find us on Spotify, you can find us wherever you find your favorite shows, like stuff you should know or stuff they don't want you to know, or I should I list the entire pantheon of all the shows we have. It's too many at this point, but but yes, you can find us in all of those places. We also have a community page, uh that we're really proud of and really happy with,

called ridiculous Historians on Facebook. Taking a total cue from the cisk army nice. Well, First of all, thank you for all of the flattery that you've been heaping on us for the last few minutes as much appreciated, but also thank you for coming by. Appreciate it, guys, Thank you guys for having so much. Let's do this every week. Yeah, that might be been much. Let me check the sketch. I gotta tell you, I love those guys, but I'm glad to get out of that that new studio box.

It's like a Fema trailer. Man. It's for malde hyde wafting off slowly poisoning us. It is still offcasting. It feels like, yeah, big time. It's in my hair, which is now falling out. We're in bad shape. Well before, I like what you're wearing. By the way, thank you. I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself and luckily I had a bunch of samples of our new T shirt. Yeah, and this is not just a plug. Everyone.

Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T shirt from the Stuff you Should Know store because they sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great, to the guy who has a hundred T shirts, here's twenty more. But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with this. Like the size of it. Look at the size, perfect size. It's not so big that it wraps around and gets all mangled by my love handles. But it's also not so small that it looks like, you know, caved in chest.

You know what I mean. I didn't remember that reference though I didn't neither like they listened to the Pie Piper episode. Oh there you go. It sounds like a youth thing, yeah, Josh, But it was just an offhanded comment I made. Now it's a T shirt I'm wearing, which is I love. It makes a pretty great time to be alive. By the way, I need to give a shout out to Brittney Shift. Um, Britney Shift sent this idea to us. Okay, great, And the reason you

know we don't often take well that's not true. We kind of keep a kitty of listeners suggestions, but we don't often like do one the next week and then shout out the person. But I thought we had fully exhausted our Crime and Punishment series. So I was delighted that Britney Shifts sent this in and I was like, why haven't we done police lineup? I don't know, it's a great question. Was just sitting there waiting. Yep. The only other one that's left is what kind of shoes

detectives wear? That that's the last one? Is this? Yeah, that's gum shoe or crepe sold I think do you knew that? Yeah? But I don't know how it relates to cops. I guess they wore those. They are super comfortable. Cops are always walking around walking, yeah you know, but sometimes when they're walking, they're actually out on the street looking for people who resemble a suspect that they have in the jail house. And they say, hey, you come on over here, how would you like to make ten bucks?

And the person says exactly how copper and the cops says, by standing in is what we call a filler in a police or they do like Comber Simpson and when they were like a boat raffle that they said he had to come down to the police station. Yeah, you want a boat? Yeah, and then they beat him merciless for like parking unpaid parking tickets. Also shout out to Beth at Schuster, who wrote to this article in the n i J Journal the National Institute of Justice, I believe, so,

is that right? Yeah, they're pretty much committed to keeping people from being wrongly convicted, so I would guess the J stance for justice. Yeah, and this is this is a good start, and we had some other stuff we added to it. But thank you Ms Schuster, Yeah for your work up. Well, um, I already led into the episode and it didn't take so let me try again. This n i J article you sent calls out a dude named Jerry Miller, who back was two years old,

I believe. And Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping, and raping a woman, and he got convicted. He was convicted because two people, two eye witnesses, saw him in the lineup picked him out, and then later at trial the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but who cares. There's two eye witnesses that picked the show out of a lineup. He's done. He did twenty four years in prison, and you may notice from the tone

that I'm using here he was wrongfully convicted. He actually got out of prison and was living life re leased on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet a monitor constantly as a registered sex offender. And then finally I think, um, oh, I'm not quite sure two thousand seven. In two thousand seven, as part of the Innocence Project, which we've done an episode on with um, yeah, that lady what is her name? Oh, Haulleen, but it's definitely not Paulazon. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah, I

wanted to say Pauli Shore so bad. I just knew it was wrong, but we didn't. Right, We did an Innocence Project episode, and under the Innocence Project, Jerry Miller was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did not do this and lost twenty four years of his life because

of flawed eyewitness testimony. Yeah, and so you know, this is all about police lineups and more about I mean, we'll tell you how they work in a general sense, but this sort of more about how you know, it's such an imperfect system, but sort of The takeaway from all of this that we're about to go over with all the studies and the trying different things is kind of like, you know, it's an imperfect system and we can try and craft it the best way we can,

but human memory is imperfect. Identifying people in lineups is imperfect, and we're just it's kind of the best we got right now. Right Well, a lot of people are like, get rid of eyewitness testimony really altogether, yes, all together. Humans suck at eyewitness testimony. And there's a lot of reasons why. It's not like people are out there like I want to have me a bad guy, show me a lineup. I'm gonna pick one of those guys out. They're not doing that. They're they're subject to basically the

way our brains are wired. We don't walk around videotaping everything that we see. Yeah, you know, we get sillly bombarded with sensory information and under normal circumstances, you know, you see a stranger on the street, you just see there's another human. I've identified him as not a threat and keep walking by it. If that person turned out to be accused of a crime, um or or perpetrated a crime, and you were brought in to say was

this the person you saw? Your brain is going to try to reconstruct what little pieces of memory it formed of that person. And there's a lot of things, a lot of factors that are involved that can make that really difficult task even harder. Yeah. Like I am someone who has told myself, Chuck, pay attention. Like, if you're ever in a situation like, pay attention, try and collect yourself and try and remember a few really good details about the car or the person. So like, this is

on my mind. And I actually had a situation when I lived now I happened to me where I had to go through a police lineup and I failed. Oh really, was the suspect there? No? Well no, here's here's the quick version is I wasn't in a hit and run this lady. Uh, these two lady, these two younger girls, they were probably teenagers, hit me from behind in my car. I stopped my car, starting to get out and they take off. So it's a hit and run. I chase them,

which is you should not do. Were you shooting into the air and again to slow down trying to shoot out their tires? No, but I did chase him. Because I was so mad, and your adrenaline just shoots through the roof when something like that happens, so immediately you're just not yourself and like recording details. So I was trying to catch up to get a license plate. I saw that they went down the street that I knew was a dead end. Um, it wasn't a cul de sect,

but it functioned to like a cul de sact. So I stopped where I was, got out of the car. Sure enough, twenty later they come halling but back towards me, and uh, the look on their faces was like you know, oh, snap, there's the guy. And they just sped right past me. And I saw their faces as they sped past me in their car. The cops found the car, found the people, and they're like, we didn't do that, and so who are these girls? These teenagers? Well that's the long and

short of it. Is all you have to do and something like that. I said, didn't do it, and if I can't pick you out, then you get away. And they showed me pictures of like, you know, these were like teenage young teenage Hispanic women. They showed me probably probably fifteen pictures and said, can you identify them. I was like, no, it was a month ago. They sped past me for a second, like I couldn't even hazard a guess, and I didn't want to do that. You know,

well that's very sensible of you. Yeah, I just didn't want to take a stab at it. So I was like, no, I have no idea, and they're basically like, sorry, they said they didn't do it. Wow. It's like, but you have the car and it's damaged, and like none of that matters. They're like not not if you can't identify I mean I could see that. I think would be like, oh, yeah, that happened some other times in some other hit and runs.

I mean, but yeah. The long story short though, is I'm someone who has tried to tell myself to react in the right ways, and I couldn't tell them much beyond like the color of the car and sort of would it looked like because you were seeing red? Because right, that's our that our bodies are not primed to form memories. It's not where our where our energy goes. It's more like getting away or shooting out the tires of a

car that just hit and ran. Right, But what you did with that lineup is the other side of the coin. The other problem with lineups is or eyewitness testimony from lineups, is that sometimes people pick out people who are innocent and other times people fail to pick out the people who are actually the perpetrators. So it's like you said, they're very they're very flaw it's as flawed system. The problem is is the wrong people can go to jail and the people who actually did it can get away

with it. So that's an extremely flawed system. And when something that um important is on the table, then um, it needs to be fixed. And there's a lot of people looking into how it can be fixed, but we're not there yet by any stretch. No, and here's the stat you were talking about the DNA exoneration. Uh, of the first three exonerations in the US were wrongfully convicted because of eyewitness testimony and police lineups. Say it again,

seventy of the first hundred and eighty three. So like the Innocence Project, it's basically like a pilot study to show through DNA exoneration all the ways that we wrongfully convict people. And what is coming to the to the front is eyewitness testimony. Yeah, and that the basis of

that is the police lineup right. And one other thing that's that's problematic with the eyewitness testimony is if you want to wow a jury, bring out an eyewitness who seems totally sure that what they saw or that they saw the person they're pointing to and the defendant's table, yeah, or that that dramatic moment. It's like a movie trope. Now you know, is the person in this room right? Let the records show that witness is pointing at the defendant, right. Yeah.

So the problem is it has a huge impact, but it's also really crutty wit, really crutty um evidence. There's this guy here, he had a great quote. He says that um eyewitness testimony is a very unusual, complex kind of trace evidence, and it's difficult to recover, easy to contaminate, and very hard to handle. And that just there's no

better description of eyewitness testimony. If I was ever in court and someone identified me from the witness stand, I would do that thing where you look at behind you when they pointed at you, just be like, I think they're talking behind me, and they would say no, and they would point again, and I would move a little bit more I'd be like, this is this witness is clearly disturbed, and then if that, if that didn't work, you would escalate to I'm rubber and your glue. Yeah,

that usually works, right. So there's a couple of other things that makes eyewitness testimony problematic, Chuck Um. In addition to not being like human video recorders, there are human VCRs. There are, Um, there are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime, that can make it really difficult to remember. If you're in a fight or flight situation, you're not forming memories. If there's a weapon, um, there are people tend to focus on the weapon. Um. You me was mugged once

and the opposite happened to her. She remember what the person looked like, but she didn't even remember that there was a weapon. And her friends were like, yeah, there was a gun. Interesting, Yeah, and she went to a lineup and like pick the guy out and bullet proof. So she is so she's like, take your gun and shove it that I'm not even going to recognize it. No,

but that makes sense. If someone pulls a gun on you or has a switchblade or some other kind of creepy weapon, the human instinct is to to focus your attention on that thing pointed at you. And apparently people can really describe the weapon, right, But you're focusing on the weapon, you're not focused on the person who's holding the weapon. Typically that helps a little bit, but not

as much as the face. Right. And then another problem is if you are um, say uh an hispanic dude, and you're a witness to a crime and it's a white guy who's the perpetrator, you're going to have a tremendous amount of difficulty picking that white guy out, as sad as it is to say, from a lineup of other white guys, because I would this testimony that crosses race or ethnicities is known to be very unreliable because it's just more difficult for somebody of an ethnicity or

a race to to separate or identify people of another ethnicity or race. Yeah, and I don't think it's the case where people are like, oh, white people look the same to me. It's just weird brain science, right, You

just have a harder time. From way back when we were basically Tuck Tuck and Tuk Tuk lived with fifteen other people that look just like him because they'd all been in breeding for generations and generations, and they had to be on the lookout for another group of people who've been inbreeding for generations and generations that wanted their jackfruit tree that they live by. What's jack fruit? O? That word jack fruit, the big huge thing, the big

huge one. It actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle shredded like shredded vegan standing. Oh okay, it's really good, gotcha, gotcha? All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup right after this. All right, so, run of the mill police lineups. I mentioned that before we left. Everyone's seen movies and TV shows, and it's not too far off. Actually, I mean, there are a couple of ways you can

do it. Uh. There are lineups where you look at someone in front of your face. And then there are lineups like I had in l A, where I look at photographs the ones. You know. It's way more sexy for a TV show or a movie to line them up in the traditional way. It's extray or narrowly sexy like a live police lineup like you see on TV. Uh. And then there are the simultaneous or sequential there's a lot of debate, which we'll get into in a minute, about which is best. To me, it's pretty obvious that

sequential is best. Simultaneous is the one that you see on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or ladies, uh, and you identify them. Uh usually well it depends. We'll get into the fillers or the foils, but uh, only usually only one of those people is a suspect. And

in like the best ideal version of it. Uh, then there're sequential, And that's when they bring out one person at a time and bring out like seven guys, just one at a time, and you say, you know, let me know at the end of this which one you think it was, or if it's a photo lineup, they show you one photo at a time. Exactly. Yeah, I agree with you. I think sequential is head and shoulders

the better one of the of the two. Yeah. And here's the the final little piece of how it can vary is whether or not to the administrator that the person that's in charge of administrating the lineup knows who the purp is or not. Yeah. That's a big one, man. So it's either double blind, which means that they don't even know, and to me, it seems obvious that that's always the best way because there are many many circumstances where you would actually even if you don't want to

or mean to lead a witness. And one example they gave here in this article is if they say, and if they identify a filler or a foil a k a. A person that was paid ten bucks, say that's the person, the administrator might say, take your time? Are you sure like you really need to take your time? Which is basically pretty much they or conversely, if if um, when they're doing it sequentially, when they get to like number four, they're like, WHOA get a load of this guy. Huh jeez,

look at that bag character. He's guilty of something. But they can't like even just a smile or something like that, like a non verbal que you don't even mean to do, right, or you may mean to do because you know that that's the guy, and you know it in your bones that that guy did it, and you're leading the witness, right,

it can be some some sort of nonverbal gesture. The problem is is that most people, I can't say most people, but it's been shown that some people, when they're brought in as a witness for a police lineup, I feel like it's their role. It's their job to pick somebody for the cops. So they're more than happy to be led by the cops because then they're fulfilling their role

and they did what they were supposed to do. So another another technique or way to administer a good lineup is to say, here, here's the lineup, whether it's sequential one at a time or um all at once simultaneously. Right, Um, the suspect may or may not be in this lineup. Yeah, that seems like I think they found that reduced mistaken identity rates, uh were lower when they did this, So you would think just always do that right right, because it says to the witness like the person may not

be in here. It's like a none of the above, the dreaded letter e none of the above. You're like, oh God, does that does that mean that they're that the answers not here? And so you may you may say I don't I don't see them where. If they don't say that, you're going to presume that the suspect is in that lineup, and it's your job to find that person and you have to pick somebody. Yeah, most people aren't going to think like I can't say so,

I'm just not going to They're gonna be like three. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's a crime against you most a lot of times when you're like picking out this purpose. Sure. Uh so you want them to be you know, found or whatever. Yeah, that's a really good point to you want you don't want them to get away with it. And the other thing too, is I think there's a natural human instinct when given a test to not want to say I can't like you might feel like you

have failed. Right. That's why I admire you saying that, like with the phone lineup, you know, not not being not just being like yeah, but if that wouldn't matter to my case, because if I would have said these two and then they're like, no, that's not the lady whose car it was. But a lot of people still would have right right, right, And they probably wouldn't say no, that's wrong. They would have been like, Okay, thanks a lot for your time or whatever, and then you would

have left. They have been like, god, he was so close. Uh. Some other research it's interesting that suggests when uh, there is an offender in the lineup that young children and elderly perform about as well as just regularly young adults. But when the lineup does not have the actual offender, then they commit mistakes a lot higher. And to me, that's just because I think kids and elderly might not

fully understand. I think they have to pick somebody. Okay, yeah, I agree, I think that's exactly what it is too. But the research bears that out. It looks like so there's there is some like you you talked about research, there's a lot of research in this, but it's become ambiguous.

Right if you step back and you listen to all of the different different things that you can do with a lineup, it becomes very clear that a sequential double blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is shown to the person at a time, or one live suspect is brought out to be looked at one person at a time and is administered by a cop or a worker somebody who doesn't know who the suspect is, that that's going to reduce the chance of a misidentification

or a failure of an identification, and that the person who's being presented with these people is not going to be able to guess, and if they actually do remember who the perpetrator was, they're going to recognize them. It's just obvious that that's the best way to do it. Right.

The thing is is there was a study in Illinois UM that just completely rocked that idea that that that's the case, because there was a three or five year study in Illinois that looked at different types of lineups and compared them side by side and found that actually, know that a double blind sequential UM lineup actually produces worse results than a UM a simultaneous non double blind one. Right.

But then again, not so fast with that because other people since then have questioned the methodology they used in that program and kind of said, you know, I don't even know if we can take this research and take these statistics seriously, right, because method methodologically it was a screwed up study, Like they really dropped the ball on the study. Yeah, and um, I don't think we mentioned the two judgments either. During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing

there together, you use what's called relative judgment. In other words, you compare all the dudes standing up there against one another, and with the ones where they trot them out one at a time. They use something called absolute judgment, which is supposedly means that they're comparing it to only their

memory and not to the people that came before or after. Right, That's that's the hope, that's the ideal, right, right, But with this reachers and research in the study, I kind of didn't even know what to think because it sort of went against the grain and the findings. But then they said, I don't even know if we can trust these findings because the methodology was no good. So we ended up sort of back at square one with the Illinois pilot program. It seems like, yeah, the reason why

the methodolo methodology was so terrible. They used the double blind procedure for sequential lineups, but they didn't use it for simultaneous lineups. So if cops were advertently or inadvertently leading people with simultaneous lineups, then of course those those are going to produce um correct choices with suspects better than the one that's a double blind sequential one. They

compared apples to oranges in the study. It's almost like a sixth grader came up with how to actually conduct the study that the Illinois legislature said, Illinois State Police, go go figure this out, to do a three year study on this, and they came back and said, huh,

and it was it's terrible. And the problem is, if it is true that a sequential double blind study is the way to go, that it is just smarter and works better, that study set that back by years because now all the cops all over the country heard they did the study and it's actually worse not and the design of the study was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work. Yeah.

They even went to the cops UH at Illinois Pilot program talk to them and they said the majority of the officers said they didn't think that it was superior UH and said that witnesses who can identify the offender can do so under either procedure UH and officers express concerns that using a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an investigator has tries to build with a witness. So I interpret all that as it's cops saying, can we just keep doing it the way we've always done it because

it gets results right. But the thing is is, um, they have some pretty good points in that if you are running a lineup or whatever. You put together like a six pack is what it's called in the US, where you've got three and three mug shots of people, um and or I think in Canada they usually use twelve. But you put this thing together, then you have to find like a patrol officer or a sergeant or somebody

who has no idea what's going on with your kids? Right, and then those that person is to go to the house, record the the what the person did, and then come back and tell you. It's just an extra thing that cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making it way too hard. Yeah. I mean they sit in here that sometimes even have trouble coming up with the blind administrator. And maybe it's a it probably has everything to do with budgets. But my thought is like, why

isn't there one person that does only this. Oh, that's a great question. That just is called the administrator the fine of administrator and goes to the people's houses or runs them in the in the precinct or whatever, and this is the only thing that they do, Right, I'll do it. Bring in the administrator. Yeah, that's a TV show waiting to happen. Uh Yeah, I don't know, it's

probably budgetary. Um. They also found with a lot of these when there's multiple purpose, it just goes haywire because sometimes they'll put two of the purpose in the same lineup,

right right, so super confusing. That actually falls in line with like how to build like a decent line up the right way, and we'll cover that and where they get people to stand in as suspects right after this, All right, Chuck, So you were just talking about how if you have a lineup and you put two suspects that you've got, say there are two guys who robbed some lady, um, and you have five people in the lineup,

but two of them are your suspects. That actually is totally unfair for the suspects because what you've done just then is increase the chance that somebody could guess, just guess randomly, uh at the suspect. Right. If you have five people in a lineup and one of them are the suspect, then that person has a one in five chance of being chosen by random chance. But if there's two suspects in a five person lineup, they have a two out of five chance, which is way more than

a one in five chance. Some people might even say double the chance, right, and so it's just less fair. So one of the standards that you want to fulfill if you're putting together a lineup in your cop is that you have one suspect per lineup, which is tougher to do than you would think. Yeah, and it seems like a lot of the problem with this is uh and they even say so in the n i J articles that lab studies are one thing, but actually implementing

this in the field they get different results. And people are doing lab research on one end, cops are out in the field, sometimes they're in people's homes, sometimes they're in the precinct. And it seems like the two heads aren't talking very much, and there are people, you know. They did like a live web chat at some point to bring together all these experts from around the world, and they kind of all around me were like, this is a big mess and we need to all combined

forces to try and do the right thing. And the feeling I get is that a lot of these police precincts just kind of want to be left alone. Sure, I mean, they know what works, and it works, you know, but does it well, that's the question, So, um, they fingered a collar, right, is that the right the gumsh you finger to call it? Yeah, then uh, it's it's all in a good day's work. But if they fingered the wrong collar, then it's no good so um. One of the reasons it's somebody cop would put a two

suspects in a lineup. It's not just to like increase the chances that one of those suspects gets picked by an eyewitness. It's because sometimes it can be hard to come up with people for a lineup. Yeah, this was hard to believe, Like they can't find people sometimes, right, Well, and the reason why is because let's say you have multiple witnesses, and each witness gives you a different description of the perpetrator. Right, Ideally, you're going to find a

different lineup for each witness. Yeah, Like, if there's three witnesses, you should run three lineups because their descriptions are probably somewhat different. Right. That can be difficult, And there's a couple of ways to handle a lineup. You can do a suspect matched lineup, where you've got a suspect and to keep your suspect from standing out, you make um all the other people in the lineup look like you

know your suspect. That's one way to do it. Another is to do the perpetrator description match strategy, which is you've got um and that's when you have no suspect, right,

just ants. You can have a suspect, but you're creating your lineup based on what the what the witness has described the perpetrator to look like, and then just throw the suspect in there right, which can be bad for the suspect because if the suspect the person you actually think did it, it doesn't look anything like the eye witness said that there's gonna be four redheads and the one blonde guy who's actually the suspect, he's going to

stand out like a sore throne. So there's a lot of different things that have to be massaged here to try to make everybody in the lineup basically look all like the perpetrator the eyewitness described, or all like the suspect that you've got, because you don't want the suspect to stand out. And there's a lot of techniques that they used to try to make everybody look the same. Yeah, one of the I mean they like you said, they dressed people. It was funny that one article said in

the Bronx Precinct, they usually put them in Yankees hats. Right, just line up a bunch of guys and Yankees, right. That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging outside of the you know that room where they walk them into. Wasn't Cramer in the lineup when he was suspect totally serial killer suspect? Yes, I don't remember it was a serial killer, but I remember he was in

the line up. He kept turning the wrong way. Yeah, I think he was misidentified on the when they went to l A to pitch the TV show, Cramer got caught up in some like serial killer thing. I think of that, and I think of the great lineup scene in The Usual Suspects, which let's address that real quick, when they have to say something so well, we can't

repeat it here because there's bad words. Right. You know, what I was going to say is that that lineup would never happen because not only do you have two suspects in there, all five people in the lineup are your suspects, and they're not dressed the same Yep. Yeah, it's it's a total movie line up, it would never happen. What were you going to say about them saying something? Well, they had to recite a line. I don't know how

typical that is, though, you me. When she did her line up, she remembered what the guy was saying, and they that, okay, so that's the thing. And she was like, wait a minute, can I do they have to say whatever I say they said? And the cop was like yeah, and she's like, really what I wanted to say? Yeah? He's like, no, you have to say what they actually said. Oh yeah, how did that result? Did she get the guy? Oh? She picked him out of media? Okay, yeah, yeah, I

think I got busted. Nice man, you don't mug you me. I'll tell you that, buddy. You hear that? Purpose right, he started quaking in your boots. The one thing, too, that caught me sort of off guard is that I never thought about is the the part about whether or not they're clean shaven, Like there could be details of omission, Like if eyewitness doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they either were clean shaven or not, then I think they

default just something that may not be accurate. And so all of a sudden you're lineup, well, your lineup should have all clean shaven dudes. You should just assume that if they didn't say the guy had a beard, that that doesn't that that doesn't mean that the guy had

a beard and they just didn't say it. You should just assume it means that they're clean shave, and they should all be clean shaven in the lineup, because if you have five clean shaven guys and one filler or one foil with a big beard like me, I might get picked out just because I look different, right exactly, Or if if the one guy's clean shaven, and you're like, well, they didn't say that the person had a beard, but

they also didn't say they didn't have a beard. So I can put this clean shaven suspect in with four other guys who all have beards and make them stand out. That's the opposite. And apparently there's this New York Times article from years back about a guy named, um what was his name, casting agent basically Robert Weston, Yeah, Robert Weston.

It's it's pretty interesting little article. Um. But in the article it says that the Bronx cops that use this guy to help fill lineups which we'll talk about in a second. Um that that when they give the perpetrators like the Yankees, hats or whatever for the lineup, like the perpetrator is always the one who pulls it down over his eyes, and they have to be like, dude, putt see however, but else is wearing their hat makes us exactly like that, or else they're going to pick

you out. So they actually are trying to help the perpetrator at least, not stand up and be like me, you know, and instead just keep it on the on the level, at least as far as the Yankees had brooms go. I so want to be a filler. I'm sure you could do it. I want to have to hang around long enough until the dude who looks like you commits a crime, which in Atlanta, I'm sure there's a lot of hipsters running around. For sure. I don't look like a hipster. I don't know, uh, I look

like it the hipster gone bad. Oh yeah, I'm not need enough to be a hips You look like a hit and run hipster. Hipsters are super well cooft and like squared Away. Oh I know what you mean. You know your your jeans aren't pegged no, I look like a hipster who slept in. So back to Robert Weston, this guy in New York at the time, at least, I can't believe how little money he made. He only got ten dollars for putting together a complete lineup. Yeah, and they said sometimes he does as many as four

in a day and sometimes not at all. Like so a good day for him is forty bucks. That's what it sounds like. Man. Maybe that's the problem is they need to Well again, it's budgetary. Probably he's gonna say, pay a little bit more, get a casting agent in there, get some of those college educated fillers in there, right, I guess. And and also it made it sound like, I don't know, he's kind of pulling people off the street.

Sometimes they're homeless people. Sometimes they're like drug addicts. Well yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on who the purpose. Sometimes they get other cops that aren't busy to stand in, right, I mean, these are people there's a real need. People will go to a police station and stand in the lineup for ten dollars. Right, they get paid as much as the guy who organized the party. Right. But if Robert Weston stands in himself. He'll get an extra twenty

bucks on top of putting the thing together right. How many times he tries to do that, but he he He even said like if they want white guys, I don't know any white guys. So they go to homeless shelters for that. And that's that's very much what cops do. Cops will go find people on the street, they will

go to homeless shelters. They will have UM casting agents like Robert Weston on their speed dial um and what they'll say is, I've got a um, middle aged white guy with a graying beard, and um he's about six ft tall. Give me four other people that match that description, and ideally four other people that that match that description will show up and not three and then one other total outlier or something like that. Well, the one cop was complaining about his work, it was kind of funny

complaining about Robert Weston. He was like, he didn't bring in good people. He always like fudges the ages and the races and stuff. But the reason why they keep using this guy is because he answers his fun doesn't matter what time you call him. He can put a lineup together for you. And if you have a very

limited amount of time. You can only hold the suspect for so long without charging the them, but you want to put them in a lineup for what's called an investigatory lineup to where you just want to see maybe bringing one witness just to see if you're on the right track. You've got a very limited amount of time and you need people like that, which means that you may have a lower quality one. Fortunately, that would just be for an investigatory one. If it were for a

confirmatory one. That's the one that you see on TV where it's like you bring in a witness and you've got your suspect and they're sitting in jail and you bring them out. That is the one where like all the t should be crossed in the eyes should be dotted, because a good court, well here, and we'll want to know the details of how that lineup went, and if anything sounds hinky, they'll toss that lineup right out, that eye witness testimony out. The worst possible version of all

of this is something called a show up. And this is something this is also a movie trope that you see and that's when an officer brings a witness to a place to show the witness the suspect that's been apprehend ended. So like they're in the back of a car, or here's what happens in the movie. There's a guy in the back of a police car handcuffed. They'll bring the person who was robbed or whatever there to the scene.

They'll yank him out of the back of the car and say, it's just the dirt bag who did it? Like just one guy, and uh, that's clearly the worst possible version of all of this, and the guys like, I need more pay, I'm coming down. So so one of the here's the reason why that show up is so terrible, Chuck, Well, there's no other people that they're comparing them to. That's one. But they're also in handcuffs, in the back of a cop car or something like that.

They're in police custody. And so the eyewitness is going to assume that, in addition to their testimony, the cops obviously have something on this person, and so that must mean that the cops know it's that person and this is just a formality. So I'll be like, yeah, sure, that was that person. That's the first problem with it. The second problem is is that from that point on, that person and that they've just seen now becomes the

star of their memory of that crime. It's like they photoshop this person's face into that vague, shadowy face that's holding the gun that they were actually focused on, and from that moment on they just get more and more certain that that was the person because that person is now starring in their memories. And it's not just the problem with the show up but with any um misidentification.

When they see that person and that person becomes seared in their brain, they're positive from that point on, and they can seem very confident in court, which again juries by even though it's garbage, and weeks and months can go by between the point that you have experienced a crime and when you may be identifying someone or a court for sure as months and months and months later. So man, part of me does think, like, get rid

of all this. A lot of people say that, or at the very least say, this is I would's test simony. It's actually terrible testimony. Actually it's terrible evidence, but let's do it right. But and if they did say that, if they basically lowered what what how much weight eyewitness testimony held in court. Then those cases that were built entirely on eyewitness testimony wouldn't have a leg to stand on. They have to go build a bigger case. Yeah, but like in Umi's case, it worked, it did now it

like that, right. That's the problem is that you know if if of the time is wrong, the time is right, we think so, I mean, it's not It's not like Arson investigation, which we're gonna do one on one day, where it's just totally made up. Like it does have some veracity, but there's a lot of flaws with it and the really dicey. They need to figure it out because of that, So they need to go do that now.

I mean, can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified and serving two decades in prison for something you really didn't do? No, I really can't. I mean I remember how said I got when we did the Innocence Project. It's just you hear these stories and then they get out and they're like, man, here's there's four thousand bucks. We feel pretty bad, right, go get yourself something nice. Try to forget about all this, right. Yeah, did you ever see that movie An Innocent Man with Tom Selick?

It's scared the Bejesus out of me. The same thing happened to him when he was when he was he was framed. Oh wait, that's high road to China. All right, I got my stuff, makes it? No, that's quickly down under that right? Uh? You got anything else? Nope? All right, Well that's it for police lineups for now. We'll do an update whenever they get it figured out. We did one on police catches, right, Okay, is this it we've done? No? We still got arson in the section. We got a

lot all right, um, yeah, okay, okay. If you want to know more about police line ups then I don't know, go hang around a police station. See if you can stand in one, learn firsthand. Okay. Get a little sign that says I will be your foil ten dollars. Uh. And since I said ten dollars, it's time for listener Matt. I'm gonna call this youngest fan is very cute email. Hey, guys, love the podcast. You're doing it right? Uh, it's not a Uh this email is not episode specific, but I

had to tell you about this. My husband and I welcomed to our baby boy into the world a couple of months ago, when I was pregnantly joked that the baby would think that one of you was his dad because he heard your voices so often. Ah, that's a very funny joke in the family, you know, joke about the paternity of your childhood. Uh. Now that he's here, I've been playing music in the car instead of the podcast, thinking music helps calm him. Well, one day he was

crying and crying in the car. I couldn't get him to calm down. She was like, what's wrong with Doc? And why is it doc and working? Uh. It couldn't get him calmed down with any the usual tricks. So I decided to heck with it. I'm gonna put on the podcast and a kid you not. As soon as you guys started talking, he stopped crying. My husband says it was coincidence. Jealous, I say, stuff, you should know magic. Now we're now we're back to always listening to you

guys in the car. Keep up with great work and thanks for soothing my baby boy. And that is from Sarah Strantz and our youngest fan, Frank from beautiful Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email. Frank, go to sleep. Quiet now they named their baby after our chair? Yeah right, that's pretty wouldn't that be amazing if they actually did? Uh? And thank you also to

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