Notes on the Illinois Pilot Program on Sequential Double-Blind Identification Procedures

As a result of recommendations made by the Illinois Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment, the Illinois Legislature charged the Illinois State Police with conducting a pilot program to evaluate the effectiveness of the sequential, double blind identification procedure in the field. Sheri H. Mecklenburg was appointed Director of the Illinois Pilot Program and undertook to design the Illinois Pilot Program, seeking comments and approval from eyewitness researchers in the process. Reporting forms were developed, police personnel were given training on the new procedures and procedures were developed for deciding which lineups would be presented according to traditional or new procedures. These matters and much more are detailed in the Report to the Legislature of the State ofIllinois: the Illinois Pilot Program on Sequential Double-Blind Identification Procedures ("the Rep~rt"). ~ The author was approached by Mecklenburg, asking for our participation as analysts. I agreed to act in this capacity with the assistance of Laura A. Zirnmerman, Stephen J. Ross, Lisa D. Topp, Vanessa Uribe, Dannette De Leon, Sarah Ramirez and Jessica Belisle, all members of the Eyewitness Identification Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at El Paso. Periodically we received sets of case reports from the three participating jurisdictions. We were given a free hand to structure our analysis in our own way. We constructed the code book3 and implemented an analysk4 While we contributed our analysis of the data, we did not participate in writing the Report. Professor Ebbesen of the University of California, San Diego also agreed to serve as an analyst for the Pilot Program. Professor Ebbesen and his research group received the same case reports and constructed their own way of coding and analyzing the data. Professor Ebbesen's group and the Eyewitness Lab at University of Texas at El Paso reached the same conclusions, although our conventions for coding the raw field reports for analysis differed in some respects, leading to somewhat different numbers. Ebbesen and Malpass never discussed anything about their task had no conversation whatever until they met during the Symposium held at the LoyolaUniversity of Chicago Law School on April 21,2006. Design The study was designed to determine whether or not a new eyewitness identification procedure (a particular variant of double-blind sequential lineup) is superior to the simultaneous lineup procedure in current use. The specifics of implementation ofthe design are discussed in the R e p ~ r t . ~ This study was not the extension of an academic research program and was not undertaken to untangle theoretical issues. Results The major results are displayed in Table 1, for the total sample, aggregating the results across the three jurisdictions. There are three outcomes possible in this study: suspect identifications, filler identifications and non-identifications. It is important to note that suspect identifications cannot be interpreted as either correct or false identifications, and non-identifications can not be interpreted as missing the offender or as rejecting a lineup that does or does not contain the actual offender. It is not known, for any lineup in this study, whether the suspect in the lineup is the actual offender. This can be known in laboratory studies, but not in the field without a considerable amount of additional research. We will return to this matter below.