Recognition

The New Yorker:

One Sunday night in March, 1985, Michele Murray, a sophomore at Texas Tech University, tried to find a parking space near her dorm. In the preceding months, four women had been raped on or near the Texas Tech campus, in the small plains city of Lubbock; local newspapers speculated about a “Tech rapist,” but the police had no solid leads. As Murray parked in a church lot, a man wearing a yellow terry-cloth shirt and bluejeans approached the car. She felt a pang of fear, but at second glance the man seemed harmless—not particularly tall or muscular, with gaunt cheeks and bulging eyes. She rolled down the window.

…

Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University and an expert on eyewitness testimony, has spent decades researching ways in which police lineups can be made more accurate. In 1998, Wells was the principal author of a paper suggesting a few simple reforms. Lineups should be “blind,” a standard borrowed from scientific experiments: the officer administering the lineup should know nothing about the case, so as to avoid unconsciously influencing the proceedings. In photographic lineups, images should be presented sequentially rather than simultaneously, allowing witnesses to compare each image against their memory instead of choosing from among a group. And witnesses should be instructed that a lineup might not include the perpetrator. In 1999, Wells was part of a federal panel that published a report elaborating on these findings. The report was non-binding, but a few jurisdictions—New Jersey, Tucson, Minneapolis—took up its recommendations.

Read the whole story: The New Yorker