There is so much to be done to improve the criminal justice system the question must be, where does one start? For me an interesting possibility is provided in an article, "Investigations Under Suspicion, The Fugitive Science of Criminal Justice," in THE NEW YORKER, 8 January 2001, p. 50-53, by Atul Gawande.

I am presenting key parts of this article below since I see it as being pregnant with possibilities. It seems to me that interested persons and groups could use the ideas presented here as a starting point for study and action. It might be a very productive activity to check with local police and court jurisdictions to learn how they deal with the matters mentioned in this article. Also, sympathetic legislators might be willing to get involved in legislative efforts on this topic, etc., etc., etc. At some point a national group might be formed to encourage such research and the application of that research.

"For more than two decades now, the leading figure in eyewitness research has been a blond, jeans-and-tweed-wearing Midwesterner named Gary Wells. He got involved in the field by happenstance: one morning in 1974, a packet from a Cincinnati defense attorney arrived at the department of psychology at Ohio State University, in Columbus, where Wells was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student."

In his first experiment "Wells knew from all the previous demonstrations [done by psychologists] that people would often misidentify the perpetrator. Still, he figured, if they did it without great assurance it wouldn't matter much: under directions that the Supreme Court laid out in 1972, courts placed strong weight on an eyewitness's level of certainty. Wells found, however, that the witnesses who picked the wrong person out of the lineup were just as confident about their choices as those who identified the right person. In a later experiment, he assembled volunteer juries and had them observe witnesses under cross-examination. The jurors, it turned out, believed inaccurate witnesses just as often as they did accurate ones."

"He noticed an unexpected pattern: having multiple witnesses did not insure accurate identifications. In his studies, a crime might be witnessed by dozens of people, yet they would often finger the same wrong suspect. The errors were clearly not random."

"In a group of a hundred individuals, fifty-four picked the perpetrator correctly; twenty-one said they didn't think the guy was there; and the other spread their picks across the people in the lineup."

"The second group of witnesses was given the same lineup, minus the perpetrator. This time, thirty-two people picked no one. But most of the rest chose the same wrong person -- the one who most resembled the perpetrator.... Studies of actual wrongful convictions support [this pattern]. For example, in a study of sixty-three DNA exonerations of wrongfully convicted people, fifty-three involved witnesses making a mistaken identification, and almost invariably they had viewed a lineup in which the actual perpetrator was not there."

"Once this was established, he and others set about designing ways to limit such errors. Researchers at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh discovered that witnesses who are not explicitly warned that a lineup may not include the actual perpetrator are substantially more likely to make a false identification, under the misapprehension that they've got to pick someone.... The convention is to show a witness a whole lineup at once. Wells and Lindsay decided to see what would happen if witnesses were shown only one person at a time, and made to decide whether they were the culprit before moving on. Now, after a staged theft, the vast majority of witnesses who were shown a lineup that did not include the culprit went through the set without picking anyone. And when the culprit was present, witnesses who viewed a sequential lineup were no less adept at identifying him than witnesses who saw a standard lineup. The innovation reduced false identifications by well over fifty per cent without sacrificing correct identification."

It has now been fifteen years since Wells and Lindsay published their results. I asked Wells how widely the procedure has been followed. He laughed, because, aside from a scattered handful of police departments, mainly in Canada, it was not picked up at all.... A Department of Justice report released in 1999 acknowledged that scientific evidence had established the superiority of sequential-lineup procedures. Yet the report goes on to emphasize that the department still has no preference between the two methods."

"In medicine, there are hundreds of academic teaching hospitals, where innovation and testing are a routine part of what doctors do. There is no such thing as an academic police department or a teaching courthouse. The legal system takes its methods for granted: it is common sense that lineups are to be trusted, that wife-beaters are to be counseled, and that jurors are not to ask witnesses questions. Law enforcement, finally, is in thrall to a culture of precedent and convention, not of experiment and change. And science remains deeply mistrusted."

"'The legal system doesn't understand science,'" Gary wells told me. 'I taught in law school for a year. Believe me there's no science in there at all.... All they want to know is whose side you're on -- the prosecutor's or the defendant's.' In an adversarial system, where even facts come in two versions, it's easy to view science as just another form of spin."

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