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Six Eyewitness ID Claims

 

In Eyewitness Suspect Identification: Six Claims Regarding the State of the Science, 

Lindsay et al. (2025) reviewed the evidence on eyewitness identification and identified six key points of agreement: 

1. Eyewitness memory can become contaminated by viewing images of a suspect before the suspect appears in a police lineup. An eyewitness's memory is least likely to be contaminated on a first test administered following best-practice guidelines soon after the witnessed event and before the witness could be exposed to biasing information

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2. Before putting a suspect in a police lineup, there should be independent evidence of guilt.

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3. A suspect should not be put into an eyewitness lineup procedure based solely on their similarity to a surveillance image of the culprit (or a composite sketch of the culprit). Finding a suspect in a Facial Recognition Technology search risks leading to investigation of an innocent suspect who resembles the true culprit and increases the risk of misidentification.

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4. Under proper testing conditions, suspect IDs made with high confidence are more likely to be accurate than suspect IDs made with low confidence.

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5. The risk of contamination is lowest on the first identification test. There are no second chances to test a witness’s uncontaminated memory of the suspect because the first test itself contaminates the witness’s memory by exposing them to the suspect in the lineup.

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6. Nonidentifications of the suspect are probative of innocence.

© Ryan Fitzgerald, 2023

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