Doctoral Dissertation Research:Using Mugshots to Improve Eyewitness Identification Accuracy

DNA测试的最新进展揭示了一个令人震惊的观察结果：无辜的人在监狱里，而犯下这些罪行的有罪人却逍遥法外。在大多数虚假定罪案件中，目击者辨认错误是罪魁祸首。警方的一种标准做法是向目击者展示潜在罪犯(或可能与他们相似的人)的面部照片，这是这些错误中的一部分。这项研究确定了目击者在犯罪后通过一系列面部照片进行搜索的过程可能会损害或增强目击者识别犯罪者的能力的情况。研究表明，看过面部照片的目击者可能不太能正确识别犯罪者。此外，目击者可能会将他们在面部照片搜索中看到的个人误认为肇事者，即使后来出现了实际的肇事者。从记忆和决策的角度来看，需要避免对证人产生偏见的技术吗？回忆的同时，协助警方寻找犯罪元凶。这项研究包括对由于先前暴露在疑犯照片搜索中而产生识别错误的因素的实证探索，并为这些影响如何运作开发了正式指定的理论解释。此外，还将测试旨在避免这些错误的新技术。这将使我们能够制定更好的警察做法，在不损害目击者辨认身份的情况下协助搜查罪犯。

Recent advances in DNA testing have uncovered an alarming observation: innocent people are in prison and the guilty people that committed those crimes are at large. In the majority of the false conviction cases, faulty eyewitness identification is to blame. One standard police practice, showing witnesses mugshots of potential offenders (or people who may resemble them), accounts for some of these errors. This research identifies cases where the ability of an eyewitness to identify a perpetrator might be harmed or enhanced by the process of searching though a series of mugshots following the crime. Research has shown that witnesses who view mugshots may be less able to correctly identify the perpetrator of the crime. Moreover, witnesses can mistake individuals they view in a mugshot search for the perpetrator, even when subsequently presented with the actual perpetrator. From a memory and decision-making perspective, techniques are needed that avoid biasing a witness? memory, while at the same time aiding the police search for the culprit of the crime. This research includes an empirical exploration of the factors that produce lineup identification errors due to a prior exposure to a mugshot search and develops a formally-specified theoretical explanation for how these effects operate. In addition, new techniques designed to avoid these errors will be tested. This will allow us to develop better police practices for aiding a culprit search without harming the ability of the eyewitness to make an identification.