Latest / Stuff You Should Know / Selects: How Police Lineups Work
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's me Josham. For this week's select I've
- 0:03Speaker 1: chosen our twenty eighteen episode how police Lineups Work. It's
- 0:08Speaker 1: one of those things that you just kind of know
- 0:10Speaker 1: about and then you find out about it and you
- 0:12Speaker 1: say to yourself, how are we doing this. It's a
- 0:15Speaker 1: great episode. I think you'll enjoy it. So sit back, relax,
- 0:18Speaker 1: and get ready for police Lineups.
- 0:24Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
- 0:34Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
- 0:37Speaker 1: Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry out there outside the fishbowl,
- 0:41Speaker 1: and also there's guest producer Noel and our pal Ben.
- 0:45Speaker 3: But yeah, I'm in the room this time, man, Yeah,
- 0:48Speaker 3: on the mic. Thanks for having us.
- 0:51Speaker 2: This is way better than that time you have me
- 0:53Speaker 2: on the April Fools episode.
- 0:55Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I may
- 0:57Speaker 1: remember Ben from that. I think it was two thousand
- 1:00Speaker 1: thirteen or fifteen something, ungodly time ago.
- 1:03Speaker 4: It's my replacement.
- 1:04Speaker 1: Yeah, it was an April Fool's joke for the three
- 1:07Speaker 1: D printing episode. So this is your second time on
- 1:09Speaker 1: the show.
- 1:10Speaker 5: Yeah, the Internet shredg you Ben was it were they
- 1:12Speaker 5: were you like a target of abuse.
- 1:14Speaker 2: I want to thank everybody for the very polite emails,
- 1:17Speaker 2: and as we could tell, thankfully, Chuck is fine.
- 1:20Speaker 1: Yeah, they took it easy on them. Okay, we have
- 1:21Speaker 1: very nice listeners, you know. And then Nol, this might
- 1:24Speaker 1: be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast,
- 1:26Speaker 1: even though you've guest produced it like a million times.
- 1:28Speaker 3: I think I may have mumbled something in the background
- 1:30Speaker 3: the time. It really wow wow, Josh. So we're having
- 1:36Speaker 3: you two on.
- 1:37Speaker 1: Let's cut, let's get down of business, because you two
- 1:41Speaker 1: have a podcast together, right, Uh, Noel, you also run
- 1:45Speaker 1: mini Crush movie Crush.
- 1:47Speaker 3: It's true. Yeah, you're also in a real world's colliding
- 1:50Speaker 3: right now.
- 1:50Speaker 1: Right, there's a lot I'm going over them all. You're
- 1:53Speaker 1: on stuff they don't want you to know. But you
- 1:55Speaker 1: two Ben and Knowl have come together and made ridiculous history,
- 1:58Speaker 1: which is awesome.
- 2:00Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's right.
- 2:01Speaker 4: We're just missing God.
- 2:04Speaker 1: I'm starting to sweat. But you guys are on ridiculous
- 2:07Speaker 1: history together. We are, Yeah, tell us about that.
- 2:10Speaker 2: Uh So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events
- 2:17Speaker 2: often not covered in your typical history class.
- 2:22Speaker 3: Sounds familiar, right.
- 2:24Speaker 2: Because for one reason or another, people thought, that's no way,
- 2:32Speaker 2: that didn't really happen. The first recorded instance of a
- 2:35Speaker 2: mooning did not result in the death of hundreds of people.
- 2:39Speaker 3: It's surely not, surely not, but it did.
- 2:41Speaker 5: It did, It did, And surely the US government did
- 2:44Speaker 5: not have a plan to shoot a nuclear missile at
- 2:46Speaker 5: the moon.
- 2:47Speaker 3: Right, that was just a Mister Shows sketch. Surely not,
- 2:50Speaker 3: but she also was. It was kind of parallel thinking.
- 2:53Speaker 5: Is the Mister Show sketch happened before this story became declassified?
- 2:57Speaker 3: Is that right?
- 2:57Speaker 2: It is?
- 3:00Speaker 4: Nine yep.
- 3:00Speaker 2: So our continuing mission with ridiculous history, not to sound.
- 3:04Speaker 3: Too star treky about it.
- 3:06Speaker 2: Is to find those moments, the bizarre people, places, and
- 3:11Speaker 2: things throughout the span of human civilization that at least
- 3:15Speaker 2: crack the both of us up on.
- 3:17Speaker 3: A continual basis.
- 3:18Speaker 2: And sometimes we do have to stop recording just for
- 3:21Speaker 2: a second because we're so tickled.
- 3:24Speaker 1: Do you really, Yeah, Wow, that's that's actually high quality,
- 3:28Speaker 1: mainly because we tickle each other.
- 3:29Speaker 3: I got to physically. Yeah, that's cheating, man. You're making
- 3:33Speaker 3: it sound so serious. It's actually a lot of fun.
- 3:36Speaker 4: It is.
- 3:36Speaker 3: It's a fun show. Right, Oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
- 3:39Speaker 5: I mean I'm giving been a hard time, but yeah,
- 3:41Speaker 5: that's definitely like we touch on from time to time.
- 3:45Speaker 3: It it'll go into a heavier territory.
- 3:47Speaker 5: Like, for example, we did an episode about how women
- 3:50Speaker 5: in Kansas in the nineteen twenties were imprisoned in labor
- 3:53Speaker 5: camps for having STDs. What that certainly falls under ridiculous
- 3:57Speaker 5: not exactly fun or funny.
- 3:59Speaker 3: Right haha, ridiculous. So it's it's it's all of those things.
- 4:03Speaker 5: Some of them are you know, crack you up hilarious
- 4:05Speaker 5: moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by bunnies or you know,
- 4:10Speaker 5: the aforementioned SDT labor camps, or.
- 4:12Speaker 2: The racist special Olympics that were held here in the States.
- 4:18Speaker 2: And we're a complete, well to borrow phrase we use
- 4:21Speaker 2: on the show, a complete ship show.
- 4:24Speaker 1: So so wait a minute, I think you are, like,
- 4:26Speaker 1: you need to name the state that hosted that.
- 4:29Speaker 3: Oh it was Saint Louis. Yeah, Saint Louis.
- 4:34Speaker 5: And it's because the World's Fair was happening in Saint
- 4:37Speaker 5: Louis and they were going to have it in Chicago.
- 4:40Speaker 5: But the people hosting the World's Fair said, if you
- 4:42Speaker 5: don't do your Olympics as part of the World's Fair,
- 4:45Speaker 5: we're going to totally blow you out of the water
- 4:46Speaker 5: with how awesome our World's Fair is.
- 4:47Speaker 3: And no one's going to come to your Olympics.
- 4:49Speaker 5: And scared them in the early days of like, you know,
- 4:51Speaker 5: not the earliest days of the Olympics, when they brought
- 4:53Speaker 5: it back like in the you know, it was not
- 4:56Speaker 5: ancient Rome.
- 4:57Speaker 3: It was not in fact ancient Rome.
- 5:00Speaker 2: And it was also it was not a good example
- 5:03Speaker 2: of the Olympics either, because the white supremacists who were
- 5:08Speaker 2: in charge of the whole shebang decided that this would
- 5:12Speaker 2: be the perfect time to prove their cockamamie ideas.
- 5:17Speaker 5: Of like eugenics, ideas of kind of like white superiority,
- 5:20Speaker 5: and like they would have indigenous people competing in these
- 5:23Speaker 5: Olympic events. Of course, they didn't teach them how to
- 5:25Speaker 5: you know, do the events, so they didn't just automatically
- 5:28Speaker 5: know how to pull vault or throw a javelin or whatever.
- 5:31Speaker 1: And when supremacists can ruin anything, anything they put their
- 5:35Speaker 1: hands on, they really can't just turns to poop.
- 5:38Speaker 2: Yeah, we are doing an episode on flatulence later, so
- 5:42Speaker 2: stay tuned with you that there.
- 5:43Speaker 1: So before we give everything away, you guys, tell everyone
- 5:46Speaker 1: where they can find ridiculous history and win.
- 5:49Speaker 2: You can find ridiculous history at our website.
- 5:53Speaker 3: It's ridiculous History show.
- 5:55Speaker 5: I think so the website, guys definitely can't prepared for this.
- 6:00Speaker 3: I've got a stack of notes right here here, yeah.
- 6:04Speaker 1: Rolling back.
- 6:04Speaker 2: So you can find us on Apple Podcast, you find
- 6:06Speaker 2: us on Spotify. You can find us wherever you find
- 6:08Speaker 2: your favorite shows, like stuff you should know or stuff
- 6:12Speaker 2: they'll want you to know, or I should I list
- 6:15Speaker 2: the entire pantheon of all the shows we have. It's
- 6:18Speaker 2: too many at this point, but but yes, you can
- 6:20Speaker 2: find us in all of those places. We also have
- 6:24Speaker 2: a community page that we're really proud of and really
- 6:28Speaker 2: happy with, called Ridiculous Historians on Facebook.
- 6:31Speaker 3: Taking a total cue from the cisk army. Yeah nice.
- 6:35Speaker 1: Well, First of all, thank you for all of the
- 6:38Speaker 1: flattery that you've been heaping on us for the last
- 6:40Speaker 1: few minutes. It's much appreciated. But also thank you for
- 6:43Speaker 1: coming by. Appreciate it, guys.
- 6:44Speaker 3: Thank you guys for having yes yank so much.
- 6:46Speaker 1: Let's do this every week.
- 6:48Speaker 3: That might be a let me check the sketch.
- 6:55Speaker 1: I gotta tell you, I love those guys, but I'm
- 6:57Speaker 1: glad to get out of that that new studio box.
- 7:01Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's like a Fema trailer man. It's formaldehyde
- 7:03Speaker 1: wafting off slowly poisoning us. It is still off gassing.
- 7:07Speaker 1: It feels like, yeah, big time. It's in my hair, yeah,
- 7:11Speaker 1: which is now falling out.
- 7:13Speaker 4: We're in bad shape. Well before, I like what you're wearing.
- 7:15Speaker 4: By the way, thank you.
- 7:17Speaker 1: I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself and
- 7:19Speaker 1: luckily I had a bunch of samples of our new
- 7:21Speaker 1: T shirt.
- 7:22Speaker 6: Yeah, and this is not a just to plug everyone.
- 7:26Speaker 6: Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T
- 7:29Speaker 6: shirt from the Stuff you Should Know store. Yeah, because
- 7:32Speaker 6: they sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great, to
- 7:35Speaker 6: the guy who has one hundred T shirts, here's twenty more.
- 7:39Speaker 1: But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with.
- 7:41Speaker 4: This, Like, yeah, that's cool.
- 7:42Speaker 3: The size of it.
- 7:43Speaker 1: Look at the size. It's a perfect size. It's not
- 7:46Speaker 1: so big that it wraps around and gets all mangled
- 7:48Speaker 1: by my love handles. But it's also not so small
- 7:51Speaker 1: that it looks like, you know, a caved in chest.
- 7:56Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
- 7:57Speaker 4: I didn't remember that reference though.
- 8:00Speaker 1: I didn't either like they listened to the Pie Piper episode.
- 8:04Speaker 1: Oh there you go.
- 8:05Speaker 4: That sounds like a you thing, Yeah, Josh, But.
- 8:08Speaker 1: It was just an offhanded comment I made. Now it's
- 8:10Speaker 1: a T shirt I'm wearing, which is I love. It
- 8:11Speaker 1: makes a pretty great time to be alive.
- 8:15Speaker 6: By the way, I need to give a shout out
- 8:17Speaker 6: to Brittany Schiff. Brittany Schiff sent this idea to us.
- 8:22Speaker 6: Oh okay, great, And the reason, you know, we don't
- 8:25Speaker 6: often take well that's not true. We kind of keep
- 8:28Speaker 6: a kitty of listener suggestions, but we don't often like
- 8:32Speaker 6: do one the next week and then shout out the person. Sure,
- 8:36Speaker 6: but I thought we had fully exhausted our Crime and
- 8:40Speaker 6: Punishment series.
- 8:41Speaker 1: Nope.
- 8:41Speaker 6: So I was delighted that Brittany Shiff sent this in
- 8:45Speaker 6: and I was like, why haven't we done police line up?
- 8:48Speaker 1: I don't know, it's a great question.
- 8:50Speaker 4: Was just sitting there, yeah, waiting.
- 8:52Speaker 1: Yep. The only other one that's left is what kind
- 8:56Speaker 1: of shoes detectives wear?
- 8:58Speaker 3: That is?
- 8:59Speaker 1: That's the last one? You know what means is this? Yeah,
- 9:04Speaker 1: that's gum shoe or crape sold I think.
- 9:07Speaker 4: You knew that, yeah, but I don't know how it
- 9:09Speaker 4: relates to cops.
- 9:11Speaker 1: I guess they wore those because they were so comfortable.
- 9:13Speaker 1: Cops are always walking around walking, yeah, you know, but
- 9:19Speaker 1: sometimes when they're walking, they're actually out on the street
- 9:23Speaker 1: looking for people who resemble a suspect that they have
- 9:27Speaker 1: in the jailhouse. And they say, hey, you come on
- 9:31Speaker 1: over here, how'd you like to make ten bucks? And
- 9:34Speaker 1: the person says exactly how copper and the cop says,
- 9:39Speaker 1: by standing in is what we call a filler in
- 9:42Speaker 1: a police lineup.
- 9:43Speaker 6: Or they do like Emer Simpson and when they're like
- 9:46Speaker 6: a boat raffle that they said he had to come
- 9:48Speaker 6: down to the police station.
- 9:49Speaker 1: Yeah he won a boat. Yeah, and then they beat
- 9:52Speaker 1: him merciless for like parking unpaid parking tickets.
- 9:57Speaker 6: Also shout out to Beth at Shuster, who wrote this
- 10:00Speaker 6: article in the NIJ Journal the National Institute of Justice.
- 10:06Speaker 1: I believe so, is that right? Yeah, they're pretty much
- 10:09Speaker 1: committed to keeping people from being wrongly convicted. So I
- 10:12Speaker 1: would guess the JAY stands for justice.
- 10:14Speaker 6: Yeah, and this is a good start. And we had
- 10:17Speaker 6: some other stuff we added to it. But thank you Ms. Schuster,
- 10:22Speaker 6: yeah for your work.
- 10:22Speaker 1: Yep. Well, I already led into the episode and it
- 10:27Speaker 1: didn't take, So let me try again. This nij article
- 10:31Speaker 1: you sent calls out a dude named Jerry Miller, who
- 10:35Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty one was twenty two years old,
- 10:38Speaker 1: I believe, and Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day
- 10:42Speaker 1: when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping,
- 10:47Speaker 1: and raping a woman. Yeah, and he got convicted. He
- 10:51Speaker 1: was convicted because two people, two eyewitnesses, saw him in
- 10:56Speaker 1: a lineup picked him out, and then later at trial
- 10:59Speaker 1: the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but
- 11:03Speaker 1: who cares. There's two eyewitnesses that picked the schmoe out
- 11:06Speaker 1: of a lineup. He's done. Yeah, he did twenty four
- 11:11Speaker 1: years in prison. And you may notice from the tone
- 11:14Speaker 1: that I'm using here he was wrongfully convicted.
- 11:17Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 11:17Speaker 1: He actually got out of prison and was living life
- 11:20Speaker 1: for leased on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet, a monitor constantly.
- 11:25Speaker 4: As a registered sex offender.
- 11:27Speaker 1: Right, and then finally I think, oh, I'm not quite sure. Oh,
- 11:32Speaker 1: two thousand and seven. In two thousand and seven, as
- 11:35Speaker 1: part of the Innocence Project, Yeah, which we've done an
- 11:37Speaker 1: episode on with.
- 11:39Speaker 4: Yeah, that lady what is her name?
- 11:44Speaker 1: Oh, Hauleen.
- 11:45Speaker 4: I don't want to say Laurville, but it's definitely not
- 11:48Speaker 4: Paula is on.
- 11:49Speaker 3: Paula is on.
- 11:50Speaker 4: Thank you, Jerry.
- 11:51Speaker 1: Yeah, I wanted to say Pauli Shore so bad. I
- 11:54Speaker 1: just knew it was wrong. But we did Incent right,
- 11:59Speaker 1: we did it Innocence Project episode And under the Innocence Project,
- 12:04Speaker 1: Jerry Miller was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did
- 12:09Speaker 1: not do this and lost twenty four years of his
- 12:12Speaker 1: life because of flawed eyewitness testimony.
- 12:16Speaker 6: Yeah, and so you know, this is all about police
- 12:19Speaker 6: lineups and more about I mean, we'll tell you how
- 12:22Speaker 6: they work in a general sense, but this is sort
- 12:25Speaker 6: of more about how you know, it's such an imperfect system.
- 12:30Speaker 6: But sort of the takeaway from all of this that
- 12:33Speaker 6: we're about to go over with all the studies and
- 12:35Speaker 6: the trying different things, is kind of like, you know,
- 12:39Speaker 6: it's an imperfect system and we can try and craft
- 12:43Speaker 6: it the best way we can, but human memory is imperfect.
- 12:47Speaker 6: Identifying people in lineups is imperfect, right, and we're just
- 12:50Speaker 6: it's kind of the best we got right now.
- 12:52Speaker 1: Right, Well, a lot of people are like, get rid
- 12:55Speaker 1: of eyewitness testimony really all together, yes, all together. Humans
- 13:00Speaker 1: suck at eyewitness testimony. And there's a lot of reasons
- 13:04Speaker 1: why it's not like people are out there like I
- 13:06Speaker 1: want to have me a bad guy, show me a lineup.
- 13:09Speaker 1: I'm gonna pick one of those guys out. They're not
- 13:11Speaker 1: doing that. They're subject to basically the way our brains
- 13:16Speaker 1: are wired. We don't walk around videotaping everything that we see,
- 13:21Speaker 1: you know, we get constantly bombarded with sensory information, and
- 13:27Speaker 1: under normal circumstances, you see a stranger on the street,
- 13:30Speaker 1: you just see there's another human. I've identified them as
- 13:33Speaker 1: not a threat and keep walking by it. If that
- 13:35Speaker 1: person turned out to be accused of a crime or
- 13:41Speaker 1: perpetrated a crime, and you were brought in to say
- 13:44Speaker 1: was this the person you saw? Your brain is going
- 13:47Speaker 1: to try to reconstruct what little pieces of memory it
- 13:51Speaker 1: formed of that person. And there's a lot of things,
- 13:54Speaker 1: a lot of factors that are involved that can make
- 13:57Speaker 1: that really difficult task even harder.
- 14:00Speaker 6: Yeah, Like I am someone who has told myself Chuck
- 14:07Speaker 6: pay attention. Like, if you're ever in a situation like
- 14:10Speaker 6: pay attention, try and collect yourself and try and remember
- 14:14Speaker 6: a few really good details about the car or the person.
- 14:17Speaker 4: So like this is on my mind.
- 14:20Speaker 6: And I actually had a situation when I lived in
- 14:23Speaker 6: LA happened to me where I had to go through
- 14:25Speaker 6: a police lineup and I failed.
- 14:29Speaker 1: Oh really, was the suspect there?
- 14:31Speaker 4: No?
- 14:32Speaker 6: Well no, here's here's the quick version. Is I was
- 14:35Speaker 6: in a hit and run. This lady, these two lady,
- 14:38Speaker 6: these two younger girls, they were probably teenagers, hit me
- 14:42Speaker 6: from behind.
- 14:43Speaker 4: In my car.
- 14:45Speaker 6: I stopped my car starting to get out, and they
- 14:47Speaker 6: take off, so it's a hit and run. I chase them,
- 14:50Speaker 6: which is you should not do.
- 14:51Speaker 1: No. Were you shooting into the air again to slow down,
- 14:54Speaker 1: trying to shoot out their tires?
- 14:58Speaker 3: No?
- 14:58Speaker 6: But I did chase them because I was so mad
- 15:00Speaker 6: and you're adrenaline just shoots through the roof when something
- 15:02Speaker 6: like that happens, so immediately you're just not yourself and
- 15:06Speaker 6: like recording details. So I was trying to catch up
- 15:08Speaker 6: to get a license plate. I saw that they went
- 15:11Speaker 6: down the street that I knew was a dead end.
- 15:15Speaker 3: Like I got them now.
- 15:16Speaker 6: It wasn't a cul de sac, but it functioned like
- 15:18Speaker 6: a cul de sac. So I stopped where I was
- 15:20Speaker 6: got out of the car. Sure enough, twenty seconds later,
- 15:23Speaker 6: they come houling but back toward me, and the look
- 15:28Speaker 6: on their faces was like you know, oh, snap, there's
- 15:31Speaker 6: the guy. And they just sped right past me. And
- 15:34Speaker 6: I saw their faces as they sped past me in
- 15:37Speaker 6: their car. The cops found the car, found the people,
- 15:42Speaker 6: and they're like, we didn't do that, and so.
- 15:45Speaker 3: Who are these girls? These teenagers?
- 15:47Speaker 4: Well that's the long and short of it. Is all
- 15:50Speaker 4: you have to do and something like that.
- 15:51Speaker 6: I say, didn't do it, and if I can't pick
- 15:54Speaker 6: you out, then you get away.
- 15:56Speaker 4: And they showed me pictures.
- 15:58Speaker 6: Of like, you know, these were like teenage young teenage
- 16:02Speaker 6: Hispanic women. They showed me probably probably fifteen pictures and
- 16:07Speaker 6: said can you identify them? I was like no, it
- 16:10Speaker 6: was a month ago. They sped past me for a second,
- 16:14Speaker 6: like I couldn't even hazard a guess, and I didn't
- 16:16Speaker 6: want to do that.
- 16:17Speaker 1: You know, well that's very sensible of you.
- 16:20Speaker 4: Yeah, I just didn't want to take a stab at it.
- 16:21Speaker 6: So I was like, no, I have no idea, and
- 16:22Speaker 6: they're basically like sorry, They said they didn't do it.
- 16:25Speaker 1: Wow.
- 16:25Speaker 4: It's like, but you have the car.
- 16:27Speaker 6: And it's damaged, and like none of that matters. They're like, no,
- 16:30Speaker 6: not if you can't identify.
- 16:31Speaker 1: I mean, I could see that. They could be like, oh, yeah,
- 16:32Speaker 1: that happened some other times, I know, and some other
- 16:35Speaker 1: hit and run.
- 16:35Speaker 4: I mean, but yeah.
- 16:38Speaker 6: The long story short though, is I'm someone who has
- 16:41Speaker 6: tried to tell myself to react in the right ways,
- 16:44Speaker 6: and I couldn't tell them much beyond like the color
- 16:48Speaker 6: of the car and sort of what it looked.
- 16:50Speaker 3: Like because you were seeing red.
- 16:51Speaker 1: Because you're right, that's that our bodies are not prime
- 16:56Speaker 1: to form memories. It's not where our energy. It's more
- 17:00Speaker 1: like getting away or shooting out the tires of a
- 17:03Speaker 1: car that just hit and ran. Right, But what you
- 17:06Speaker 1: did with that lineup is the other side of the coin.
- 17:10Speaker 1: The other problem with lineups is or eyewitness testimony from lineups,
- 17:15Speaker 1: is that sometimes people pick out people who are innocent,
- 17:19Speaker 1: and other times people fail to pick out the people
- 17:22Speaker 1: who are actually the perpetrators.
- 17:24Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 17:24Speaker 1: So it's like you said, they're very They're very flawed.
- 17:27Speaker 1: It's a flawed system. The problem is is the wrong
- 17:31Speaker 1: people can go to jail and the people who actually
- 17:34Speaker 1: did it can get away with it. So that's an
- 17:36Speaker 1: extremely flawed system. And when something that important is on
- 17:42Speaker 1: the table, then it needs to be fixed. And there's
- 17:45Speaker 1: a lot of people looking into how it can be fixed,
- 17:48Speaker 1: but we're not there yet by any stretch.
- 17:50Speaker 6: No, And here's a stat you were talking about the
- 17:53Speaker 6: DNA exoneration, seventy five percent of the first one and
- 17:58Speaker 6: eighty three exonerations in the US were wrongfully convicted because
- 18:03Speaker 6: of eyewitness testimony and police lineups.
- 18:06Speaker 4: Say it again, seventy.
- 18:07Speaker 1: Five seventy five percent of the first one hundred and
- 18:10Speaker 1: eighty three. So, like, the Innocence Project is basically like
- 18:14Speaker 1: a pilot study to show through DNA exoneration all the
- 18:20Speaker 1: ways that we wrongfully convict people. And what is coming
- 18:24Speaker 1: to the front is eyewitness testimony.
- 18:28Speaker 4: Yeah, and at the basis of that is the police lineup, right.
- 18:31Speaker 1: And one other thing that's that's problematic with the eyewitness
- 18:34Speaker 1: testimony is if you want to wow a jury, bring
- 18:38Speaker 1: out an eyewitness who seems totally sure that what they
- 18:41Speaker 1: saw or that they saw the person they're pointing to
- 18:44Speaker 1: and the defendants.
- 18:45Speaker 6: Table yeah, or that that dramatic moment it's like a
- 18:48Speaker 6: movie trope. Now, you know, is the person in this room.
- 18:51Speaker 1: Right, Let the record show that this witness is pointing
- 18:54Speaker 1: at the defendant, right.
- 18:55Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 18:56Speaker 1: So the problem is it has a huge impact, but
- 18:59Speaker 1: it's also so really cruddy wit, really cruddy evidence. There's
- 19:04Speaker 1: this guy he he had a great quote.
- 19:06Speaker 3: He says that.
- 19:08Speaker 1: Eyewitness testimony is a very unusual, complex kind of trace evidence,
- 19:14Speaker 1: and it's difficult to recover, easy to contaminate, and very
- 19:18Speaker 1: hard to handle. Yeah, and that just there's no better
- 19:20Speaker 1: description of eyewitness testimony.
- 19:23Speaker 6: If I was ever in court and someone identified me
- 19:27Speaker 6: from the witness stand, I would do that thing where
- 19:29Speaker 6: you look at behind you when they pointed at you,
- 19:33Speaker 6: just be like, I think they're talking about that guy
- 19:35Speaker 6: behind me, and they would say no, and they would
- 19:37Speaker 6: point again, and I would move a little bit more and.
- 19:40Speaker 4: Be like, this is this witness is clearly disturbed.
- 19:43Speaker 1: And then if that, if that didn't work, you would
- 19:44Speaker 1: escalate to I'm rubber and you're glued.
- 19:47Speaker 4: Yeah, that usually works, right.
- 19:49Speaker 1: So there's a couple of other things that makes eyewitness
- 19:52Speaker 1: testimony problematic, Chuck. In addition to not being like human
- 19:59Speaker 1: video recorders.
- 20:01Speaker 4: There are human vs.
- 20:03Speaker 1: There are. There are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime, that
- 20:07Speaker 1: can make it really difficult to remember. If you're in
- 20:10Speaker 1: a fight or flight situation, yeah, you're not forming memories.
- 20:13Speaker 1: If there's a weapon, there are people tend to focus
- 20:18Speaker 1: on the weapon.
- 20:18Speaker 4: Sure you.
- 20:20Speaker 1: Me was mugged once and the opposite happened to her.
- 20:23Speaker 1: She remember what the person looked like, but she didn't
- 20:25Speaker 1: even remember that there was a weapon. And her friends
- 20:27Speaker 1: are like, yeah, there was a gun. Interesting, Yeah, and
- 20:30Speaker 1: she went to a lineup and like picked the guy
- 20:32Speaker 1: out and yummy's bulletproof, so she is, So she's like,
- 20:35Speaker 1: take your gun and shove it. I'm not even going
- 20:37Speaker 1: to recognize it.
- 20:38Speaker 4: No, but that makes sense.
- 20:39Speaker 6: If someone pulls a gun on you, or has a
- 20:42Speaker 6: switchblade or some other kind of creepy weapon, the human
- 20:46Speaker 6: instinct is to focus your attention on that thing pointed
- 20:49Speaker 6: at you.
- 20:49Speaker 1: Yeah, and apparently people can really describe the weapon, right,
- 20:54Speaker 1: But you're focusing on the weapon. You're not focused on
- 20:56Speaker 1: the person who is holding the weapon typically.
- 20:58Speaker 4: Which helps a little bit, but not as much as
- 21:00Speaker 4: the face.
- 21:01Speaker 1: Right. And then another problem is if you are say
- 21:06Speaker 1: an Hispanic dude, and you're a witness to a crime,
- 21:10Speaker 1: and it's a white guy who's the perpetrator, You're going
- 21:13Speaker 1: to have a tremendous amount of difficulty picking that white
- 21:17Speaker 1: guy out, as sad as it is to say, from
- 21:20Speaker 1: a lineup of other white guys. Yeah, because eyewitness testimony
- 21:23Speaker 1: that crosses race or ethnicities is known to be very
- 21:28Speaker 1: unreliable because it's just more difficult for somebody of an
- 21:33Speaker 1: ethnicity or a race to separate or identify people of
- 21:38Speaker 1: another ethnicity or race.
- 21:40Speaker 6: Yeah, and I don't think it's the case where people
- 21:42Speaker 6: are like, all white people look the same to me,
- 21:44Speaker 6: it's just weird brain science, right, you know, right, you
- 21:49Speaker 6: just have a harder time.
- 21:50Speaker 1: From way back when we were basically tuktook and Tuktok
- 21:55Speaker 1: lived with fifteen other people that look just like him
- 21:58Speaker 1: because they'd all been inbreeding for generations and generations, and
- 22:02Speaker 1: they had to be on the lookout for another group
- 22:04Speaker 1: of people who've been inbreeding for generations and generations that
- 22:07Speaker 1: wanted their jackfruit tree that they live by.
- 22:11Speaker 4: What's jack fruit? Oh?
- 22:13Speaker 1: That word jack fruits, the big huge thing, the big
- 22:16Speaker 1: huge one. Yeah, it actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle.
- 22:21Speaker 1: Uhreded like shredded pork vegan stand in.
- 22:25Speaker 4: Oh okay, it's really good. Gotcha, gotcha?
- 22:27Speaker 6: All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about
- 22:29Speaker 6: the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup.
- 22:33Speaker 4: Right after this.
- 22:53Speaker 6: All right, so, run of the mill police lineups. I
- 22:56Speaker 6: mentioned that before we left. Everyone's seen movies and TV shows,
- 23:01Speaker 6: and it's not too far off. Actually, I mean, there
- 23:04Speaker 6: are a couple of ways you can do it. There
- 23:07Speaker 6: are lineups where you'd look at someone in front of
- 23:10Speaker 6: your face, and then there are lineups like I had
- 23:13Speaker 6: in La where I look at photographs the ones. You know,
- 23:16Speaker 6: it's way more sexy for a TV show or a
- 23:18Speaker 6: movie to line them up in the traditional.
- 23:21Speaker 1: Way, right, it's extraordinarily sexy, like a live police lineup
- 23:25Speaker 1: like you see on TV.
- 23:26Speaker 6: Sure, and then they're the simultaneous or sequential. There's a
- 23:30Speaker 6: lot of debate, which we'll get into in a minute,
- 23:32Speaker 6: about which is best. To me, it's pretty obvious that
- 23:35Speaker 6: sequential is best. Simultaneous is the one that you see
- 23:38Speaker 6: on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or
- 23:41Speaker 6: ladies and you identify them usually, well, it depends. We'll
- 23:45Speaker 6: get into the fillers or the foils, but only usually
- 23:50Speaker 6: only one of those people is a suspect.
- 23:52Speaker 1: In like the best ideal version of it.
- 23:55Speaker 4: Right.
- 23:55Speaker 6: Then there's sequential, and that's when they bring out one
- 23:58Speaker 6: person at a time and bring out like seven guys,
- 24:01Speaker 6: just one at a time, and you say, you know,
- 24:02Speaker 6: let me know at the end of this which one
- 24:04Speaker 6: you think it was, or.
- 24:05Speaker 3: If it's a photo lineup, they show you one photo
- 24:07Speaker 3: at a time.
- 24:07Speaker 4: Exactly.
- 24:08Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with you. I think sequential is head
- 24:10Speaker 1: and shoulders the better one of the of the two.
- 24:14Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 24:15Speaker 6: And here's the final little piece of how it can
- 24:17Speaker 6: vary is whether or not the administrator, that the person
- 24:22Speaker 6: that's in charge of administrating the lineup knows who the
- 24:25Speaker 6: purp is or not.
- 24:27Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a big one, man.
- 24:28Speaker 6: So it's either double blind, which means that they don't
- 24:30Speaker 6: even know. And to me, it seems obvious that that's
- 24:33Speaker 6: always the best way, because there are many many circumstances
- 24:36Speaker 6: where you would actually even if you don't want to
- 24:40Speaker 6: or mean to lead a witness. And one example they
- 24:42Speaker 6: gave here in this article is if they say, and
- 24:46Speaker 6: if they identify a filler or a foil aka a
- 24:49Speaker 6: person that was paid ten bucks say that's the person.
- 24:52Speaker 6: The administrator might.
- 24:54Speaker 4: Say take your time, Yeah, are you sure like you
- 24:57Speaker 4: really need to take.
- 24:58Speaker 1: Your time, which is basically like saying row.
- 25:01Speaker 4: Pretty much, they just.
- 25:04Speaker 1: Or conversely, if when they're doing it sequentially, when they
- 25:08Speaker 1: get to like number four, they're like, whoa, get a
- 25:11Speaker 1: load of this guy. Huh geez, look at that bag character.
- 25:15Speaker 4: He's guilty of something.
- 25:16Speaker 1: But they can't like even just a smile or something
- 25:21Speaker 1: like that.
- 25:21Speaker 4: Off like a nonverbal que you don't even mean to.
- 25:24Speaker 1: Do, right, or you may mean to do because you
- 25:27Speaker 1: know that that's the guy, and you know it in
- 25:29Speaker 1: your bones that that guy did it, and you're leading
- 25:32Speaker 1: the witness, right, it can be some some sort of
- 25:34Speaker 1: nonverbal gesture. The problem is is that most people, I
- 25:39Speaker 1: can't say most people, but it's been shown that some people,
- 25:42Speaker 1: when they're brought in as a witness for a police lineup,
- 25:46Speaker 1: feel like it's their role. It's their job to pick
- 25:49Speaker 1: somebody for the cops. So they're more than happy to
- 25:52Speaker 1: be led by the cops because then they're fulfilling their
- 25:54Speaker 1: role and they did what they were supposed to do.
- 25:56Speaker 1: So another another technique or way to administer a good
- 26:02Speaker 1: lineup is to say, here, here's the lineup, whether it's sequential,
- 26:07Speaker 1: one at a time or.
- 26:09Speaker 4: All at once simultaneous.
- 26:10Speaker 1: Yet right, the suspect may or may not be in
- 26:15Speaker 1: this lineup.
- 26:16Speaker 6: Yeah, that seems like I think they found that reduced
- 26:20Speaker 6: mistaken identity rates were lower when they did this, So
- 26:27Speaker 6: you would think just always do that right, right.
- 26:30Speaker 1: Because it says to the witness like the person may
- 26:33Speaker 1: not be in here. It's like a none of the above,
- 26:35Speaker 1: the dreaded letter e none of the above. You're like,
- 26:38Speaker 1: oh God, does that? Does that mean that they're that
- 26:41Speaker 1: the answer is not here? And so you may you
- 26:43Speaker 1: may say I don't I don't see them where. If
- 26:46Speaker 1: they don't say that, you're going to presume that the
- 26:49Speaker 1: suspect is in that lineup, right, and it's your job
- 26:52Speaker 1: to find that person and you have to pick somebody. Yeah,
- 26:56Speaker 1: most people aren't going to think like, I can't say so,
- 26:59Speaker 1: I'm just not going to They're gonna be like three.
- 27:03Speaker 6: Yeah, Well, first of all, it's a crime against you
- 27:07Speaker 6: most a lot of times when you're like picking out
- 27:09Speaker 6: this purp.
- 27:10Speaker 1: Sure.
- 27:10Speaker 6: Yeah, so you want them to be you know, found
- 27:13Speaker 6: or whatever.
- 27:14Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good point too.
- 27:15Speaker 6: You want you don't want them to get away with it.
- 27:17Speaker 6: And the other thing too, is I think there's a
- 27:19Speaker 6: natural human instinct when given a test to not want
- 27:24Speaker 6: to say I can't like you might feel like you
- 27:27Speaker 6: have failed.
- 27:27Speaker 1: Right. That's why I admire you saying that, like with
- 27:30Speaker 1: the phone lineup, you know, not not being not just
- 27:33Speaker 1: being like.
- 27:34Speaker 4: This these two right.
- 27:36Speaker 6: Yeah, But if it that wouldn't matter to my case,
- 27:39Speaker 6: because if I would have said these two and if
- 27:40Speaker 6: they're like, na, that's not the lady whose car it was.
- 27:43Speaker 3: But a lot of people still would have right, right, right,
- 27:45Speaker 3: And they probably.
- 27:46Speaker 1: Wouldn't say no, that's wrong. They would have been like, Okay,
- 27:48Speaker 1: thanks a lot for your time or whatever, and then
- 27:50Speaker 1: you would have left and they'd.
- 27:51Speaker 3: Been like, god, he was so close.
- 27:55Speaker 6: Some other research, it's interesting that suggests when there is
- 27:59Speaker 6: a defender in the lineup that young children and elderly
- 28:04Speaker 6: perform about as well as just regularly young adults. But
- 28:07Speaker 6: when the lineup does not have the actual offender, then
- 28:11Speaker 6: they commit mistakes a lot higher. And to me, that's
- 28:15Speaker 6: just because I think kids and elderly might not fully understand.
- 28:20Speaker 4: I think they have to pick.
- 28:21Speaker 1: Somebody, Okay, yeah, I agree. I think that's exactly what
- 28:24Speaker 1: it is too.
- 28:25Speaker 4: But the research bears that out. It looks like.
- 28:27Speaker 1: Right, So there's there is some like you talked about research,
- 28:31Speaker 1: there's a lot of research in this, but it's become ambiguous.
- 28:35Speaker 1: Right If you step back and you listen to all
- 28:37Speaker 1: of the different different things that you can do with
- 28:40Speaker 1: a lineup, it becomes very clear that a sequential double
- 28:46Speaker 1: blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is
- 28:51Speaker 1: shown to the person at a time, or one live
- 28:53Speaker 1: suspect is brought out to be looked at one person
- 28:56Speaker 1: at a time, yeah, and is administered by a cop
- 29:00Speaker 1: or a worker or somebody who doesn't know who the
- 29:03Speaker 1: suspect is. That that's going to reduce the chance of
- 29:08Speaker 1: a misidentification or a failure of an identification, and that
- 29:13Speaker 1: the person who's being presented with these people is not
- 29:17Speaker 1: going to be able to guess and if they actually
- 29:20Speaker 1: do remember who the perpetrator was, they're going to recognize them.
- 29:25Speaker 1: It's just obvious that that's the best way to do it, right.
- 29:29Speaker 1: The thing is is there was a study in Illinois
- 29:32Speaker 1: that just completely rocked that idea that that's the case,
- 29:36Speaker 1: because there was a three or five year study in
- 29:39Speaker 1: Illinois that looked at different types of lineups and compared
- 29:43Speaker 1: them side by side and found that actually know that
- 29:47Speaker 1: a double blind sequential lineup actually produces worse results than
- 29:56Speaker 1: a simultaneous, non double blind one.
- 29:58Speaker 4: Right.
- 29:59Speaker 6: But and then again not so fast with that, because
- 30:02Speaker 6: other people since then have questioned the methodology they used
- 30:06Speaker 6: in that program and kind of said, you know, I
- 30:10Speaker 6: don't even know if we can take this research and
- 30:13Speaker 6: take these statistics seriously.
- 30:16Speaker 1: Right, because methodologically it was a screwed up study, Like
- 30:20Speaker 1: they really dropped the ball on the study.
- 30:23Speaker 6: Yeah, And I don't think we mentioned the two judgments either.
- 30:26Speaker 6: During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing there together, use what's
- 30:29Speaker 6: called relative judgment. In other words, you compare all the
- 30:32Speaker 6: dudes standing up there against one another, and with the
- 30:35Speaker 6: ones where they trot them out one at a time,
- 30:38Speaker 6: they use something called absolute judgment, which is supposedly means
- 30:42Speaker 6: that they're comparing it to only their memory and not
- 30:45Speaker 6: to the people that came before or after.
- 30:47Speaker 1: Right, that's the hope, that's the ideal, right.
- 30:50Speaker 6: Right, But with this reasearch in research and the study,
- 30:54Speaker 6: I kind of didn't even know what to think because
- 30:56Speaker 6: it sort of went against the grain and the findings.
- 30:59Speaker 6: But then they said, I don't even know if we
- 31:00Speaker 6: can trust these findings because the methodology was no good, right,
- 31:04Speaker 6: So we ended up sort of back at square one
- 31:07Speaker 6: with the Illinois pilot program.
- 31:09Speaker 1: It seems like, yeah, the reason why the method methodology
- 31:12Speaker 1: was so terrible. They used the double blind procedure for
- 31:16Speaker 1: sequential lineups, but they didn't use it for simultaneous lineups.
- 31:20Speaker 1: So if cops were advertently or inadvertently leading people with
- 31:24Speaker 1: simultaneous lineups, then of course those are going to produce
- 31:30Speaker 1: correct choices with suspects better than the one that's a
- 31:33Speaker 1: double blind sequential one. They compared apples to oranges in
- 31:38Speaker 1: this study. It's almost like a sixth grader came up
- 31:42Speaker 1: with how to actually conduct this study that the Illinois
- 31:45Speaker 1: legislature said, Illinois State Police, go go figure this out.
- 31:49Speaker 1: Do a three year study on this, and they came
- 31:52Speaker 1: back and said, huh yeah, and it was. It's terrible.
- 31:56Speaker 1: And the problem is is if it is true that
- 31:59Speaker 1: a sequential double blind study is the way to go,
- 32:02Speaker 1: that it is just smarter and works better, that study
- 32:06Speaker 1: set that back by years because now all the cops
- 32:09Speaker 1: all over the country heardh they did the study and
- 32:12Speaker 1: it's actually worse not and the design of the study
- 32:16Speaker 1: was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work.
- 32:20Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 32:20Speaker 6: They even went to the cops at the Illinois pilot program,
- 32:24Speaker 6: talked to them, and they said the majority of the
- 32:26Speaker 6: officers said they didn't think that it was superior and
- 32:30Speaker 6: said that witnesses who can identify the offender can do
- 32:32Speaker 6: so under either procedure, and officers express concerns that using
- 32:37Speaker 6: a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an investigator has tries
- 32:42Speaker 6: to build with a witness. So I interpret all that
- 32:44Speaker 6: as it's cops saying, can we just keep doing it
- 32:48Speaker 6: the way we've always done it?
- 32:49Speaker 1: Yeah, because it gets results right. But the thing is
- 32:53Speaker 1: is they have some pretty good points in that if
- 32:56Speaker 1: you are running a lineup or whatever, you put together
- 32:59Speaker 1: like a six pack is what it's called in the US,
- 33:02Speaker 1: where you've got three and three mugshots of people and
- 33:07Speaker 1: or I think in Canada they usually use twelve. But
- 33:10Speaker 1: you put this thing together, then you have to find
- 33:12Speaker 1: like a patrol officer or a sergeant or somebody who
- 33:17Speaker 1: has no idea what's going on with your kids?
- 33:19Speaker 4: You want to do a double blind, right.
- 33:21Speaker 1: And then those that person has to go to the house,
- 33:23Speaker 1: record the the what the person did, and then come
- 33:28Speaker 1: back and tell you. It's just an extra thing that
- 33:31Speaker 1: cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making
- 33:33Speaker 1: it way too hard.
- 33:34Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean they said in here that sometimes they
- 33:36Speaker 6: even have trouble coming up with the blind administrator, and
- 33:41Speaker 6: maybe it's a It probably has everything to do with budgets.
- 33:45Speaker 6: My thought is like, why isn't there one person that
- 33:50Speaker 6: does only this.
- 33:51Speaker 1: Oh, that's a great question.
- 33:52Speaker 4: That just is called the administrator.
- 33:54Speaker 6: Right, and then so the line of administrator and goes
- 33:58Speaker 6: to the people's houses or runs them in the precinct
- 34:01Speaker 6: or whatever, and this is the only thing that they do, right,
- 34:05Speaker 6: I'll do.
- 34:05Speaker 1: It, bring in the administrator.
- 34:07Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a TV show waiting to have it. Sure, Yeah,
- 34:11Speaker 4: I don't know. It's probably budgetary.
- 34:14Speaker 1: Its got to be.
- 34:15Speaker 6: They also found with a lot of these when there's
- 34:17Speaker 6: multiple purpse, it just goes haywire. Yeah, because sometimes they'll
- 34:22Speaker 6: put two of the purpose in the same lineup right, right,
- 34:26Speaker 6: just super confusing.
- 34:27Speaker 1: That actually falls in line with like how to build
- 34:29Speaker 1: like a decent line up the right way and we'll
- 34:32Speaker 1: cover that and where they get people to stand in
- 34:36Speaker 1: as suspects right after this. All right, Chuck, So you
- 34:58Speaker 1: were just talking about how if you have lineup and
- 35:01Speaker 1: you put two suspects that you've got, say, there are
- 35:04Speaker 1: two guys who rob some lady, and you have five
- 35:09Speaker 1: people in the lineup, but two of them are your suspects.
- 35:12Speaker 1: That actually is totally unfair for the suspects because what
- 35:18Speaker 1: you've done just then is increase the chance that somebody
- 35:22Speaker 1: could guess, just guess randomly at the suspect. Right.
- 35:28Speaker 3: Yeah, If you have five.
- 35:29Speaker 1: People in a lineup and one of them are the suspect,
- 35:32Speaker 1: then that person has a one in five chance of
- 35:34Speaker 1: being chosen by random chance. But if there's two suspects
- 35:38Speaker 1: in a five person lineup, they have a two out
- 35:40Speaker 1: of five chance, which is way more than a one
- 35:43Speaker 1: in five chance. Some people might even say double the chance, right,
- 35:47Speaker 1: And so it's just less fair. So one of the
- 35:50Speaker 1: standards that you want to fulfill if you're putting together
- 35:53Speaker 1: a lineup in your cop is that you have one
- 35:56Speaker 1: suspect per lineup, which is tougher to do than you
- 36:02Speaker 1: would think.
- 36:02Speaker 6: Yeah, and it seems like a lot of The problem
- 36:04Speaker 6: with this is, and they even say so in the
- 36:06Speaker 6: NIJ articles, that lab studies are one thing, but actually
- 36:10Speaker 6: implementing this in the field they get different results. And
- 36:14Speaker 6: people are doing lab research on one end, cops are
- 36:17Speaker 6: out in the field, sometimes they're in people's home, sometimes
- 36:20Speaker 6: they're in the precinct. And it seems like the two
- 36:23Speaker 6: heads aren't talking very much, right, And there are people,
- 36:26Speaker 6: you know, they did like a live web chat at
- 36:28Speaker 6: some point to bring together all these experts from around
- 36:31Speaker 6: the world, and they kind of all around me were like,
- 36:34Speaker 6: this is a big mess and we need to all
- 36:36Speaker 6: combine forces to try and do the right thing. And
- 36:40Speaker 6: the feeling I get is that a lot of these
- 36:42Speaker 6: police precincts just kind of want to be left alone.
- 36:44Speaker 1: Sure, I mean, they know what works, and it works,
- 36:47Speaker 1: you know, but does it well, that's the question.
- 36:50Speaker 4: Right. So they fingered a collar, right, is that the.
- 36:54Speaker 1: Right the gumsh you finger to call it?
- 36:56Speaker 6: Yeah, then it's all in a good day's work. They
- 37:00Speaker 6: finger the wrong collar, then it's no good.
- 37:04Speaker 1: It's still all in. So one of the reasons it's
- 37:08Speaker 1: that somebody cop would put a two suspects in a lineup.
- 37:13Speaker 1: It's not just to increase the chances that one of
- 37:15Speaker 1: those suspects gets picked by an eyewitness. It's because sometimes
- 37:18Speaker 1: it can be hard to come up with people for
- 37:20Speaker 1: a lineup.
- 37:21Speaker 6: Yeah, this was hard to believe, Like, just they can't
- 37:23Speaker 6: find people sometimes.
- 37:24Speaker 1: Right, Well, and the reason why is because let's say
- 37:27Speaker 1: you have multiple witnesses, and each witness gives you a
- 37:32Speaker 1: different description of the perpetrator, right, right, Ideally you're going
- 37:39Speaker 1: to find a different lineup for each witness.
- 37:45Speaker 6: Yeah, Like, if there's three witnesses, you should run three lineups, right,
- 37:49Speaker 6: because their descriptions are probably somewhat different.
- 37:52Speaker 1: Right. That can be difficult, right, And there's a couple
- 37:54Speaker 1: of ways to handle a lineup. You can do a
- 37:57Speaker 1: suspect matched lineup, where you've got a suspect and to
- 38:03Speaker 1: keep your suspect from standing out, you make all the
- 38:07Speaker 1: other people in the lineup look like you know your suspect. Yeah,
- 38:11Speaker 1: that's one way to do it. Another is to do
- 38:13Speaker 1: the perpetrator description match strategy, which is you've got.
- 38:20Speaker 4: And that's when you have no suspect, right, just witness accounts.
- 38:22Speaker 1: You can have a suspect, but you're creating your lineup
- 38:25Speaker 1: based on what the what the witness has described the perpetrator.
- 38:30Speaker 4: To look like, and then just throw the suspect in there, right.
- 38:32Speaker 1: Which can be bad for the suspect because if the suspect,
- 38:35Speaker 1: the person you actually think did it, doesn't look anything
- 38:38Speaker 1: like the eyewitness said. There's going to be four redheads
- 38:41Speaker 1: and the one blonde guy who's actually the suspect, and
- 38:44Speaker 1: he's going to stand out like a sore throum. So
- 38:46Speaker 1: there's a lot of different things that have to be
- 38:47Speaker 1: massaged here to try to make everybody in the lineup
- 38:51Speaker 1: basically look all like the perpetrator, yeah the eyewitness described,
- 38:55Speaker 1: or all like the suspect that you've got, because you
- 38:58Speaker 1: don't want the suspect to stand out. And there's a
- 39:00Speaker 1: lot of techniques that they use to try to make
- 39:02Speaker 1: everybody look the same.
- 39:04Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 39:04Speaker 6: One of the I mean they like you said they
- 39:06Speaker 6: dressed people. It was funny that one article said in
- 39:09Speaker 6: the Bronx precinct, they usually.
- 39:10Speaker 4: Put them in Yankees hats. Right, Just line up a
- 39:14Speaker 4: bunch of guys in Yankees right.
- 39:15Speaker 1: That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging
- 39:18Speaker 1: outside of the you know that room where they.
- 39:20Speaker 6: Walk them into wasn' Kramer in a lineup when he
- 39:22Speaker 6: was a suspect, a totally serial killer suspect.
- 39:26Speaker 1: Yes, I don't remember it was a serial killer, but
- 39:29Speaker 1: I remember he was in the line I he kept
- 39:30Speaker 1: turning the wrong way.
- 39:31Speaker 6: Yeah, I think he was misidentified on the when they
- 39:34Speaker 6: went to LA to pitch the TV show. Huh, Kramer
- 39:36Speaker 6: got caught up in some like serial killer things. I
- 39:39Speaker 6: think of that, and I think of the great lineup
- 39:42Speaker 6: scene in the Usual Suspects.
- 39:44Speaker 1: Let's address that real quick.
- 39:46Speaker 6: When they have to say something so well, we can't
- 39:49Speaker 6: repeat it here because there's bad words.
- 39:50Speaker 1: Right. No, what I was going to say is that
- 39:53Speaker 1: that lineup would never happen because not only do you
- 39:56Speaker 1: have two suspects in there, all five people in the
- 39:59Speaker 1: lineup are your.
- 40:00Speaker 4: And they're not dressed the same.
- 40:02Speaker 1: Yep.
- 40:02Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's a total movie lineup.
- 40:05Speaker 1: It would never happen. No, Or are you going to
- 40:07Speaker 1: say about them saying something.
- 40:08Speaker 6: Well, they had to recite a line. I don't know
- 40:10Speaker 6: how typical that is, though.
- 40:12Speaker 3: Uh, you me.
- 40:13Speaker 1: When she did her line up, she remembered what the
- 40:16Speaker 1: guy was saying.
- 40:17Speaker 4: Oh, and they say that, okay, so that's the thing.
- 40:19Speaker 1: And she was like, wait a minute, can I do
- 40:21Speaker 1: they have to say whatever I say they said? And
- 40:23Speaker 1: the cop was like yeah, and she's like, really, what
- 40:26Speaker 1: I want him to say? Yeah, he's like, no, you
- 40:28Speaker 1: have to say what they actually said.
- 40:30Speaker 4: Oh yeah, how did that result? Did she get the guy?
- 40:33Speaker 1: Oh? She picked him out immediately? Oh okay, yeah, yeah,
- 40:36Speaker 1: I think I got busted.
- 40:37Speaker 4: Nice.
- 40:37Speaker 1: Yeah, man, you don't mug you me. I'll tell you that, buddy.
- 40:40Speaker 4: You hear that, purpose.
- 40:42Speaker 1: Right, you started quaking in your boots.
- 40:46Speaker 6: The one thing too, that caught me, uh sort of
- 40:48Speaker 6: off guard, is that I never thought about is the uh,
- 40:51Speaker 6: the part about whether or not they're clean shaven, Like
- 40:55Speaker 6: there could be details of omission, Like if an eyewitness
- 40:59Speaker 6: doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they either were clean
- 41:02Speaker 6: shaven or not, then I think they default to something
- 41:06Speaker 6: that may not be accurate. And so all of a sudden,
- 41:09Speaker 6: your lineup, well, your lineup should have all clean shaven dudes.
- 41:13Speaker 1: You should just assume that if they didn't say the
- 41:15Speaker 1: guy had a beard, that that doesn't that that doesn't
- 41:18Speaker 1: mean that the guy had a beard and they just
- 41:20Speaker 1: didn't say it. You should just assume it means that
- 41:22Speaker 1: they're clean shaven.
- 41:23Speaker 6: And they should all be clean shaven in a lineup,
- 41:25Speaker 6: because if you have five clean shaven guys in one
- 41:28Speaker 6: filler or one foil with a big beard like.
- 41:30Speaker 4: Me, right, I might get picked out just because I
- 41:33Speaker 4: look different.
- 41:34Speaker 3: Right exactly?
- 41:35Speaker 1: Or if the one guy's clean shaven, and you're like, well,
- 41:38Speaker 1: they didn't say that the person had a beard, but
- 41:40Speaker 1: they also didn't say they didn't have a beard, right,
- 41:43Speaker 1: so I can put this clean shaven suspect in with
- 41:46Speaker 1: four other guys who all have beards and make them
- 41:48Speaker 1: stand out. That's the opposite. And apparently there was this
- 41:51Speaker 1: New York Times article from years back about a guy
- 41:54Speaker 1: named that dude, what was his.
- 41:56Speaker 4: Name, casting agent, basically Robert Weston.
- 41:59Speaker 1: Yeah, Robert or western It's it's a pretty interesting little article.
- 42:03Speaker 1: But in the article it says that the Bronx cops
- 42:07Speaker 1: that use this guy to help fill lineups, which we'll
- 42:09Speaker 1: talk about in a second, that that when they give
- 42:12Speaker 1: the perpetrators like the Yankees hats or whatever for the lineup,
- 42:16Speaker 1: like the perpetrator is always the one who pulls it
- 42:19Speaker 1: down over his eyes, and they have to be like, dude,
- 42:22Speaker 1: see how everybody else to wear in their hat makes
- 42:24Speaker 1: us exactly like that, or else they're going to pick
- 42:26Speaker 1: you out. So they actually are trying to help the
- 42:29Speaker 1: perpetrator at least not stand up and be like me,
- 42:33Speaker 1: you know, and instead just keep it on the on
- 42:36Speaker 1: the level, at least as far as the Yankees hat
- 42:39Speaker 1: brooms go.
- 42:40Speaker 4: I so want to be a filler.
- 42:42Speaker 1: I'm sure you could do it. I want you just
- 42:45Speaker 1: have to hang around long enough until a dude who
- 42:46Speaker 1: looks like you commits a crime, which in Atlanta's a
- 42:50Speaker 1: lot of hipsters running around. For sure.
- 42:52Speaker 4: I don't look like a hipster.
- 42:54Speaker 1: I don't know, I.
- 42:56Speaker 4: Look like it the hipster gone bad.
- 42:59Speaker 1: Oh yeah, need enough to be h. You look like
- 43:01Speaker 1: a hit and run hipster.
- 43:02Speaker 4: Hipsters are super well coffed and like squared away.
- 43:05Speaker 1: Oh I know it to me, you know, Yeah, your
- 43:08Speaker 1: jeenes aren't pegged.
- 43:09Speaker 4: No, I look like a hipster who slept in.
- 43:12Speaker 6: So back to Robert Weston, this guy in New York
- 43:15Speaker 6: at the time, at least, I can't believe how little
- 43:18Speaker 6: money he made. He only got ten dollars for putting
- 43:21Speaker 6: together a complete lineup. Yeah, and they said sometimes he
- 43:25Speaker 6: does as many as four in a day, and sometimes
- 43:27Speaker 6: not at all.
- 43:28Speaker 4: I'm like, so a good day for him is forty bucks,
- 43:30Speaker 4: that's what it sounds like. Man, Maybe that's the problem
- 43:34Speaker 4: is they need to Well again, it's budgetary. Probably it's
- 43:36Speaker 4: going to say pay a little bit more, get a
- 43:39Speaker 4: casting agent in there, get.
- 43:40Speaker 1: Some of those college educated fillers in there, right.
- 43:43Speaker 4: I guess.
- 43:43Speaker 6: And also it made it sound like, I don't know,
- 43:47Speaker 6: he's kind of pulling people off the street. Sometimes they're
- 43:50Speaker 6: homeless people. Sometimes they're like drug addicts. Well yeah, I
- 43:54Speaker 6: mean I guess it depends on who the purp is.
- 43:57Speaker 6: Sometimes they get other cops that are busy to stand in.
- 44:01Speaker 1: Right, I mean, these are people need people will go
- 44:04Speaker 1: to a police station and stand in the lineup for
- 44:06Speaker 1: ten dollars.
- 44:07Speaker 4: Right, They get paid as much as the guy who
- 44:09Speaker 4: organized the party.
- 44:10Speaker 1: Right, But if Robert Weston stands in himself, he'll get
- 44:13Speaker 1: an extra twenty bucks on top of putting the thing together.
- 44:16Speaker 3: Right.
- 44:16Speaker 4: How many times he tries to do that.
- 44:18Speaker 1: But he even said, like if they want white guys,
- 44:21Speaker 1: I don't know any white guys. So they go to
- 44:23Speaker 1: homeless shelters for that. And that's very much what cops do.
- 44:26Speaker 1: Cops will go find people on the street. They will
- 44:28Speaker 1: go to homeless shelters. They will have casting agents like
- 44:32Speaker 1: Robert Weston on their speed dial, and what they'll say is,
- 44:37Speaker 1: I've got a middle aged white guy with a graying
- 44:43Speaker 1: beard and he's about six feet tall. Give me four
- 44:48Speaker 1: other people that match that description, and ideally four other
- 44:53Speaker 1: people that match that description will show up, and not
- 44:56Speaker 1: three and then one another total outlier or something like that.
- 45:00Speaker 6: One cop was complaining about his work. It was kind
- 45:02Speaker 6: of funny, right, complaining about Robert Wesson. He was like,
- 45:05Speaker 6: he didn't bring in good people. He always like right.
- 45:07Speaker 4: Budges, the ages and the races and stuff.
- 45:10Speaker 1: But the reason why they keep using this guy is
- 45:12Speaker 1: because he answers his phone, doesn't matter what time you
- 45:15Speaker 1: call him. He can put a lineup together for you.
- 45:18Speaker 1: And if you have a very limited amount of time,
- 45:20Speaker 1: you can only hold a suspect for so long without
- 45:22Speaker 1: charging them, but you want to put them in a
- 45:24Speaker 1: lineup for what's called an investigatory lineup, to where you
- 45:28Speaker 1: just want to see maybe bringing one witness just to
- 45:31Speaker 1: see if you're on the right track. You've got a
- 45:33Speaker 1: very limited amount of time and you need people like that,
- 45:36Speaker 1: which means that you may have a lower quality one. Yeah,
- 45:39Speaker 1: fortunately that would just be for an investigatory one. If
- 45:42Speaker 1: it were for a confirmatory one, that's the one that
- 45:44Speaker 1: you see on TV where it's like you bring in
- 45:47Speaker 1: a witness and you've got your suspect and they're sitting
- 45:50Speaker 1: in jail, and you bring them out. That is the
- 45:52Speaker 1: one where like, all the t should be crossed and
- 45:55Speaker 1: the eyes should be dotted, because a good court will
- 45:59Speaker 1: here and we'll want to know the details of how
- 46:01Speaker 1: that lineup went, and if anything sounds hinky, they'll toss
- 46:05Speaker 1: that lineup right out, that eyewitness testimony out.
- 46:09Speaker 6: The worst possible version of all of this is something
- 46:12Speaker 6: called a show up. And this is something this is
- 46:14Speaker 6: also a movie trope that you see, and that's when
- 46:17Speaker 6: an officer brings a witness to a place to show
- 46:20Speaker 6: the witness the suspect that's been apprehended. So like they're
- 46:25Speaker 6: in the back of a car, or here's what happens
- 46:28Speaker 6: in the movie. There's a guy in the back of
- 46:30Speaker 6: a police car handcuffed. They'll bring the person who was
- 46:34Speaker 6: robbed or whatever they're to the scene. They'll yank him
- 46:37Speaker 6: out of the back of the car and say, is
- 46:39Speaker 6: this the dirt bag who did it?
- 46:41Speaker 4: Like just one guy.
- 46:42Speaker 6: Yeah, and that's clearly the worst possible version of.
- 46:45Speaker 4: All of this.
- 46:46Speaker 1: And the guy's like, I need more pace, a pay,
- 46:49Speaker 1: I'm coming down. So one of the here's the reason
- 46:52Speaker 1: why that show up is so terrible, Chuck.
- 46:55Speaker 4: Well, there's no other people that they're comparing them to.
- 46:57Speaker 1: That's one. But they're also in handcuffs, in the back
- 47:00Speaker 1: of a cop car or something like that. They're in
- 47:02Speaker 1: place custody, and so the eyewitness is going to assume that,
- 47:06Speaker 1: in addition to their testimony, the cops obviously have something
- 47:09Speaker 1: on this person, and so that must mean that the
- 47:12Speaker 1: cops know it's that person, and this is just a formality,
- 47:15Speaker 1: so I'll be like, yeah, sure, that was that person.
- 47:17Speaker 1: That's the first problem with it. The second problem is
- 47:20Speaker 1: is that from that point on, that person that they've
- 47:23Speaker 1: just seen now becomes the star of their memory of
- 47:28Speaker 1: that crime. It's like they photoshop this person's face into
- 47:33Speaker 1: that vague, shadowy face that's holding the gun that they
- 47:36Speaker 1: were actually focused on, and from that moment on they
- 47:39Speaker 1: just get more and more certain that that was the
- 47:42Speaker 1: person because that person's not starring in their memories and
- 47:46Speaker 1: it's not just the problem with the show up, but
- 47:48Speaker 1: with any misidentification. When they see that person and that
- 47:52Speaker 1: person becomes seared in their brain, they're positive from that
- 47:56Speaker 1: point on and they can seem very confident in court,
- 47:58Speaker 1: which again he's buy even though it's garbage.
- 48:02Speaker 4: Well, in weeks and months can go by, right between
- 48:06Speaker 4: the point that you have experienced a crime and when
- 48:09Speaker 4: you may be identifying someone or a court for sure
- 48:12Speaker 4: as months and months and months later. So man, part
- 48:16Speaker 4: of me does think, like, get rid of all this.
- 48:19Speaker 1: A lot of people say that, or at the very
- 48:21Speaker 1: least say this is eyewitness testimony. It's actually terrible testimony.
- 48:25Speaker 1: Actually it's terrible evidence.
- 48:27Speaker 4: But let's do it anyway.
- 48:28Speaker 1: Right. But and if they did say that, if they
- 48:30Speaker 1: basically lowered what how much weight eyewitness testimony held in court,
- 48:36Speaker 1: then those cases that were built entirely on eyewitness testimony
- 48:40Speaker 1: wouldn't have a leg to stand on it. They have
- 48:42Speaker 1: to go build a bigger case.
- 48:44Speaker 6: Yeah, But like in Yumi's case, it worked, it did. No,
- 48:47Speaker 6: it was like that guy might have walked, you know, right, That's.
- 48:49Speaker 1: The problem is that, you know, if if twenty five
- 48:54Speaker 1: percent of the time is wrong, right, seventy five percent
- 48:56Speaker 1: of the time, is right, we think. So, I mean
- 48:59Speaker 1: it's not it's not like Arson investigation, which we're going
- 49:03Speaker 1: to do one on one day, Yeah, where it's just
- 49:05Speaker 1: totally made up. Like it does have some veracity, but
- 49:08Speaker 1: there's a lot of flaws with it, and.
- 49:09Speaker 4: The lives are at stake though it's really dicey.
- 49:12Speaker 1: They need to figure it out because of that. Yeah,
- 49:16Speaker 1: so they need to go do that now.
- 49:18Speaker 6: I mean, can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified
- 49:22Speaker 6: and serving no, two decades in prison for something you
- 49:25Speaker 6: really didn't do?
- 49:27Speaker 1: No, I really can't.
- 49:29Speaker 6: I mean I remember how up said I got when
- 49:31Speaker 6: we did the Innocence Project. It's just, yeah, you hear
- 49:33Speaker 6: these stories and then they get out and they're like,
- 49:35Speaker 6: well here's here's four hundred thousand bucks.
- 49:37Speaker 4: We feel pretty bad.
- 49:38Speaker 1: Right, go get yourself something nice. Try to forget about
- 49:40Speaker 1: all this, right. Yeah, did you ever see that movie
- 49:43Speaker 1: An Innocent Man with Tom Selleck. It scared the Bejesus
- 49:49Speaker 1: out of me. The same thing happened to him when
- 49:51Speaker 1: he was when he was he was framed.
- 49:54Speaker 4: Oh wait, that's high Road to China.
- 49:57Speaker 1: Oh right, I got my stuff? Makes it? No that's
- 50:00Speaker 1: down under that. Oh right, Uh, you got anything else?
- 50:03Speaker 4: Nope?
- 50:03Speaker 3: All right, Well that's it for police.
- 50:05Speaker 1: Lineups for now. We'll do an update whenever they get
- 50:08Speaker 1: it figured out.
- 50:08Speaker 4: We did one on police sketches, right, yeah, okay, is
- 50:12Speaker 4: this it?
- 50:12Speaker 1: Are we done?
- 50:13Speaker 4: No?
- 50:13Speaker 1: We still got Arson investigation. We've got a lot all right, yeah, okay, okay.
- 50:21Speaker 1: If you want to know more about police lineups, then
- 50:23Speaker 1: I don't know, go hang around a police station. See
- 50:25Speaker 1: if you can stand in one learn firsthand.
- 50:28Speaker 6: Okay, get a little sign that says I will be
- 50:31Speaker 6: your foil ten dollars.
- 50:33Speaker 4: Yep.
- 50:33Speaker 3: Uh.
- 50:34Speaker 1: And since I said ten dollars, it's time for listener.
- 50:36Speaker 4: Now, I'm gonna call this youngest fan. This very cute email. Hey, guys,
- 50:43Speaker 4: love the podcast.
- 50:43Speaker 6: You're doing it right, It's not this email is not
- 50:48Speaker 6: episode specific, but I had to tell you about this.
- 50:50Speaker 6: My husband and I welcomed our baby boy into the
- 50:52Speaker 6: world a couple of months ago. When I was pregnant,
- 50:55Speaker 6: we joked that the baby would think that one of
- 50:57Speaker 6: you was his dad because he heard your voices so often.
- 51:02Speaker 6: That's a very funny joke in a family, you know,
- 51:06Speaker 6: joke about the paternity of your child. Now that he's here,
- 51:10Speaker 6: I've been playing music in the car instead of the podcast,
- 51:13Speaker 6: thinking music helps calm him. Well, one day he was
- 51:16Speaker 6: crying and crying in the car. I couldn't get him
- 51:17Speaker 6: to calm down.
- 51:18Speaker 1: She was like, what's wrong with DOCN? Why isn't docin working.
- 51:23Speaker 6: I couldn't get him to calm down with any of the
- 51:24Speaker 6: usual tricks, so I decided to heck with it. I'm
- 51:26Speaker 6: gonna put on the podcast, and I kid you not,
- 51:28Speaker 6: as soon as you guys started talking, he stopped crying.
- 51:31Speaker 6: My husband says it was coincidence. Jealous, I say, stuff,
- 51:36Speaker 6: you should know.
- 51:36Speaker 4: Magic.
- 51:39Speaker 6: Now we're back to always listening to you guys in
- 51:40Speaker 6: the car. You keep up the great work. And thanks
- 51:42Speaker 6: for soothing my baby boy. And that is from Sarah
- 51:46Speaker 6: Strantz and our youngest fan, Frank from beautiful Mount Pleasant,
- 51:52Speaker 6: South Carolina.
- 51:52Speaker 1: That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email, Frank,
- 51:55Speaker 1: go to sleep quiet now.
- 51:56Speaker 4: They named their baby after our chair?
- 51:59Speaker 3: Yeah?
- 52:01Speaker 1: Pretty? Wouldn't that be amazing if they actually did it?
- 52:03Speaker 3: Well? Now?
- 52:05Speaker 1: And thank you also to unnamed husband for being a
- 52:07Speaker 1: good sport.
- 52:08Speaker 4: Agreed.
- 52:09Speaker 1: If you want to send us a great email about
- 52:12Speaker 1: how We're magic. You can hang out with us on
- 52:14Speaker 1: social media. Just go to our website stuff you Should
- 52:17Speaker 1: Know dot com, and you can also send us an
- 52:19Speaker 1: email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
- 52:25Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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