Lineup Construction

Basically, four factors can affect identification performance at this stage. The first is the lineup construction. To be fair, a lineup should contain four to eight innocent persons, called “fillers” or “foils,” who match the witness’s general description of the culprit. If the witness describes seeing a white male in his 20s with curly hair, for example, foils should not be included who are old, nonwhite, and bald. Also, anything that makes a suspect distinctive compared to the others in the lineup increases his or her chance of being selected. This is what happened to Steve Titus, who was mistakenly accused of rape when the police showed the victim his picture alongside those of five other men. Although the foils resembled Titus in appearance, his picture stood out like a sore thumb. It was the smallest and the only one without a border.

Eyewitness choices from a lineup can also be influenced by the emotional expression on a suspect’s face relative to fillers. In one experiment, for exam- ple, “innocent” suspects were more likely to get identified from a photographic lineup when their picture depicted an angry expression, which made them look more like a criminal, and when the fillers in the lineup did not also depict angry expressions.