Empirical Assessment of Lineups: Getting Down to Cases

Empirical assessment has been proposed as a process for evaluating the fairness of lineups in forensic settings. The mock witness paradigm, which asks a nonwitnesses to choose lineup members best fitting a given description, was used in a 2 × 2 ANOVA design (N = 165) to evaluate two photospreads (same defendant, different foils) from an actual rape case. Two groups (context 1) were asked to pick the best matching photo from the two photospreads after hearing the real witnesses' description and to estimate the features of each foil. Two groups (context 2) were asked for feature estimates only. A significant context effect (p < .01) on height and weight estimates shows that hearing a description polarized the absolute values (higher) but not the relative distribution, which saw the defendant rated as the heaviest and tallest member. The defendant was chosen by 58% (p < .001) in one photospread rated as biased. Complications in the second photospread prompted critique of recommended fairness indicators.