September 4, 2018 • 52 mins
Police lineups are something most people have never had any firsthand experience with. What you see on TV and in movies isn't so far off though. Learn about how these tropes work for real in today's episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry out there outside
the fish bowl, and also there's guest producer Noel in
(00:21):
our pal Ben. But yeah, I'm in the room this time. Man, Yeah,
on the mike. Thanks for having us. Uh, this is
way better than that time you have me on the
April Fools episode. Well, I'm glad you brought that up
because may remember Ben from that I think it was
two thirteen or fifteen something, ungodly time ago. It's my replacement. Yeah,
(00:42):
it was the April Fools joke for the three D
printing episode. So this is your second time on the show. Yeah,
the Internet shredgy Ben was it were? They were like
a target of abuse. I want to thank everybody for
the very polite emails and as as we could tell, thankfully,
Chuck is fine. They yeah, they took it easy on him.
We have very nice listeners. Something. And then know, this
might be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast,
(01:03):
even though you've guess produced it like a million times.
I think I may have mumbled something in the background
the time. Really, so we're having you two on let's cut,
let's get down a business because you two have a
podcast together, right, I know you also are on Mini
Crushed movie Crush. Yeah, you're also in real World's colliding
(01:27):
right now, Right, there's a lot I'm going over them all.
You're on stuff they don't want you to know. But
you two, Ben and Nol have come together and made
ridiculous history, which isn't awesome. Oh yeah, that's right. We're
just missing that. God I'm starting to sweat. But you
guys are on ridiculous history together. We are tell us
about that. So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events,
(01:54):
often not covered in your typical history class. Sounds for Mimilier, right,
because for one reason or another, people thought that's no
way that didn't really happen. The first recorded instance of
a mooning did not result in the death of hundreds
(02:15):
of people, is surely not? Surely not? But it did,
And surely the US government did not have a plan
to shoot a nuclear missile at the moon, right, That
was just a Mr Show sketch, Sure not, but it
also was It was kind of parallel thinking. Is the
Mr show sketch happened before this story became declassified Project
(02:36):
day one nine. So our continuing mission with Ridiculous History,
not to sound too star trekky about it, is to
find those moments, the bizarre people, places, and things throughout
the span of human civilization that at least crack the
both of us up on a continual basis. And sometimes
we do have to stop recording just for a second
(02:59):
because we're so tickled. Yeah wow, that's that's actually high qualities,
mainly because we tickle each other physically. That's cheating, Ben,
You're making it sound so serious. It's actually a lot
of fun. It's a fun show, right Yeah, Okay, Yeah,
I mean I'm giving been a hard time, but yeah,
that's definitely like we touch on from time to time.
(03:21):
It'll it'll go into a heavier territory. Like, for example,
we did an episode about how women in Kansas in
the nineteen twenties were imprisoned in labor camps for having STDs.
Well that certainly falls under ridiculous, not exactly fun or
funny right now, ridiculous, But so it's it's it's all
of those things. Some of them are you know, crack
you up hilarious moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by
(03:45):
bunnies or you know, the aforementioned stt labor camps or
racist special Olympics that were held here in the States.
And we're a complete uh well tomorrow phrase we use
on the show each ship show. So so wait a minute,
I think you are like, you need to name the
state that hosted that. It was St. Louis. Yeah. St Louis,
(04:11):
And it's because the World's Fair was happening in St.
Louis and they were going to have it in Chicago.
But the people hosting the World's Fair said, if you
don't do your Olympics as part of the World's Fair,
we're going to totally blow you out of the water
with how awesome our World's Fair is. And no one's
gonna come to your Olympics. Scared them in the early
days of like, you know, not the earliest days of
the Olympics, when they brought it back like in them,
(04:31):
you know, it was not ancient room. It was not
in fact ancient Rome. And it was also it was
not a good example of the Olympics either because the
white supremacists who were in charge of the whole shebang
decided that this would be the perfect time to prove
(04:52):
their cockamamie ideas of like eugenic ideas of kind of
like white superiority and like they would have indigenous people
competing in these Olympic events, but of course they didn't
teach them how to, you know, do the events, so
they didn't just automatically know how to pull vault or
throw a javelin or whatever. So and one supremacists can
ruin anything. Anything they put their hands on, they really
(05:13):
can just turns to poop. Yeah, we are doing an
episode on flash events later, so stay tuned for there. So,
so before we give everything away, you guys tell everyone
where they can find ridiculous history and when. You can
find ridiculous history at our website. No, it's ridiculous history show,
I think, so the website. It's definitely keep prepared for this.
(05:37):
I've got steck of notes right here. Yeah, you can
find us an Apple podcast. You find us on Spotify,
you can find us wherever you find your favorite shows,
like stuff you should know or stuff they don't want
you to know, or I should I list the entire
pantheon of all the shows we have. It's too many
at this point, but but yes, you can find us
(05:58):
in all of those places. We also have a community page,
uh that we're really proud of and really happy with,
called ridiculous Historians on Facebook. Taking a total cue from
the cisk army nice. Well, First of all, thank you
for all of the flattery that you've been heaping on
us for the last few minutes as much appreciated, but
(06:19):
also thank you for coming by. Appreciate it, guys, Thank
you guys for having so much. Let's do this every week. Yeah,
that might be been much. Let me check the sketch.
I gotta tell you, I love those guys, but I'm
glad to get out of that that new studio box.
It's like a Fema trailer. Man. It's for malde hyde
(06:40):
wafting off slowly poisoning us. It is still offcasting. It
feels like, yeah, big time. It's in my hair, which
is now falling out. We're in bad shape. Well before,
I like what you're wearing. By the way, thank you.
I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself and
luckily I had a bunch of samples of our new
T shirt. Yeah, and this is not just a plug. Everyone.
(07:02):
Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T
shirt from the Stuff you Should Know store because they
sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great, to the
guy who has a hundred T shirts, here's twenty more.
But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with this.
Like the size of it. Look at the size, perfect size.
It's not so big that it wraps around and gets
(07:24):
all mangled by my love handles. But it's also not
so small that it looks like, you know, caved in chest.
You know what I mean. I didn't remember that reference
though I didn't neither like they listened to the Pie
Piper episode. Oh there you go. It sounds like a
youth thing, yeah, Josh, But it was just an offhanded
(07:45):
comment I made. Now it's a T shirt I'm wearing,
which is I love. It makes a pretty great time
to be alive. By the way, I need to give
a shout out to Brittney Shift. Um, Britney Shift sent
this idea to us. Okay, great, And the reason you
know we don't often take well that's not true. We
kind of keep a kitty of listeners suggestions, but we
(08:07):
don't often like do one the next week and then
shout out the person. But I thought we had fully
exhausted our Crime and Punishment series. So I was delighted
that Britney Shifts sent this in and I was like,
why haven't we done police lineup? I don't know, it's
a great question. Was just sitting there waiting. Yep. The
(08:30):
only other one that's left is what kind of shoes
detectives wear? That that's the last one? Is this? Yeah,
that's gum shoe or crepe sold I think do you
knew that? Yeah? But I don't know how it relates
to cops. I guess they wore those. They are super comfortable.
(08:50):
Cops are always walking around walking, yeah you know, but
sometimes when they're walking, they're actually out on the street
looking for people who resemble a suspect that they have
in the jail house. And they say, hey, you come
on over here, how would you like to make ten bucks?
(09:11):
And the person says exactly how copper and the cops says,
by standing in is what we call a filler in
a police or they do like Comber Simpson and when
they were like a boat raffle that they said he
had to come down to the police station. Yeah, you
want a boat? Yeah, and then they beat him merciless
for like parking unpaid parking tickets. Also shout out to
(09:34):
Beth at Schuster, who wrote to this article in the
n i J Journal the National Institute of Justice, I believe, so,
is that right? Yeah, they're pretty much committed to keeping
people from being wrongly convicted, so I would guess the
J stance for justice. Yeah, and this is this is
a good start, and we had some other stuff we
(09:55):
added to it. But thank you Ms Schuster, Yeah for
your work up. Well, um, I already led into the
episode and it didn't take so let me try again.
This n i J article you sent calls out a
dude named Jerry Miller, who back was two years old,
I believe. And Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day
(10:19):
when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping,
and raping a woman, and he got convicted. He was
convicted because two people, two eye witnesses, saw him in
the lineup picked him out, and then later at trial
the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but
(10:40):
who cares. There's two eye witnesses that picked the show
out of a lineup. He's done. He did twenty four
years in prison, and you may notice from the tone
that I'm using here he was wrongfully convicted. He actually
got out of prison and was living life re leased
on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet a monitor constantly as
(11:02):
a registered sex offender. And then finally I think, um, oh,
I'm not quite sure two thousand seven. In two thousand seven,
as part of the Innocence Project, which we've done an
episode on with um, yeah, that lady what is her name? Oh, Haulleen,
(11:23):
but it's definitely not Paulazon. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah, I
wanted to say Pauli Shore so bad. I just knew
it was wrong, but we didn't. Right, We did an
Innocence Project episode, and under the Innocence Project, Jerry Miller
was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did not do
(11:47):
this and lost twenty four years of his life because
of flawed eyewitness testimony. Yeah, and so you know, this
is all about police lineups and more about I mean,
we'll tell you how they work in a general sense,
but this sort of more about how you know, it's
such an imperfect system, but sort of The takeaway from
(12:09):
all of this that we're about to go over with
all the studies and the trying different things is kind
of like, you know, it's an imperfect system and we
can try and craft it the best way we can,
but human memory is imperfect. Identifying people in lineups is imperfect,
and we're just it's kind of the best we got
right now. Right Well, a lot of people are like,
(12:31):
get rid of eyewitness testimony really altogether, yes, all together.
Humans suck at eyewitness testimony. And there's a lot of
reasons why. It's not like people are out there like
I want to have me a bad guy, show me
a lineup. I'm gonna pick one of those guys out.
They're not doing that. They're they're subject to basically the
(12:52):
way our brains are wired. We don't walk around videotaping
everything that we see. Yeah, you know, we get sillly
bombarded with sensory information and under normal circumstances, you know,
you see a stranger on the street, you just see
there's another human. I've identified him as not a threat
and keep walking by it. If that person turned out
(13:13):
to be accused of a crime, um or or perpetrated
a crime, and you were brought in to say was
this the person you saw? Your brain is going to
try to reconstruct what little pieces of memory it formed
of that person. And there's a lot of things, a
lot of factors that are involved that can make that
(13:34):
really difficult task even harder. Yeah. Like I am someone
who has told myself, Chuck, pay attention. Like, if you're
ever in a situation like, pay attention, try and collect
yourself and try and remember a few really good details
about the car or the person. So like, this is
(13:55):
on my mind. And I actually had a situation when
I lived now I happened to me where I had
to go through a police lineup and I failed. Oh really,
was the suspect there? No? Well no, here's here's the
quick version is I wasn't in a hit and run
this lady. Uh, these two lady, these two younger girls,
(14:16):
they were probably teenagers, hit me from behind in my car.
I stopped my car, starting to get out and they
take off. So it's a hit and run. I chase them,
which is you should not do. Were you shooting into
the air and again to slow down trying to shoot
out their tires? No, but I did chase him. Because
I was so mad, and your adrenaline just shoots through
(14:38):
the roof when something like that happens, so immediately you're
just not yourself and like recording details. So I was
trying to catch up to get a license plate. I
saw that they went down the street that I knew
was a dead end. Um, it wasn't a cul de sect,
but it functioned to like a cul de sact. So
I stopped where I was, got out of the car.
(14:58):
Sure enough, twenty later they come halling but back towards me,
and uh, the look on their faces was like you know, oh, snap,
there's the guy. And they just sped right past me.
And I saw their faces as they sped past me
in their car. The cops found the car, found the people,
(15:19):
and they're like, we didn't do that, and so who
are these girls? These teenagers? Well that's the long and
short of it. Is all you have to do and
something like that. I said, didn't do it, and if
I can't pick you out, then you get away. And
they showed me pictures of like, you know, these were
like teenage young teenage Hispanic women. They showed me probably
(15:42):
probably fifteen pictures and said, can you identify them. I
was like, no, it was a month ago. They sped
past me for a second, like I couldn't even hazard
a guess, and I didn't want to do that. You know,
well that's very sensible of you. Yeah, I just didn't
want to take a stab at it. So I was like, no,
I have no idea, and they're basically like, sorry, they
said they didn't do it. Wow. It's like, but you
(16:03):
have the car and it's damaged, and like none of
that matters. They're like not not if you can't identify
I mean I could see that. I think would be like, oh, yeah,
that happened some other times in some other hit and runs.
I mean, but yeah. The long story short though, is
I'm someone who has tried to tell myself to react
in the right ways, and I couldn't tell them much
(16:24):
beyond like the color of the car and sort of
would it looked like because you were seeing red? Because right,
that's our that our bodies are not primed to form memories.
It's not where our where our energy goes. It's more
like getting away or shooting out the tires of a
car that just hit and ran. Right, But what you
did with that lineup is the other side of the coin.
(16:47):
The other problem with lineups is or eyewitness testimony from lineups,
is that sometimes people pick out people who are innocent
and other times people fail to pick out the people
who are actually the perpetrators. So it's like you said,
they're very they're very flaw it's as flawed system. The
problem is is the wrong people can go to jail
(17:09):
and the people who actually did it can get away
with it. So that's an extremely flawed system. And when
something that um important is on the table, then um,
it needs to be fixed. And there's a lot of
people looking into how it can be fixed, but we're
not there yet by any stretch. No, and here's the
stat you were talking about the DNA exoneration. Uh, of
(17:34):
the first three exonerations in the US were wrongfully convicted
because of eyewitness testimony and police lineups. Say it again,
seventy of the first hundred and eighty three. So like
the Innocence Project, it's basically like a pilot study to
show through DNA exoneration all the ways that we wrongfully
(17:58):
convict people. And what is coming to the to the
front is eyewitness testimony. Yeah, and that the basis of
that is the police lineup right. And one other thing
that's that's problematic with the eyewitness testimony is if you
want to wow a jury, bring out an eyewitness who
seems totally sure that what they saw or that they
(18:19):
saw the person they're pointing to and the defendant's table, yeah,
or that that dramatic moment. It's like a movie trope.
Now you know, is the person in this room right?
Let the records show that witness is pointing at the defendant, right. Yeah.
So the problem is it has a huge impact, but
it's also really crutty wit, really crutty um evidence. There's
(18:41):
this guy here, he had a great quote. He says
that um eyewitness testimony is a very unusual, complex kind
of trace evidence, and it's difficult to recover, easy to contaminate,
and very hard to handle. And that just there's no
better description of eyewitness testimony. If I was ever in
(19:01):
court and someone identified me from the witness stand, I
would do that thing where you look at behind you
when they pointed at you, just be like, I think
they're talking behind me, and they would say no, and
they would point again, and I would move a little
bit more I'd be like, this is this witness is
clearly disturbed, and then if that, if that didn't work,
you would escalate to I'm rubber and your glue. Yeah,
(19:24):
that usually works, right. So there's a couple of other
things that makes eyewitness testimony problematic, Chuck Um. In addition
to not being like human video recorders, there are human VCRs.
There are, Um, there are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime,
(19:44):
that can make it really difficult to remember. If you're
in a fight or flight situation, you're not forming memories.
If there's a weapon, um, there are people tend to
focus on the weapon. Um. You me was mugged once
and the opposite happened to her. She remember what the
person looked like, but she didn't even remember that there
was a weapon. And her friends were like, yeah, there
(20:05):
was a gun. Interesting, Yeah, and she went to a
lineup and like pick the guy out and bullet proof.
So she is so she's like, take your gun and
shove it that I'm not even going to recognize it. No,
but that makes sense. If someone pulls a gun on
you or has a switchblade or some other kind of
creepy weapon, the human instinct is to to focus your
attention on that thing pointed at you. And apparently people
(20:27):
can really describe the weapon, right, But you're focusing on
the weapon, you're not focused on the person who's holding
the weapon. Typically that helps a little bit, but not
as much as the face. Right. And then another problem
is if you are um, say uh an hispanic dude,
and you're a witness to a crime and it's a
(20:47):
white guy who's the perpetrator, you're going to have a
tremendous amount of difficulty picking that white guy out, as
sad as it is to say, from a lineup of
other white guys, because I would this testimony that crosses
race or ethnicities is known to be very unreliable because
it's just more difficult for somebody of an ethnicity or
(21:10):
a race to to separate or identify people of another
ethnicity or race. Yeah, and I don't think it's the
case where people are like, oh, white people look the
same to me. It's just weird brain science, right, You
just have a harder time. From way back when we
were basically Tuck Tuck and Tuk Tuk lived with fifteen
(21:33):
other people that look just like him because they'd all
been in breeding for generations and generations, and they had
to be on the lookout for another group of people
who've been inbreeding for generations and generations that wanted their
jackfruit tree that they live by. What's jack fruit? O?
That word jack fruit, the big huge thing, the big
huge one. It actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle shredded
(21:59):
like shredded vegan standing. Oh okay, it's really good, gotcha, gotcha?
All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about
the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup
right after this. All right, so, run of the mill
(22:32):
police lineups. I mentioned that before we left. Everyone's seen
movies and TV shows, and it's not too far off. Actually,
I mean, there are a couple of ways you can
do it. Uh. There are lineups where you look at
someone in front of your face. And then there are
lineups like I had in l A, where I look
at photographs the ones. You know. It's way more sexy
(22:54):
for a TV show or a movie to line them
up in the traditional way. It's extray or narrowly sexy
like a live police lineup like you see on TV. Uh.
And then there are the simultaneous or sequential there's a
lot of debate, which we'll get into in a minute,
about which is best. To me, it's pretty obvious that
sequential is best. Simultaneous is the one that you see
(23:14):
on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or ladies, uh,
and you identify them. Uh usually well it depends. We'll
get into the fillers or the foils, but uh, only
usually only one of those people is a suspect. And
in like the best ideal version of it. Uh, then
there're sequential, And that's when they bring out one person
(23:35):
at a time and bring out like seven guys, just
one at a time, and you say, you know, let
me know at the end of this which one you
think it was, or if it's a photo lineup, they
show you one photo at a time. Exactly. Yeah, I
agree with you. I think sequential is head and shoulders
the better one of the of the two. Yeah. And
here's the the final little piece of how it can
vary is whether or not to the administrator that the
(23:58):
person that's in charge of administrating the lineup knows who
the purp is or not. Yeah. That's a big one, man.
So it's either double blind, which means that they don't
even know, and to me, it seems obvious that that's
always the best way because there are many many circumstances
where you would actually even if you don't want to
or mean to lead a witness. And one example they
(24:19):
gave here in this article is if they say, and
if they identify a filler or a foil a k a.
A person that was paid ten bucks, say that's the person,
the administrator might say, take your time? Are you sure
like you really need to take your time? Which is
basically pretty much they or conversely, if if um, when
(24:43):
they're doing it sequentially, when they get to like number four,
they're like, WHOA get a load of this guy. Huh jeez,
look at that bag character. He's guilty of something. But
they can't like even just a smile or something like that,
like a non verbal que you don't even mean to do, right,
or you may mean to do because you know that
(25:04):
that's the guy, and you know it in your bones
that that guy did it, and you're leading the witness, right,
it can be some some sort of nonverbal gesture. The
problem is is that most people, I can't say most people,
but it's been shown that some people, when they're brought
in as a witness for a police lineup, I feel
like it's their role. It's their job to pick somebody
(25:26):
for the cops. So they're more than happy to be
led by the cops because then they're fulfilling their role
and they did what they were supposed to do. So
another another technique or way to administer a good lineup
is to say, here, here's the lineup, whether it's sequential
one at a time or um all at once simultaneously. Right, Um,
(25:49):
the suspect may or may not be in this lineup. Yeah,
that seems like I think they found that reduced mistaken
identity rates, uh were lower when they did this, So
you would think just always do that right right, because
it says to the witness like the person may not
(26:10):
be in here. It's like a none of the above,
the dreaded letter e none of the above. You're like,
oh God, does that does that mean that they're that
the answers not here? And so you may you may
say I don't I don't see them where. If they
don't say that, you're going to presume that the suspect
is in that lineup, and it's your job to find
that person and you have to pick somebody. Yeah, most
(26:33):
people aren't going to think like I can't say so,
I'm just not going to They're gonna be like three. Yeah. Well,
first of all, it's a crime against you most a
lot of times when you're like picking out this purpose. Sure.
Uh so you want them to be you know, found
or whatever. Yeah, that's a really good point to you
want you don't want them to get away with it.
(26:54):
And the other thing too, is I think there's a
natural human instinct when given a test to not want
to say I can't like you might feel like you
have failed. Right. That's why I admire you saying that,
like with the phone lineup, you know, not not being
not just being like yeah, but if that wouldn't matter
(27:15):
to my case, because if I would have said these
two and then they're like, no, that's not the lady
whose car it was. But a lot of people still
would have right right, right, And they probably wouldn't say no,
that's wrong. They would have been like, Okay, thanks a
lot for your time or whatever, and then you would
have left. They have been like, god, he was so close. Uh.
Some other research it's interesting that suggests when uh, there
(27:36):
is an offender in the lineup that young children and
elderly perform about as well as just regularly young adults.
But when the lineup does not have the actual offender,
then they commit mistakes a lot higher. And to me,
that's just because I think kids and elderly might not
fully understand. I think they have to pick somebody. Okay, yeah,
(27:59):
I agree, I think that's exactly what it is too.
But the research bears that out. It looks like so
there's there is some like you you talked about research,
there's a lot of research in this, but it's become ambiguous.
Right if you step back and you listen to all
of the different different things that you can do with
a lineup, it becomes very clear that a sequential double
(28:23):
blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is
shown to the person at a time, or one live
suspect is brought out to be looked at one person
at a time and is administered by a cop or
a worker somebody who doesn't know who the suspect is,
that that's going to reduce the chance of a misidentification
(28:47):
or a failure of an identification, and that the person
who's being presented with these people is not going to
be able to guess, and if they actually do remember
who the perpetrator was, they're going to recognize them. It's
just obvious that that's the best way to do it. Right.
The thing is is there was a study in Illinois
(29:08):
UM that just completely rocked that idea that that that's
the case, because there was a three or five year
study in Illinois that looked at different types of lineups
and compared them side by side and found that actually,
know that a double blind sequential UM lineup actually produces
(29:29):
worse results than a UM a simultaneous non double blind one. Right.
But then again, not so fast with that because other
people since then have questioned the methodology they used in
that program and kind of said, you know, I don't
even know if we can take this research and take
(29:50):
these statistics seriously, right, because method methodologically it was a
screwed up study, Like they really dropped the ball on
the study. Yeah, and um, I don't think we mentioned
the two judgments either. During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing
there together, you use what's called relative judgment. In other words,
you compare all the dudes standing up there against one another,
(30:12):
and with the ones where they trot them out one
at a time. They use something called absolute judgment, which
is supposedly means that they're comparing it to only their
memory and not to the people that came before or after. Right,
That's that's the hope, that's the ideal, right, right, But
with this reachers and research in the study, I kind
of didn't even know what to think because it sort
(30:33):
of went against the grain and the findings. But then
they said, I don't even know if we can trust
these findings because the methodology was no good. So we
ended up sort of back at square one with the
Illinois pilot program. It seems like, yeah, the reason why
the methodolo methodology was so terrible. They used the double
blind procedure for sequential lineups, but they didn't use it
(30:56):
for simultaneous lineups. So if cops were advertently or inadvertently
leading people with simultaneous lineups, then of course those those
are going to produce um correct choices with suspects better
than the one that's a double blind sequential one. They
compared apples to oranges in the study. It's almost like
(31:17):
a sixth grader came up with how to actually conduct
the study that the Illinois legislature said, Illinois State Police,
go go figure this out, to do a three year
study on this, and they came back and said, huh,
and it was it's terrible. And the problem is, if
it is true that a sequential double blind study is
(31:39):
the way to go, that it is just smarter and
works better, that study set that back by years because
now all the cops all over the country heard they
did the study and it's actually worse not and the
design of the study was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work. Yeah.
They even went to the cops UH at Illinois Pilot
(32:00):
program talk to them and they said the majority of
the officers said they didn't think that it was superior
UH and said that witnesses who can identify the offender
can do so under either procedure UH and officers express
concerns that using a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an
investigator has tries to build with a witness. So I
interpret all that as it's cops saying, can we just
(32:24):
keep doing it the way we've always done it because
it gets results right. But the thing is is, um,
they have some pretty good points in that if you
are running a lineup or whatever. You put together like
a six pack is what it's called in the US,
where you've got three and three mug shots of people,
um and or I think in Canada they usually use twelve.
(32:47):
But you put this thing together, then you have to
find like a patrol officer or a sergeant or somebody
who has no idea what's going on with your kids? Right,
and then those that person is to go to the house,
record the the what the person did, and then come
back and tell you. It's just an extra thing that
(33:08):
cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making
it way too hard. Yeah. I mean they sit in
here that sometimes even have trouble coming up with the
blind administrator. And maybe it's a it probably has everything
to do with budgets. But my thought is like, why
isn't there one person that does only this. Oh, that's
(33:28):
a great question. That just is called the administrator the
fine of administrator and goes to the people's houses or
runs them in the in the precinct or whatever, and
this is the only thing that they do, Right, I'll
do it. Bring in the administrator. Yeah, that's a TV
show waiting to happen. Uh Yeah, I don't know, it's
(33:49):
probably budgetary. Um. They also found with a lot of
these when there's multiple purpose, it just goes haywire because
sometimes they'll put two of the purpose in the same lineup,
right right, so super confusing. That actually falls in line
with like how to build like a decent line up
the right way, and we'll cover that and where they
(34:11):
get people to stand in as suspects right after this,
(34:34):
All right, Chuck, So you were just talking about how
if you have a lineup and you put two suspects
that you've got, say there are two guys who robbed
some lady, um, and you have five people in the lineup,
but two of them are your suspects. That actually is
totally unfair for the suspects because what you've done just
(34:55):
then is increase the chance that somebody could guess, just
guess randomly, uh at the suspect. Right. If you have
five people in a lineup and one of them are
the suspect, then that person has a one in five
chance of being chosen by random chance. But if there's
two suspects in a five person lineup, they have a
(35:17):
two out of five chance, which is way more than
a one in five chance. Some people might even say
double the chance, right, and so it's just less fair.
So one of the standards that you want to fulfill
if you're putting together a lineup in your cop is
that you have one suspect per lineup, which is tougher
(35:38):
to do than you would think. Yeah, and it seems
like a lot of the problem with this is uh
and they even say so in the n i J
articles that lab studies are one thing, but actually implementing
this in the field they get different results. And people
are doing lab research on one end, cops are out
in the field, sometimes they're in people's homes, sometimes they're
in the precinct. And it seems like the two heads
(36:00):
aren't talking very much, and there are people, you know.
They did like a live web chat at some point
to bring together all these experts from around the world,
and they kind of all around me were like, this
is a big mess and we need to all combined
forces to try and do the right thing. And the
feeling I get is that a lot of these police
precincts just kind of want to be left alone. Sure,
(36:22):
I mean, they know what works, and it works, you know,
but does it well, that's the question, So, um, they
fingered a collar, right, is that the right the gumsh
you finger to call it? Yeah, then uh, it's it's
all in a good day's work. But if they fingered
the wrong collar, then it's no good so um. One
(36:44):
of the reasons it's somebody cop would put a two
suspects in a lineup. It's not just to like increase
the chances that one of those suspects gets picked by
an eyewitness. It's because sometimes it can be hard to
come up with people for a lineup. Yeah, this was
hard to believe, Like they can't find people sometimes, right, Well,
and the reason why is because let's say you have
(37:04):
multiple witnesses, and each witness gives you a different description
of the perpetrator. Right, Ideally, you're going to find a
different lineup for each witness. Yeah, Like, if there's three witnesses,
you should run three lineups because their descriptions are probably
(37:28):
somewhat different. Right. That can be difficult, And there's a
couple of ways to handle a lineup. You can do
a suspect matched lineup, where you've got a suspect and
to keep your suspect from standing out, you make um
all the other people in the lineup look like you
know your suspect. That's one way to do it. Another
(37:49):
is to do the perpetrator description match strategy, which is
you've got um and that's when you have no suspect, right,
just ants. You can have a suspect, but you're creating
your lineup based on what the what the witness has
described the perpetrator to look like, and then just throw
the suspect in there right, which can be bad for
(38:10):
the suspect because if the suspect the person you actually
think did it, it doesn't look anything like the eye
witness said that there's gonna be four redheads and the
one blonde guy who's actually the suspect, he's going to
stand out like a sore throne. So there's a lot
of different things that have to be massaged here to
try to make everybody in the lineup basically look all
like the perpetrator the eyewitness described, or all like the
(38:33):
suspect that you've got, because you don't want the suspect
to stand out. And there's a lot of techniques that
they used to try to make everybody look the same. Yeah,
one of the I mean they like you said, they
dressed people. It was funny that one article said in
the Bronx Precinct, they usually put them in Yankees hats. Right,
just line up a bunch of guys and Yankees, right.
That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging
(38:55):
outside of the you know that room where they walk
them into. Wasn't Cramer in the lineup when he was
suspect totally serial killer suspect? Yes, I don't remember it
was a serial killer, but I remember he was in
the line up. He kept turning the wrong way. Yeah,
I think he was misidentified on the when they went
to l A to pitch the TV show, Cramer got
caught up in some like serial killer thing. I think
(39:16):
of that, and I think of the great lineup scene
in The Usual Suspects, which let's address that real quick,
when they have to say something so well, we can't
repeat it here because there's bad words. Right. You know,
what I was going to say is that that lineup
would never happen because not only do you have two
suspects in there, all five people in the lineup are
your suspects, and they're not dressed the same Yep. Yeah,
(39:40):
it's it's a total movie line up, it would never happen.
What were you going to say about them saying something? Well,
they had to recite a line. I don't know how
typical that is, though, you me. When she did her
line up, she remembered what the guy was saying, and
they that, okay, so that's the thing. And she was like,
wait a minute, can I do they have to say
whatever I say they said? And the cop was like yeah,
(40:01):
and she's like, really what I wanted to say? Yeah?
He's like, no, you have to say what they actually said.
Oh yeah, how did that result? Did she get the guy? Oh?
She picked him out of media? Okay, yeah, yeah, I
think I got busted. Nice man, you don't mug you me.
I'll tell you that, buddy. You hear that? Purpose right,
he started quaking in your boots. The one thing, too,
(40:23):
that caught me sort of off guard is that I
never thought about is the the part about whether or
not they're clean shaven, Like there could be details of omission,
Like if eyewitness doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they
either were clean shaven or not, then I think they
default just something that may not be accurate. And so
(40:45):
all of a sudden you're lineup, well, your lineup should
have all clean shaven dudes. You should just assume that
if they didn't say the guy had a beard, that
that doesn't that that doesn't mean that the guy had
a beard and they just didn't say it. You should
just assume it means that they're clean shave, and they
should all be clean shaven in the lineup, because if
you have five clean shaven guys and one filler or
(41:05):
one foil with a big beard like me, I might
get picked out just because I look different, right exactly,
Or if if the one guy's clean shaven, and you're like, well,
they didn't say that the person had a beard, but
they also didn't say they didn't have a beard. So
I can put this clean shaven suspect in with four
other guys who all have beards and make them stand out.
(41:25):
That's the opposite. And apparently there's this New York Times
article from years back about a guy named, um what
was his name, casting agent basically Robert Weston, Yeah, Robert Weston.
It's it's pretty interesting little article. Um. But in the
article it says that the Bronx cops that use this
guy to help fill lineups which we'll talk about in
(41:46):
a second. Um that that when they give the perpetrators
like the Yankees, hats or whatever for the lineup, like
the perpetrator is always the one who pulls it down
over his eyes, and they have to be like, dude,
putt see however, but else is wearing their hat makes
us exactly like that, or else they're going to pick
you out. So they actually are trying to help the
perpetrator at least, not stand up and be like me,
(42:10):
you know, and instead just keep it on the on
the level, at least as far as the Yankees had
brooms go. I so want to be a filler. I'm
sure you could do it. I want to have to
hang around long enough until the dude who looks like
you commits a crime, which in Atlanta, I'm sure there's
a lot of hipsters running around. For sure. I don't
look like a hipster. I don't know, uh, I look
(42:33):
like it the hipster gone bad. Oh yeah, I'm not
need enough to be a hips You look like a
hit and run hipster. Hipsters are super well cooft and
like squared Away. Oh I know what you mean. You
know your your jeans aren't pegged no, I look like
a hipster who slept in. So back to Robert Weston,
this guy in New York at the time, at least,
(42:54):
I can't believe how little money he made. He only
got ten dollars for putting together a complete lineup. Yeah,
and they said sometimes he does as many as four
in a day and sometimes not at all. Like so
a good day for him is forty bucks. That's what
it sounds like. Man. Maybe that's the problem is they
need to Well again, it's budgetary. Probably he's gonna say,
pay a little bit more, get a casting agent in there,
(43:17):
get some of those college educated fillers in there, right,
I guess. And and also it made it sound like,
I don't know, he's kind of pulling people off the street.
Sometimes they're homeless people. Sometimes they're like drug addicts. Well yeah,
I mean, I guess it depends on who the purpose.
Sometimes they get other cops that aren't busy to stand in, right,
(43:38):
I mean, these are people there's a real need. People
will go to a police station and stand in the
lineup for ten dollars. Right, they get paid as much
as the guy who organized the party. Right. But if
Robert Weston stands in himself. He'll get an extra twenty
bucks on top of putting the thing together right. How
many times he tries to do that, but he he
He even said like if they want white guys, I
don't know any white guys. So they go to homeless
(44:00):
shelters for that. And that's that's very much what cops do.
Cops will go find people on the street, they will
go to homeless shelters. They will have UM casting agents
like Robert Weston on their speed dial um and what
they'll say is, I've got a um, middle aged white
guy with a graying beard, and um he's about six
(44:23):
ft tall. Give me four other people that match that description,
and ideally four other people that that match that description
will show up and not three and then one other
total outlier or something like that. Well, the one cop
was complaining about his work, it was kind of funny
complaining about Robert Weston. He was like, he didn't bring
in good people. He always like fudges the ages and
(44:45):
the races and stuff. But the reason why they keep
using this guy is because he answers his fun doesn't
matter what time you call him. He can put a
lineup together for you. And if you have a very
limited amount of time. You can only hold the suspect
for so long without charging the them, but you want
to put them in a lineup for what's called an
investigatory lineup to where you just want to see maybe
(45:06):
bringing one witness just to see if you're on the
right track. You've got a very limited amount of time
and you need people like that, which means that you
may have a lower quality one. Fortunately, that would just
be for an investigatory one. If it were for a
confirmatory one. That's the one that you see on TV
where it's like you bring in a witness and you've
got your suspect and they're sitting in jail and you
(45:27):
bring them out. That is the one where like all
the t should be crossed in the eyes should be dotted,
because a good court, well here, and we'll want to
know the details of how that lineup went, and if
anything sounds hinky, they'll toss that lineup right out, that
eye witness testimony out. The worst possible version of all
(45:47):
of this is something called a show up. And this
is something this is also a movie trope that you
see and that's when an officer brings a witness to
a place to show the witness the suspect that's been
apprehend ended. So like they're in the back of a car,
or here's what happens in the movie. There's a guy
in the back of a police car handcuffed. They'll bring
(46:09):
the person who was robbed or whatever there to the scene.
They'll yank him out of the back of the car
and say, it's just the dirt bag who did it?
Like just one guy, and uh, that's clearly the worst
possible version of all of this, and the guys like,
I need more pay, I'm coming down. So so one
of the here's the reason why that show up is
(46:30):
so terrible, Chuck, Well, there's no other people that they're
comparing them to. That's one. But they're also in handcuffs,
in the back of a cop car or something like that.
They're in police custody. And so the eyewitness is going
to assume that, in addition to their testimony, the cops
obviously have something on this person, and so that must
mean that the cops know it's that person and this
(46:50):
is just a formality. So I'll be like, yeah, sure,
that was that person. That's the first problem with it.
The second problem is is that from that point on,
that person and that they've just seen now becomes the
star of their memory of that crime. It's like they
photoshop this person's face into that vague, shadowy face that's
(47:12):
holding the gun that they were actually focused on, and
from that moment on they just get more and more
certain that that was the person because that person is
now starring in their memories. And it's not just the
problem with the show up but with any um misidentification.
When they see that person and that person becomes seared
in their brain, they're positive from that point on, and
(47:34):
they can seem very confident in court, which again juries
by even though it's garbage, and weeks and months can
go by between the point that you have experienced a
crime and when you may be identifying someone or a
court for sure as months and months and months later.
So man, part of me does think, like, get rid
(47:55):
of all this. A lot of people say that, or
at the very least say, this is I would's test simony.
It's actually terrible testimony. Actually it's terrible evidence, but let's
do it right. But and if they did say that,
if they basically lowered what what how much weight eyewitness
testimony held in court. Then those cases that were built
(48:15):
entirely on eyewitness testimony wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
They have to go build a bigger case. Yeah, but
like in Umi's case, it worked, it did now it
like that, right. That's the problem is that you know
if if of the time is wrong, the time is right,
we think so, I mean, it's not It's not like
(48:38):
Arson investigation, which we're gonna do one on one day,
where it's just totally made up. Like it does have
some veracity, but there's a lot of flaws with it
and the really dicey. They need to figure it out
because of that, So they need to go do that now.
I mean, can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified
(48:58):
and serving two decades in prison for something you really
didn't do? No, I really can't. I mean I remember
how said I got when we did the Innocence Project.
It's just you hear these stories and then they get
out and they're like, man, here's there's four thousand bucks.
We feel pretty bad, right, go get yourself something nice.
Try to forget about all this, right. Yeah, did you
(49:19):
ever see that movie An Innocent Man with Tom Selick?
It's scared the Bejesus out of me. The same thing
happened to him when he was when he was he
was framed. Oh wait, that's high road to China. All right,
I got my stuff, makes it? No, that's quickly down
under that right? Uh? You got anything else? Nope? All right,
(49:41):
Well that's it for police lineups for now. We'll do
an update whenever they get it figured out. We did
one on police catches, right, Okay, is this it we've done? No?
We still got arson in the section. We got a
lot all right, um, yeah, okay, okay. If you want
to know more about police line ups then I don't know,
(50:01):
go hang around a police station. See if you can
stand in one, learn firsthand. Okay. Get a little sign
that says I will be your foil ten dollars. Uh.
And since I said ten dollars, it's time for listener Matt.
I'm gonna call this youngest fan is very cute email. Hey, guys,
love the podcast. You're doing it right? Uh, it's not
(50:23):
a Uh this email is not episode specific, but I
had to tell you about this. My husband and I
welcomed to our baby boy into the world a couple
of months ago, when I was pregnantly joked that the
baby would think that one of you was his dad
because he heard your voices so often. Ah, that's a
very funny joke in the family, you know, joke about
(50:43):
the paternity of your childhood. Uh. Now that he's here,
I've been playing music in the car instead of the podcast,
thinking music helps calm him. Well, one day he was
crying and crying in the car. I couldn't get him
to calm down. She was like, what's wrong with Doc?
And why is it doc and working? Uh. It couldn't
get him calmed down with any the usual tricks. So
I decided to heck with it. I'm gonna put on
the podcast and a kid you not. As soon as
(51:06):
you guys started talking, he stopped crying. My husband says
it was coincidence. Jealous, I say, stuff, you should know magic.
Now we're now we're back to always listening to you
guys in the car. Keep up with great work and
thanks for soothing my baby boy. And that is from
Sarah Strantz and our youngest fan, Frank from beautiful Mount Pleasant,
(51:28):
South Carolina. That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email. Frank,
go to sleep. Quiet now they named their baby after
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if they actually did? Uh? And thank you also to
unnamed husband for being a good sport. Agreed. If you
want to send us agree email about how we're magic,
(51:50):
you can hang out with us on social media. Just
go to our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
And you can also send us an email to Stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com. Yeah for more
on this and thousands of other topics. VI is it
how stuff works dot com? H
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry out there outside
the fish bowl, and also there's guest producer Noel in
(00:21):
our pal Ben. But yeah, I'm in the room this time. Man, Yeah,
on the mike. Thanks for having us. Uh, this is
way better than that time you have me on the
April Fools episode. Well, I'm glad you brought that up
because may remember Ben from that I think it was
two thirteen or fifteen something, ungodly time ago. It's my replacement. Yeah,
(00:42):
it was the April Fools joke for the three D
printing episode. So this is your second time on the show. Yeah,
the Internet shredgy Ben was it were? They were like
a target of abuse. I want to thank everybody for
the very polite emails and as as we could tell, thankfully,
Chuck is fine. They yeah, they took it easy on him.
We have very nice listeners. Something. And then know, this
might be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast,
(01:03):
even though you've guess produced it like a million times.
I think I may have mumbled something in the background
the time. Really, so we're having you two on let's cut,
let's get down a business because you two have a
podcast together, right, I know you also are on Mini
Crushed movie Crush. Yeah, you're also in real World's colliding
(01:27):
right now, Right, there's a lot I'm going over them all.
You're on stuff they don't want you to know. But
you two, Ben and Nol have come together and made
ridiculous history, which isn't awesome. Oh yeah, that's right. We're
just missing that. God I'm starting to sweat. But you
guys are on ridiculous history together. We are tell us
about that. So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events,
(01:54):
often not covered in your typical history class. Sounds for Mimilier, right,
because for one reason or another, people thought that's no
way that didn't really happen. The first recorded instance of
a mooning did not result in the death of hundreds
(02:15):
of people, is surely not? Surely not? But it did,
And surely the US government did not have a plan
to shoot a nuclear missile at the moon, right, That
was just a Mr Show sketch, Sure not, but it
also was It was kind of parallel thinking. Is the
Mr show sketch happened before this story became declassified Project
(02:36):
day one nine. So our continuing mission with Ridiculous History,
not to sound too star trekky about it, is to
find those moments, the bizarre people, places, and things throughout
the span of human civilization that at least crack the
both of us up on a continual basis. And sometimes
we do have to stop recording just for a second
(02:59):
because we're so tickled. Yeah wow, that's that's actually high qualities,
mainly because we tickle each other physically. That's cheating, Ben,
You're making it sound so serious. It's actually a lot
of fun. It's a fun show, right Yeah, Okay, Yeah,
I mean I'm giving been a hard time, but yeah,
that's definitely like we touch on from time to time.
(03:21):
It'll it'll go into a heavier territory. Like, for example,
we did an episode about how women in Kansas in
the nineteen twenties were imprisoned in labor camps for having STDs.
Well that certainly falls under ridiculous, not exactly fun or
funny right now, ridiculous, But so it's it's it's all
of those things. Some of them are you know, crack
you up hilarious moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by
(03:45):
bunnies or you know, the aforementioned stt labor camps or
racist special Olympics that were held here in the States.
And we're a complete uh well tomorrow phrase we use
on the show each ship show. So so wait a minute,
I think you are like, you need to name the
state that hosted that. It was St. Louis. Yeah. St Louis,
(04:11):
And it's because the World's Fair was happening in St.
Louis and they were going to have it in Chicago.
But the people hosting the World's Fair said, if you
don't do your Olympics as part of the World's Fair,
we're going to totally blow you out of the water
with how awesome our World's Fair is. And no one's
gonna come to your Olympics. Scared them in the early
days of like, you know, not the earliest days of
the Olympics, when they brought it back like in them,
(04:31):
you know, it was not ancient room. It was not
in fact ancient Rome. And it was also it was
not a good example of the Olympics either because the
white supremacists who were in charge of the whole shebang
decided that this would be the perfect time to prove
(04:52):
their cockamamie ideas of like eugenic ideas of kind of
like white superiority and like they would have indigenous people
competing in these Olympic events, but of course they didn't
teach them how to, you know, do the events, so
they didn't just automatically know how to pull vault or
throw a javelin or whatever. So and one supremacists can
ruin anything. Anything they put their hands on, they really
(05:13):
can just turns to poop. Yeah, we are doing an
episode on flash events later, so stay tuned for there. So,
so before we give everything away, you guys tell everyone
where they can find ridiculous history and when. You can
find ridiculous history at our website. No, it's ridiculous history show,
I think, so the website. It's definitely keep prepared for this.
(05:37):
I've got steck of notes right here. Yeah, you can
find us an Apple podcast. You find us on Spotify,
you can find us wherever you find your favorite shows,
like stuff you should know or stuff they don't want
you to know, or I should I list the entire
pantheon of all the shows we have. It's too many
at this point, but but yes, you can find us
(05:58):
in all of those places. We also have a community page,
uh that we're really proud of and really happy with,
called ridiculous Historians on Facebook. Taking a total cue from
the cisk army nice. Well, First of all, thank you
for all of the flattery that you've been heaping on
us for the last few minutes as much appreciated, but
(06:19):
also thank you for coming by. Appreciate it, guys, Thank
you guys for having so much. Let's do this every week. Yeah,
that might be been much. Let me check the sketch.
I gotta tell you, I love those guys, but I'm
glad to get out of that that new studio box.
It's like a Fema trailer. Man. It's for malde hyde
(06:40):
wafting off slowly poisoning us. It is still offcasting. It
feels like, yeah, big time. It's in my hair, which
is now falling out. We're in bad shape. Well before,
I like what you're wearing. By the way, thank you.
I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself and
luckily I had a bunch of samples of our new
T shirt. Yeah, and this is not just a plug. Everyone.
(07:02):
Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T
shirt from the Stuff you Should Know store because they
sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great, to the
guy who has a hundred T shirts, here's twenty more.
But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with this.
Like the size of it. Look at the size, perfect size.
It's not so big that it wraps around and gets
(07:24):
all mangled by my love handles. But it's also not
so small that it looks like, you know, caved in chest.
You know what I mean. I didn't remember that reference
though I didn't neither like they listened to the Pie
Piper episode. Oh there you go. It sounds like a
youth thing, yeah, Josh, But it was just an offhanded
(07:45):
comment I made. Now it's a T shirt I'm wearing,
which is I love. It makes a pretty great time
to be alive. By the way, I need to give
a shout out to Brittney Shift. Um, Britney Shift sent
this idea to us. Okay, great, And the reason you
know we don't often take well that's not true. We
kind of keep a kitty of listeners suggestions, but we
(08:07):
don't often like do one the next week and then
shout out the person. But I thought we had fully
exhausted our Crime and Punishment series. So I was delighted
that Britney Shifts sent this in and I was like,
why haven't we done police lineup? I don't know, it's
a great question. Was just sitting there waiting. Yep. The
(08:30):
only other one that's left is what kind of shoes
detectives wear? That that's the last one? Is this? Yeah,
that's gum shoe or crepe sold I think do you
knew that? Yeah? But I don't know how it relates
to cops. I guess they wore those. They are super comfortable.
(08:50):
Cops are always walking around walking, yeah you know, but
sometimes when they're walking, they're actually out on the street
looking for people who resemble a suspect that they have
in the jail house. And they say, hey, you come
on over here, how would you like to make ten bucks?
(09:11):
And the person says exactly how copper and the cops says,
by standing in is what we call a filler in
a police or they do like Comber Simpson and when
they were like a boat raffle that they said he
had to come down to the police station. Yeah, you
want a boat? Yeah, and then they beat him merciless
for like parking unpaid parking tickets. Also shout out to
(09:34):
Beth at Schuster, who wrote to this article in the
n i J Journal the National Institute of Justice, I believe, so,
is that right? Yeah, they're pretty much committed to keeping
people from being wrongly convicted, so I would guess the
J stance for justice. Yeah, and this is this is
a good start, and we had some other stuff we
(09:55):
added to it. But thank you Ms Schuster, Yeah for
your work up. Well, um, I already led into the
episode and it didn't take so let me try again.
This n i J article you sent calls out a
dude named Jerry Miller, who back was two years old,
I believe. And Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day
(10:19):
when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping,
and raping a woman, and he got convicted. He was
convicted because two people, two eye witnesses, saw him in
the lineup picked him out, and then later at trial
the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but
(10:40):
who cares. There's two eye witnesses that picked the show
out of a lineup. He's done. He did twenty four
years in prison, and you may notice from the tone
that I'm using here he was wrongfully convicted. He actually
got out of prison and was living life re leased
on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet a monitor constantly as
(11:02):
a registered sex offender. And then finally I think, um, oh,
I'm not quite sure two thousand seven. In two thousand seven,
as part of the Innocence Project, which we've done an
episode on with um, yeah, that lady what is her name? Oh, Haulleen,
(11:23):
but it's definitely not Paulazon. Thank you, Jerry. Yeah, I
wanted to say Pauli Shore so bad. I just knew
it was wrong, but we didn't. Right, We did an
Innocence Project episode, and under the Innocence Project, Jerry Miller
was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did not do
(11:47):
this and lost twenty four years of his life because
of flawed eyewitness testimony. Yeah, and so you know, this
is all about police lineups and more about I mean,
we'll tell you how they work in a general sense,
but this sort of more about how you know, it's
such an imperfect system, but sort of The takeaway from
(12:09):
all of this that we're about to go over with
all the studies and the trying different things is kind
of like, you know, it's an imperfect system and we
can try and craft it the best way we can,
but human memory is imperfect. Identifying people in lineups is imperfect,
and we're just it's kind of the best we got
right now. Right Well, a lot of people are like,
(12:31):
get rid of eyewitness testimony really altogether, yes, all together.
Humans suck at eyewitness testimony. And there's a lot of
reasons why. It's not like people are out there like
I want to have me a bad guy, show me
a lineup. I'm gonna pick one of those guys out.
They're not doing that. They're they're subject to basically the
(12:52):
way our brains are wired. We don't walk around videotaping
everything that we see. Yeah, you know, we get sillly
bombarded with sensory information and under normal circumstances, you know,
you see a stranger on the street, you just see
there's another human. I've identified him as not a threat
and keep walking by it. If that person turned out
(13:13):
to be accused of a crime, um or or perpetrated
a crime, and you were brought in to say was
this the person you saw? Your brain is going to
try to reconstruct what little pieces of memory it formed
of that person. And there's a lot of things, a
lot of factors that are involved that can make that
(13:34):
really difficult task even harder. Yeah. Like I am someone
who has told myself, Chuck, pay attention. Like, if you're
ever in a situation like, pay attention, try and collect
yourself and try and remember a few really good details
about the car or the person. So like, this is
(13:55):
on my mind. And I actually had a situation when
I lived now I happened to me where I had
to go through a police lineup and I failed. Oh really,
was the suspect there? No? Well no, here's here's the
quick version is I wasn't in a hit and run
this lady. Uh, these two lady, these two younger girls,
(14:16):
they were probably teenagers, hit me from behind in my car.
I stopped my car, starting to get out and they
take off. So it's a hit and run. I chase them,
which is you should not do. Were you shooting into
the air and again to slow down trying to shoot
out their tires? No, but I did chase him. Because
I was so mad, and your adrenaline just shoots through
(14:38):
the roof when something like that happens, so immediately you're
just not yourself and like recording details. So I was
trying to catch up to get a license plate. I
saw that they went down the street that I knew
was a dead end. Um, it wasn't a cul de sect,
but it functioned to like a cul de sact. So
I stopped where I was, got out of the car.
(14:58):
Sure enough, twenty later they come halling but back towards me,
and uh, the look on their faces was like you know, oh, snap,
there's the guy. And they just sped right past me.
And I saw their faces as they sped past me
in their car. The cops found the car, found the people,
(15:19):
and they're like, we didn't do that, and so who
are these girls? These teenagers? Well that's the long and
short of it. Is all you have to do and
something like that. I said, didn't do it, and if
I can't pick you out, then you get away. And
they showed me pictures of like, you know, these were
like teenage young teenage Hispanic women. They showed me probably
(15:42):
probably fifteen pictures and said, can you identify them. I
was like, no, it was a month ago. They sped
past me for a second, like I couldn't even hazard
a guess, and I didn't want to do that. You know,
well that's very sensible of you. Yeah, I just didn't
want to take a stab at it. So I was like, no,
I have no idea, and they're basically like, sorry, they
said they didn't do it. Wow. It's like, but you
(16:03):
have the car and it's damaged, and like none of
that matters. They're like not not if you can't identify
I mean I could see that. I think would be like, oh, yeah,
that happened some other times in some other hit and runs.
I mean, but yeah. The long story short though, is
I'm someone who has tried to tell myself to react
in the right ways, and I couldn't tell them much
(16:24):
beyond like the color of the car and sort of
would it looked like because you were seeing red? Because right,
that's our that our bodies are not primed to form memories.
It's not where our where our energy goes. It's more
like getting away or shooting out the tires of a
car that just hit and ran. Right, But what you
did with that lineup is the other side of the coin.
(16:47):
The other problem with lineups is or eyewitness testimony from lineups,
is that sometimes people pick out people who are innocent
and other times people fail to pick out the people
who are actually the perpetrators. So it's like you said,
they're very they're very flaw it's as flawed system. The
problem is is the wrong people can go to jail
(17:09):
and the people who actually did it can get away
with it. So that's an extremely flawed system. And when
something that um important is on the table, then um,
it needs to be fixed. And there's a lot of
people looking into how it can be fixed, but we're
not there yet by any stretch. No, and here's the
stat you were talking about the DNA exoneration. Uh, of
(17:34):
the first three exonerations in the US were wrongfully convicted
because of eyewitness testimony and police lineups. Say it again,
seventy of the first hundred and eighty three. So like
the Innocence Project, it's basically like a pilot study to
show through DNA exoneration all the ways that we wrongfully
(17:58):
convict people. And what is coming to the to the
front is eyewitness testimony. Yeah, and that the basis of
that is the police lineup right. And one other thing
that's that's problematic with the eyewitness testimony is if you
want to wow a jury, bring out an eyewitness who
seems totally sure that what they saw or that they
(18:19):
saw the person they're pointing to and the defendant's table, yeah,
or that that dramatic moment. It's like a movie trope.
Now you know, is the person in this room right?
Let the records show that witness is pointing at the defendant, right. Yeah.
So the problem is it has a huge impact, but
it's also really crutty wit, really crutty um evidence. There's
(18:41):
this guy here, he had a great quote. He says
that um eyewitness testimony is a very unusual, complex kind
of trace evidence, and it's difficult to recover, easy to contaminate,
and very hard to handle. And that just there's no
better description of eyewitness testimony. If I was ever in
(19:01):
court and someone identified me from the witness stand, I
would do that thing where you look at behind you
when they pointed at you, just be like, I think
they're talking behind me, and they would say no, and
they would point again, and I would move a little
bit more I'd be like, this is this witness is
clearly disturbed, and then if that, if that didn't work,
you would escalate to I'm rubber and your glue. Yeah,
(19:24):
that usually works, right. So there's a couple of other
things that makes eyewitness testimony problematic, Chuck Um. In addition
to not being like human video recorders, there are human VCRs.
There are, Um, there are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime,
(19:44):
that can make it really difficult to remember. If you're
in a fight or flight situation, you're not forming memories.
If there's a weapon, um, there are people tend to
focus on the weapon. Um. You me was mugged once
and the opposite happened to her. She remember what the
person looked like, but she didn't even remember that there
was a weapon. And her friends were like, yeah, there
(20:05):
was a gun. Interesting, Yeah, and she went to a
lineup and like pick the guy out and bullet proof.
So she is so she's like, take your gun and
shove it that I'm not even going to recognize it. No,
but that makes sense. If someone pulls a gun on
you or has a switchblade or some other kind of
creepy weapon, the human instinct is to to focus your
attention on that thing pointed at you. And apparently people
(20:27):
can really describe the weapon, right, But you're focusing on
the weapon, you're not focused on the person who's holding
the weapon. Typically that helps a little bit, but not
as much as the face. Right. And then another problem
is if you are um, say uh an hispanic dude,
and you're a witness to a crime and it's a
(20:47):
white guy who's the perpetrator, you're going to have a
tremendous amount of difficulty picking that white guy out, as
sad as it is to say, from a lineup of
other white guys, because I would this testimony that crosses
race or ethnicities is known to be very unreliable because
it's just more difficult for somebody of an ethnicity or
(21:10):
a race to to separate or identify people of another
ethnicity or race. Yeah, and I don't think it's the
case where people are like, oh, white people look the
same to me. It's just weird brain science, right, You
just have a harder time. From way back when we
were basically Tuck Tuck and Tuk Tuk lived with fifteen
(21:33):
other people that look just like him because they'd all
been in breeding for generations and generations, and they had
to be on the lookout for another group of people
who've been inbreeding for generations and generations that wanted their
jackfruit tree that they live by. What's jack fruit? O?
That word jack fruit, the big huge thing, the big
huge one. It actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle shredded
(21:59):
like shredded vegan standing. Oh okay, it's really good, gotcha, gotcha?
All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about
the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup
right after this. All right, so, run of the mill
(22:32):
police lineups. I mentioned that before we left. Everyone's seen
movies and TV shows, and it's not too far off. Actually,
I mean, there are a couple of ways you can
do it. Uh. There are lineups where you look at
someone in front of your face. And then there are
lineups like I had in l A, where I look
at photographs the ones. You know. It's way more sexy
(22:54):
for a TV show or a movie to line them
up in the traditional way. It's extray or narrowly sexy
like a live police lineup like you see on TV. Uh.
And then there are the simultaneous or sequential there's a
lot of debate, which we'll get into in a minute,
about which is best. To me, it's pretty obvious that
sequential is best. Simultaneous is the one that you see
(23:14):
on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or ladies, uh,
and you identify them. Uh usually well it depends. We'll
get into the fillers or the foils, but uh, only
usually only one of those people is a suspect. And
in like the best ideal version of it. Uh, then
there're sequential, And that's when they bring out one person
(23:35):
at a time and bring out like seven guys, just
one at a time, and you say, you know, let
me know at the end of this which one you
think it was, or if it's a photo lineup, they
show you one photo at a time. Exactly. Yeah, I
agree with you. I think sequential is head and shoulders
the better one of the of the two. Yeah. And
here's the the final little piece of how it can
vary is whether or not to the administrator that the
(23:58):
person that's in charge of administrating the lineup knows who
the purp is or not. Yeah. That's a big one, man.
So it's either double blind, which means that they don't
even know, and to me, it seems obvious that that's
always the best way because there are many many circumstances
where you would actually even if you don't want to
or mean to lead a witness. And one example they
(24:19):
gave here in this article is if they say, and
if they identify a filler or a foil a k a.
A person that was paid ten bucks, say that's the person,
the administrator might say, take your time? Are you sure
like you really need to take your time? Which is
basically pretty much they or conversely, if if um, when
(24:43):
they're doing it sequentially, when they get to like number four,
they're like, WHOA get a load of this guy. Huh jeez,
look at that bag character. He's guilty of something. But
they can't like even just a smile or something like that,
like a non verbal que you don't even mean to do, right,
or you may mean to do because you know that
(25:04):
that's the guy, and you know it in your bones
that that guy did it, and you're leading the witness, right,
it can be some some sort of nonverbal gesture. The
problem is is that most people, I can't say most people,
but it's been shown that some people, when they're brought
in as a witness for a police lineup, I feel
like it's their role. It's their job to pick somebody
(25:26):
for the cops. So they're more than happy to be
led by the cops because then they're fulfilling their role
and they did what they were supposed to do. So
another another technique or way to administer a good lineup
is to say, here, here's the lineup, whether it's sequential
one at a time or um all at once simultaneously. Right, Um,
(25:49):
the suspect may or may not be in this lineup. Yeah,
that seems like I think they found that reduced mistaken
identity rates, uh were lower when they did this, So
you would think just always do that right right, because
it says to the witness like the person may not
(26:10):
be in here. It's like a none of the above,
the dreaded letter e none of the above. You're like,
oh God, does that does that mean that they're that
the answers not here? And so you may you may
say I don't I don't see them where. If they
don't say that, you're going to presume that the suspect
is in that lineup, and it's your job to find
that person and you have to pick somebody. Yeah, most
(26:33):
people aren't going to think like I can't say so,
I'm just not going to They're gonna be like three. Yeah. Well,
first of all, it's a crime against you most a
lot of times when you're like picking out this purpose. Sure.
Uh so you want them to be you know, found
or whatever. Yeah, that's a really good point to you
want you don't want them to get away with it.
(26:54):
And the other thing too, is I think there's a
natural human instinct when given a test to not want
to say I can't like you might feel like you
have failed. Right. That's why I admire you saying that,
like with the phone lineup, you know, not not being
not just being like yeah, but if that wouldn't matter
(27:15):
to my case, because if I would have said these
two and then they're like, no, that's not the lady
whose car it was. But a lot of people still
would have right right, right, And they probably wouldn't say no,
that's wrong. They would have been like, Okay, thanks a
lot for your time or whatever, and then you would
have left. They have been like, god, he was so close. Uh.
Some other research it's interesting that suggests when uh, there
(27:36):
is an offender in the lineup that young children and
elderly perform about as well as just regularly young adults.
But when the lineup does not have the actual offender,
then they commit mistakes a lot higher. And to me,
that's just because I think kids and elderly might not
fully understand. I think they have to pick somebody. Okay, yeah,
(27:59):
I agree, I think that's exactly what it is too.
But the research bears that out. It looks like so
there's there is some like you you talked about research,
there's a lot of research in this, but it's become ambiguous.
Right if you step back and you listen to all
of the different different things that you can do with
a lineup, it becomes very clear that a sequential double
(28:23):
blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is
shown to the person at a time, or one live
suspect is brought out to be looked at one person
at a time and is administered by a cop or
a worker somebody who doesn't know who the suspect is,
that that's going to reduce the chance of a misidentification
(28:47):
or a failure of an identification, and that the person
who's being presented with these people is not going to
be able to guess, and if they actually do remember
who the perpetrator was, they're going to recognize them. It's
just obvious that that's the best way to do it. Right.
The thing is is there was a study in Illinois
(29:08):
UM that just completely rocked that idea that that that's
the case, because there was a three or five year
study in Illinois that looked at different types of lineups
and compared them side by side and found that actually,
know that a double blind sequential UM lineup actually produces
(29:29):
worse results than a UM a simultaneous non double blind one. Right.
But then again, not so fast with that because other
people since then have questioned the methodology they used in
that program and kind of said, you know, I don't
even know if we can take this research and take
(29:50):
these statistics seriously, right, because method methodologically it was a
screwed up study, Like they really dropped the ball on
the study. Yeah, and um, I don't think we mentioned
the two judgments either. During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing
there together, you use what's called relative judgment. In other words,
you compare all the dudes standing up there against one another,
(30:12):
and with the ones where they trot them out one
at a time. They use something called absolute judgment, which
is supposedly means that they're comparing it to only their
memory and not to the people that came before or after. Right,
That's that's the hope, that's the ideal, right, right, But
with this reachers and research in the study, I kind
of didn't even know what to think because it sort
(30:33):
of went against the grain and the findings. But then
they said, I don't even know if we can trust
these findings because the methodology was no good. So we
ended up sort of back at square one with the
Illinois pilot program. It seems like, yeah, the reason why
the methodolo methodology was so terrible. They used the double
blind procedure for sequential lineups, but they didn't use it
(30:56):
for simultaneous lineups. So if cops were advertently or inadvertently
leading people with simultaneous lineups, then of course those those
are going to produce um correct choices with suspects better
than the one that's a double blind sequential one. They
compared apples to oranges in the study. It's almost like
(31:17):
a sixth grader came up with how to actually conduct
the study that the Illinois legislature said, Illinois State Police,
go go figure this out, to do a three year
study on this, and they came back and said, huh,
and it was it's terrible. And the problem is, if
it is true that a sequential double blind study is
(31:39):
the way to go, that it is just smarter and
works better, that study set that back by years because
now all the cops all over the country heard they
did the study and it's actually worse not and the
design of the study was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work. Yeah.
They even went to the cops UH at Illinois Pilot
(32:00):
program talk to them and they said the majority of
the officers said they didn't think that it was superior
UH and said that witnesses who can identify the offender
can do so under either procedure UH and officers express
concerns that using a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an
investigator has tries to build with a witness. So I
interpret all that as it's cops saying, can we just
(32:24):
keep doing it the way we've always done it because
it gets results right. But the thing is is, um,
they have some pretty good points in that if you
are running a lineup or whatever. You put together like
a six pack is what it's called in the US,
where you've got three and three mug shots of people,
um and or I think in Canada they usually use twelve.
(32:47):
But you put this thing together, then you have to
find like a patrol officer or a sergeant or somebody
who has no idea what's going on with your kids? Right,
and then those that person is to go to the house,
record the the what the person did, and then come
back and tell you. It's just an extra thing that
(33:08):
cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making
it way too hard. Yeah. I mean they sit in
here that sometimes even have trouble coming up with the
blind administrator. And maybe it's a it probably has everything
to do with budgets. But my thought is like, why
isn't there one person that does only this. Oh, that's
(33:28):
a great question. That just is called the administrator the
fine of administrator and goes to the people's houses or
runs them in the in the precinct or whatever, and
this is the only thing that they do, Right, I'll
do it. Bring in the administrator. Yeah, that's a TV
show waiting to happen. Uh Yeah, I don't know, it's
(33:49):
probably budgetary. Um. They also found with a lot of
these when there's multiple purpose, it just goes haywire because
sometimes they'll put two of the purpose in the same lineup,
right right, so super confusing. That actually falls in line
with like how to build like a decent line up
the right way, and we'll cover that and where they
(34:11):
get people to stand in as suspects right after this,
(34:34):
All right, Chuck, So you were just talking about how
if you have a lineup and you put two suspects
that you've got, say there are two guys who robbed
some lady, um, and you have five people in the lineup,
but two of them are your suspects. That actually is
totally unfair for the suspects because what you've done just
(34:55):
then is increase the chance that somebody could guess, just
guess randomly, uh at the suspect. Right. If you have
five people in a lineup and one of them are
the suspect, then that person has a one in five
chance of being chosen by random chance. But if there's
two suspects in a five person lineup, they have a
(35:17):
two out of five chance, which is way more than
a one in five chance. Some people might even say
double the chance, right, and so it's just less fair.
So one of the standards that you want to fulfill
if you're putting together a lineup in your cop is
that you have one suspect per lineup, which is tougher
(35:38):
to do than you would think. Yeah, and it seems
like a lot of the problem with this is uh
and they even say so in the n i J
articles that lab studies are one thing, but actually implementing
this in the field they get different results. And people
are doing lab research on one end, cops are out
in the field, sometimes they're in people's homes, sometimes they're
in the precinct. And it seems like the two heads
(36:00):
aren't talking very much, and there are people, you know.
They did like a live web chat at some point
to bring together all these experts from around the world,
and they kind of all around me were like, this
is a big mess and we need to all combined
forces to try and do the right thing. And the
feeling I get is that a lot of these police
precincts just kind of want to be left alone. Sure,
(36:22):
I mean, they know what works, and it works, you know,
but does it well, that's the question, So, um, they
fingered a collar, right, is that the right the gumsh
you finger to call it? Yeah, then uh, it's it's
all in a good day's work. But if they fingered
the wrong collar, then it's no good so um. One
(36:44):
of the reasons it's somebody cop would put a two
suspects in a lineup. It's not just to like increase
the chances that one of those suspects gets picked by
an eyewitness. It's because sometimes it can be hard to
come up with people for a lineup. Yeah, this was
hard to believe, Like they can't find people sometimes, right, Well,
and the reason why is because let's say you have
(37:04):
multiple witnesses, and each witness gives you a different description
of the perpetrator. Right, Ideally, you're going to find a
different lineup for each witness. Yeah, Like, if there's three witnesses,
you should run three lineups because their descriptions are probably
(37:28):
somewhat different. Right. That can be difficult, And there's a
couple of ways to handle a lineup. You can do
a suspect matched lineup, where you've got a suspect and
to keep your suspect from standing out, you make um
all the other people in the lineup look like you
know your suspect. That's one way to do it. Another
(37:49):
is to do the perpetrator description match strategy, which is
you've got um and that's when you have no suspect, right,
just ants. You can have a suspect, but you're creating
your lineup based on what the what the witness has
described the perpetrator to look like, and then just throw
the suspect in there right, which can be bad for
(38:10):
the suspect because if the suspect the person you actually
think did it, it doesn't look anything like the eye
witness said that there's gonna be four redheads and the
one blonde guy who's actually the suspect, he's going to
stand out like a sore throne. So there's a lot
of different things that have to be massaged here to
try to make everybody in the lineup basically look all
like the perpetrator the eyewitness described, or all like the
(38:33):
suspect that you've got, because you don't want the suspect
to stand out. And there's a lot of techniques that
they used to try to make everybody look the same. Yeah,
one of the I mean they like you said, they
dressed people. It was funny that one article said in
the Bronx Precinct, they usually put them in Yankees hats. Right,
just line up a bunch of guys and Yankees, right.
That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging
(38:55):
outside of the you know that room where they walk
them into. Wasn't Cramer in the lineup when he was
suspect totally serial killer suspect? Yes, I don't remember it
was a serial killer, but I remember he was in
the line up. He kept turning the wrong way. Yeah,
I think he was misidentified on the when they went
to l A to pitch the TV show, Cramer got
caught up in some like serial killer thing. I think
(39:16):
of that, and I think of the great lineup scene
in The Usual Suspects, which let's address that real quick,
when they have to say something so well, we can't
repeat it here because there's bad words. Right. You know,
what I was going to say is that that lineup
would never happen because not only do you have two
suspects in there, all five people in the lineup are
your suspects, and they're not dressed the same Yep. Yeah,
(39:40):
it's it's a total movie line up, it would never happen.
What were you going to say about them saying something? Well,
they had to recite a line. I don't know how
typical that is, though, you me. When she did her
line up, she remembered what the guy was saying, and
they that, okay, so that's the thing. And she was like,
wait a minute, can I do they have to say
whatever I say they said? And the cop was like yeah,
(40:01):
and she's like, really what I wanted to say? Yeah?
He's like, no, you have to say what they actually said.
Oh yeah, how did that result? Did she get the guy? Oh?
She picked him out of media? Okay, yeah, yeah, I
think I got busted. Nice man, you don't mug you me.
I'll tell you that, buddy. You hear that? Purpose right,
he started quaking in your boots. The one thing, too,
(40:23):
that caught me sort of off guard is that I
never thought about is the the part about whether or
not they're clean shaven, Like there could be details of omission,
Like if eyewitness doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they
either were clean shaven or not, then I think they
default just something that may not be accurate. And so
(40:45):
all of a sudden you're lineup, well, your lineup should
have all clean shaven dudes. You should just assume that
if they didn't say the guy had a beard, that
that doesn't that that doesn't mean that the guy had
a beard and they just didn't say it. You should
just assume it means that they're clean shave, and they
should all be clean shaven in the lineup, because if
you have five clean shaven guys and one filler or
(41:05):
one foil with a big beard like me, I might
get picked out just because I look different, right exactly,
Or if if the one guy's clean shaven, and you're like, well,
they didn't say that the person had a beard, but
they also didn't say they didn't have a beard. So
I can put this clean shaven suspect in with four
other guys who all have beards and make them stand out.
(41:25):
That's the opposite. And apparently there's this New York Times
article from years back about a guy named, um what
was his name, casting agent basically Robert Weston, Yeah, Robert Weston.
It's it's pretty interesting little article. Um. But in the
article it says that the Bronx cops that use this
guy to help fill lineups which we'll talk about in
(41:46):
a second. Um that that when they give the perpetrators
like the Yankees, hats or whatever for the lineup, like
the perpetrator is always the one who pulls it down
over his eyes, and they have to be like, dude,
putt see however, but else is wearing their hat makes
us exactly like that, or else they're going to pick
you out. So they actually are trying to help the
perpetrator at least, not stand up and be like me,
(42:10):
you know, and instead just keep it on the on
the level, at least as far as the Yankees had
brooms go. I so want to be a filler. I'm
sure you could do it. I want to have to
hang around long enough until the dude who looks like
you commits a crime, which in Atlanta, I'm sure there's
a lot of hipsters running around. For sure. I don't
look like a hipster. I don't know, uh, I look
(42:33):
like it the hipster gone bad. Oh yeah, I'm not
need enough to be a hips You look like a
hit and run hipster. Hipsters are super well cooft and
like squared Away. Oh I know what you mean. You
know your your jeans aren't pegged no, I look like
a hipster who slept in. So back to Robert Weston,
this guy in New York at the time, at least,
(42:54):
I can't believe how little money he made. He only
got ten dollars for putting together a complete lineup. Yeah,
and they said sometimes he does as many as four
in a day and sometimes not at all. Like so
a good day for him is forty bucks. That's what
it sounds like. Man. Maybe that's the problem is they
need to Well again, it's budgetary. Probably he's gonna say,
pay a little bit more, get a casting agent in there,
(43:17):
get some of those college educated fillers in there, right,
I guess. And and also it made it sound like,
I don't know, he's kind of pulling people off the street.
Sometimes they're homeless people. Sometimes they're like drug addicts. Well yeah,
I mean, I guess it depends on who the purpose.
Sometimes they get other cops that aren't busy to stand in, right,
(43:38):
I mean, these are people there's a real need. People
will go to a police station and stand in the
lineup for ten dollars. Right, they get paid as much
as the guy who organized the party. Right. But if
Robert Weston stands in himself. He'll get an extra twenty
bucks on top of putting the thing together right. How
many times he tries to do that, but he he
He even said like if they want white guys, I
don't know any white guys. So they go to homeless
(44:00):
shelters for that. And that's that's very much what cops do.
Cops will go find people on the street, they will
go to homeless shelters. They will have UM casting agents
like Robert Weston on their speed dial um and what
they'll say is, I've got a um, middle aged white
guy with a graying beard, and um he's about six
(44:23):
ft tall. Give me four other people that match that description,
and ideally four other people that that match that description
will show up and not three and then one other
total outlier or something like that. Well, the one cop
was complaining about his work, it was kind of funny
complaining about Robert Weston. He was like, he didn't bring
in good people. He always like fudges the ages and
(44:45):
the races and stuff. But the reason why they keep
using this guy is because he answers his fun doesn't
matter what time you call him. He can put a
lineup together for you. And if you have a very
limited amount of time. You can only hold the suspect
for so long without charging the them, but you want
to put them in a lineup for what's called an
investigatory lineup to where you just want to see maybe
(45:06):
bringing one witness just to see if you're on the
right track. You've got a very limited amount of time
and you need people like that, which means that you
may have a lower quality one. Fortunately, that would just
be for an investigatory one. If it were for a
confirmatory one. That's the one that you see on TV
where it's like you bring in a witness and you've
got your suspect and they're sitting in jail and you
(45:27):
bring them out. That is the one where like all
the t should be crossed in the eyes should be dotted,
because a good court, well here, and we'll want to
know the details of how that lineup went, and if
anything sounds hinky, they'll toss that lineup right out, that
eye witness testimony out. The worst possible version of all
(45:47):
of this is something called a show up. And this
is something this is also a movie trope that you
see and that's when an officer brings a witness to
a place to show the witness the suspect that's been
apprehend ended. So like they're in the back of a car,
or here's what happens in the movie. There's a guy
in the back of a police car handcuffed. They'll bring
(46:09):
the person who was robbed or whatever there to the scene.
They'll yank him out of the back of the car
and say, it's just the dirt bag who did it?
Like just one guy, and uh, that's clearly the worst
possible version of all of this, and the guys like,
I need more pay, I'm coming down. So so one
of the here's the reason why that show up is
(46:30):
so terrible, Chuck, Well, there's no other people that they're
comparing them to. That's one. But they're also in handcuffs,
in the back of a cop car or something like that.
They're in police custody. And so the eyewitness is going
to assume that, in addition to their testimony, the cops
obviously have something on this person, and so that must
mean that the cops know it's that person and this
(46:50):
is just a formality. So I'll be like, yeah, sure,
that was that person. That's the first problem with it.
The second problem is is that from that point on,
that person and that they've just seen now becomes the
star of their memory of that crime. It's like they
photoshop this person's face into that vague, shadowy face that's
(47:12):
holding the gun that they were actually focused on, and
from that moment on they just get more and more
certain that that was the person because that person is
now starring in their memories. And it's not just the
problem with the show up but with any um misidentification.
When they see that person and that person becomes seared
in their brain, they're positive from that point on, and
(47:34):
they can seem very confident in court, which again juries
by even though it's garbage, and weeks and months can
go by between the point that you have experienced a
crime and when you may be identifying someone or a
court for sure as months and months and months later.
So man, part of me does think, like, get rid
(47:55):
of all this. A lot of people say that, or
at the very least say, this is I would's test simony.
It's actually terrible testimony. Actually it's terrible evidence, but let's
do it right. But and if they did say that,
if they basically lowered what what how much weight eyewitness
testimony held in court. Then those cases that were built
(48:15):
entirely on eyewitness testimony wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
They have to go build a bigger case. Yeah, but
like in Umi's case, it worked, it did now it
like that, right. That's the problem is that you know
if if of the time is wrong, the time is right,
we think so, I mean, it's not It's not like
(48:38):
Arson investigation, which we're gonna do one on one day,
where it's just totally made up. Like it does have
some veracity, but there's a lot of flaws with it
and the really dicey. They need to figure it out
because of that, So they need to go do that now.
I mean, can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified
(48:58):
and serving two decades in prison for something you really
didn't do? No, I really can't. I mean I remember
how said I got when we did the Innocence Project.
It's just you hear these stories and then they get
out and they're like, man, here's there's four thousand bucks.
We feel pretty bad, right, go get yourself something nice.
Try to forget about all this, right. Yeah, did you
(49:19):
ever see that movie An Innocent Man with Tom Selick?
It's scared the Bejesus out of me. The same thing
happened to him when he was when he was he
was framed. Oh wait, that's high road to China. All right,
I got my stuff, makes it? No, that's quickly down
under that right? Uh? You got anything else? Nope? All right,
(49:41):
Well that's it for police lineups for now. We'll do
an update whenever they get it figured out. We did
one on police catches, right, Okay, is this it we've done? No?
We still got arson in the section. We got a
lot all right, um, yeah, okay, okay. If you want
to know more about police line ups then I don't know,
(50:01):
go hang around a police station. See if you can
stand in one, learn firsthand. Okay. Get a little sign
that says I will be your foil ten dollars. Uh.
And since I said ten dollars, it's time for listener Matt.
I'm gonna call this youngest fan is very cute email. Hey, guys,
love the podcast. You're doing it right? Uh, it's not
(50:23):
a Uh this email is not episode specific, but I
had to tell you about this. My husband and I
welcomed to our baby boy into the world a couple
of months ago, when I was pregnantly joked that the
baby would think that one of you was his dad
because he heard your voices so often. Ah, that's a
very funny joke in the family, you know, joke about
(50:43):
the paternity of your childhood. Uh. Now that he's here,
I've been playing music in the car instead of the podcast,
thinking music helps calm him. Well, one day he was
crying and crying in the car. I couldn't get him
to calm down. She was like, what's wrong with Doc?
And why is it doc and working? Uh. It couldn't
get him calmed down with any the usual tricks. So
I decided to heck with it. I'm gonna put on
the podcast and a kid you not. As soon as
(51:06):
you guys started talking, he stopped crying. My husband says
it was coincidence. Jealous, I say, stuff, you should know magic.
Now we're now we're back to always listening to you
guys in the car. Keep up with great work and
thanks for soothing my baby boy. And that is from
Sarah Strantz and our youngest fan, Frank from beautiful Mount Pleasant,
(51:28):
South Carolina. That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email. Frank,
go to sleep. Quiet now they named their baby after
our chair? Yeah right, that's pretty wouldn't that be amazing
if they actually did? Uh? And thank you also to
unnamed husband for being a good sport. Agreed. If you
want to send us agree email about how we're magic,
(51:50):
you can hang out with us on social media. Just
go to our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
And you can also send us an email to Stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com. Yeah for more
on this and thousands of other topics. VI is it
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