July 15, 2023 • 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 this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's me Josham. For this week's select I've
chosen our twenty eighteen episode how police Lineups Work. It's
one of those things that you just kind of know
about and then you find out about it and you
say to yourself, how are we doing this. It's a
great episode. I think you'll enjoy it. So sit back, relax,
and get ready for police Lineups.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry out there outside the fishbowl,
and also there's guest producer Noel and our pal Ben.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
But yeah, I'm in the room this time, man, Yeah,
on the mic. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
This is way better than that time you have me
on the April Fools episode.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I may
remember Ben from that. I think it was two thousand
thirteen or fifteen something, ungodly time ago.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
It's my replacement.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, it was an April Fool's joke for the three
D printing episode. So this is your second time on
the show.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
Yeah, the Internet shredg you Ben was it were they
were you like a target of abuse.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I want to thank everybody for the very polite emails,
and as we could tell, thankfully, Chuck is fine.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, they took it easy on them. Okay, we have
very nice listeners, you know. And then Nol, this might
be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast,
even though you've guest produced it like a million times.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
I think I may have mumbled something in the background
the time. It really wow wow, Josh. So we're having
you two on.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Let's cut, let's get down of business, because you two
have a podcast together, right, Uh, Noel, you also run
mini Crush movie Crush.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
It's true. Yeah, you're also in a real world's colliding
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
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 Knowl have come together and made ridiculous history,
which is awesome.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Oh yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
We're just missing God.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'm starting to sweat. But you guys are on ridiculous
history together. We are, Yeah, tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Uh So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events
often not covered in your typical history class.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Sounds familiar, right.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
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 of people.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
It's surely not, surely not, but it did.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
It did, It did, And surely the US government did
not have a plan to shoot a nuclear missile at
the moon.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right, that was just a Mister Shows sketch. Surely not,
but she also was. It was kind of parallel thinking.
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Is the Mister Show sketch happened before this story became declassified?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
It is?
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Nine yep.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
So our continuing mission with ridiculous history, not to sound.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Too star treky about it.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
A continual basis.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
And sometimes we do have to stop recording just for
a second because we're so tickled.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Do you really, Yeah, Wow, that's that's actually high quality,
mainly because we tickle each other.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I got to physically. Yeah, that's cheating, man. You're making
it sound so serious. It's actually a lot of fun.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
It is.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
It's a fun show. Right, Oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
I mean I'm giving been a hard time, but yeah,
that's definitely like we touch on from time to time.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
It it'll go into a heavier territory.
Speaker 5 (03:47):
Like, for example, we did an episode about how women
in Kansas in the nineteen twenties were imprisoned in labor
camps for having STDs. What that certainly falls under ridiculous
not exactly fun or funny.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Right haha, ridiculous. So it's it's it's all of those things.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
Some of them are you know, crack you up hilarious
moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by bunnies or you know,
the aforementioned SDT labor camps, or.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
The racist special Olympics that were held here in the States.
And we're a complete, well to borrow phrase we use
on the show, a complete ship show.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So so wait a minute, I think you are, like,
you need to name the state that hosted that.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Oh it was Saint Louis. Yeah, Saint Louis.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
And it's because the World's Fair was happening in Saint
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.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
And no one's going to come to your Olympics.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
And scared them in the early days of like, you know,
not the earliest days of the Olympics, when they brought
it back like in the you know, it was not
ancient Rome.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
It was not in fact ancient Rome.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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 their cockamamie ideas.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
Of like eugenics, ideas of kind of like white superiority,
and like they would have indigenous people competing in these
Olympic events. 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.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
And when supremacists can ruin anything, anything they put their
hands on, they really can't just turns to poop.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, we are doing an episode on flatulence later, so
stay tuned with you that there.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So before we give everything away, you guys, tell everyone
where they can find ridiculous history and win.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
You can find ridiculous history at our website.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
It's ridiculous History show.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
I think so the website, guys definitely can't prepared for this.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I've got a stack of notes right here here, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Rolling back.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So you can find us on 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'll 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 in all of those places. We also have
a community page that we're really proud of and really
(06:28):
happy with, called Ridiculous Historians on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Taking a total cue from the cisk army. Yeah nice.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Well, First of all, thank you for all of the
flattery that you've been heaping on us for the last
few minutes. It's much appreciated. But also thank you for
coming by. Appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Thank you guys for having yes yank so much.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Let's do this every week.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
That might be a let me check the sketch.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I gotta tell you, I love those guys, but I'm
glad to get out of that that new studio box.
Oh yeah, it's like a Fema trailer man. It's formaldehyde
wafting off slowly poisoning us. It is still off gassing.
It feels like, yeah, big time. It's in my hair, yeah,
which is now falling out.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
We're in bad shape. Well before, I like what you're wearing.
By the way, thank you.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself and
luckily I had a bunch of samples of our new
T shirt.
Speaker 6 (07:22):
Yeah, and this is not a just to plug everyone.
Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T
shirt from the Stuff you Should Know store. Yeah, because
they sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great, to
the guy who has one hundred T shirts, here's twenty more.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
This, Like, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
The size of it.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Look at the size. It's a perfect size. It's not
so big that it wraps around and gets all mangled
by my love handles. But it's also not so small
that it looks like, you know, a caved in chest.
You know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
I didn't remember that reference though.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I didn't either like they listened to the Pie Piper episode.
Oh there you go.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
That sounds like a you thing, Yeah, Josh, But.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
It was just an offhanded 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.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
By the way, I need to give a shout out
to Brittany Schiff. Brittany Schiff sent this idea to us.
Oh okay, great, And the reason, you know, we don't
often take well that's not true. We kind of keep
a kitty of listener suggestions, but we don't often like
do one the next week and then shout out the person. Sure,
(08:36):
but I thought we had fully exhausted our Crime and
Punishment series.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Nope.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
So I was delighted that Brittany Shiff sent this in
and I was like, why haven't we done police line up?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
I don't know, it's a great question.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
Was just sitting there, yeah, waiting.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yep. The only other one that's left is what kind
of shoes detectives wear?
Speaker 3 (08:58):
That is?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
That's the last one? You know what means is this? Yeah,
that's gum shoe or crape sold I think.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
You knew that, yeah, but I don't know how it
relates to cops.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
I guess they wore those because they were so comfortable.
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 jailhouse. And they say, hey, you come on
(09:31):
over here, how'd you like to make ten bucks? And
the person says exactly how copper and the cop says,
by standing in is what we call a filler in
a police lineup.
Speaker 6 (09:43):
Or they do like Emer Simpson and when they're like
a boat raffle that they said he had to come
down to the police station.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah he won a boat. Yeah, and then they beat
him merciless for like parking unpaid parking tickets.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
Also shout out to Beth at Shuster, who wrote this
article in the NIJ Journal the National Institute of Justice.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
I believe so, is that right? Yeah, they're pretty much
committed to keeping people from being wrongly convicted. So I
would guess the JAY stands for justice.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
Yeah, and this is a good start. And we had
some other stuff we added to it. But thank you Ms. Schuster,
yeah for your work.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yep. Well, I already led into the episode and it
didn't take, So let me try again. This nij article
you sent calls out a dude named Jerry Miller, who
back in nineteen eighty one was twenty two years old,
I believe, and Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day
when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping,
(10:47):
and raping a woman. Yeah, and he got convicted. He
was convicted because two people, two eyewitnesses, saw him in
a lineup picked him out, and then later at trial
the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but
who cares. There's two eyewitnesses that picked the schmoe out
of a lineup. He's done. Yeah, he did twenty four
(11:11):
years in prison. And you may notice from the tone
that I'm using here he was wrongfully convicted.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
He actually got out of prison and was living life
for leased on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet, a monitor constantly.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
As a registered sex offender.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Right, and then finally I think, oh, I'm not quite sure. Oh,
two thousand and seven. In two thousand and seven, as
part of the Innocence Project, Yeah, which we've done an
episode on with.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Yeah, that lady what is her name?
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Oh, Hauleen.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
I don't want to say Laurville, but it's definitely not
Paula is on.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Paula is on.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
Thank you, Jerry.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, I wanted to say Pauli Shore so bad. I
just knew it was wrong. But we did Incent right,
we did it Innocence Project episode And under the Innocence Project,
Jerry Miller was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did
not do this and lost twenty four years of his
(12:12):
life because of flawed eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 6 (12:16):
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 is sort
of more about how you know, it's such an imperfect system.
But sort of the takeaway from 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,
(12:39):
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, right, and we're just
it's kind of the best we got right now.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Right, Well, a lot of people are like, get rid
of eyewitness testimony really all together, 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 subject to basically the way our brains
(13:16):
are wired. We don't walk around videotaping everything that we see,
you know, we get constantly bombarded with sensory information, and
under normal circumstances, you see a stranger on the street,
you just see there's another human. I've identified them as
not a threat and keep walking by it. If that
person turned out to be accused of a crime or
(13:41):
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 really difficult task even harder.
Speaker 6 (14:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
So like this is on my mind.
Speaker 6 (14:20):
And I actually had a situation when I lived in
LA happened to me where I had to go through
a police lineup and I failed.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Oh really, was the suspect there?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
No?
Speaker 6 (14:32):
Well no, here's here's the quick version. Is I was
in a hit and run. This lady, these two lady,
these two younger girls, they were probably teenagers, hit me
from behind.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
In my car.
Speaker 6 (14:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
No. Were you shooting into the air again to slow down,
trying to shoot out their tires?
Speaker 3 (14:58):
No?
Speaker 6 (14:58):
But I did chase them because I was so mad
and you're adrenaline just shoots through 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.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Like I got them now.
Speaker 6 (15:16):
It wasn't a cul de sac, but it functioned like
a cul de sac. So I stopped where I was
got out of the car. Sure enough, twenty seconds later,
they come houling but back toward me, and 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
(15:37):
their car. The cops found the car, found the people,
and they're like, we didn't do that, and so.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Who are these girls? These teenagers?
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Well that's the long and short of it. Is all
you have to do and something like that.
Speaker 6 (15:51):
I say, didn't do it, and if I can't pick
you out, then you get away.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
And they showed me pictures.
Speaker 6 (15:58):
Of like, you know, these were like teenage young teenage
Hispanic women. They showed me probably 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.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
You know, well that's very sensible of you.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Yeah, I just didn't want to take a stab at it.
Speaker 6 (16:21):
So I was like, no, I have no idea, and
they're basically like sorry, They said they didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
It's like, but you have the car.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
And it's damaged, and like none of that matters. They're like, no,
not if you can't identify.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I mean, I could see that. They could be like, oh, yeah,
that happened some other times, I know, and some other
hit and run.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
I mean, but yeah.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
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 beyond like the color
of the car and sort of what it looked.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Like because you were seeing red.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Because you're right, that's that our bodies are not prime
to form memories. It's not where our energy. 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.
The other problem with lineups is or eyewitness testimony from lineups,
(17:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
So it's like you said, they're very They're very flawed.
It's a flawed system. The problem is is the wrong
people can go to jail and the people who actually
did it can get away with it. So that's an
extremely flawed system. And when something that important is on
the table, then it needs to be fixed. And there's
(17:45):
a lot of people looking into how it can be fixed,
but we're not there yet by any stretch.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
No, And here's a stat you were talking about the
DNA exoneration, seventy five percent of the first one and
eighty three exonerations in the US were wrongfully convicted because
of eyewitness testimony and police lineups.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
Say it again, seventy.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Five seventy five percent of the first one hundred and
eighty three. So, like, the Innocence Project is basically like
a pilot study to show through DNA exoneration all the
ways that we wrongfully convict people. And what is coming
to the front is eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Yeah, and at the basis of that is the police lineup, right.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
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 saw the person they're pointing to
and the defendants.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
Table yeah, or that that dramatic moment it's like a
movie trope. Now, you know, is the person in this room.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Right, Let the record show that this witness is pointing
at the defendant, right.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
So the problem is it has a huge impact, but
it's also so really cruddy wit, really cruddy evidence. There's
this guy he he had a great quote.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
He says that.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
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. Yeah, and that just there's no better
description of eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 6 (19:23):
If I was ever in 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 about that guy
behind me, and they would say no, and they would
point again, and I would move a little bit more and.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Be like, this is this witness is clearly disturbed.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And then if that, if that didn't work, you would
escalate to I'm rubber and you're glued.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yeah, that usually works, right.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
So there's a couple of other things that makes eyewitness
testimony problematic, Chuck. In addition to not being like human
video recorders.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
There are human vs.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
There are. There are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime, that
can make it really difficult to remember. If you're in
a fight or flight situation, yeah, you're not forming memories.
If there's a weapon, there are people tend to focus
on the weapon.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Sure you.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
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
are like, yeah, there was a gun. Interesting, Yeah, and
she went to a lineup and like picked the guy
out and yummy's bulletproof, so she is, So she's like,
take your gun and shove it. I'm not even going
to recognize it.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
No, but that makes sense.
Speaker 6 (20:39):
If someone pulls a gun on you, or has a
switchblade or some other kind of creepy weapon, the human
instinct is to focus your attention on that thing pointed
at you.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, and apparently people can really describe the weapon, right,
But you're focusing on the weapon. You're not focused on
the person who is holding the weapon typically.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
Which helps a little bit, but not as much as
the face.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Right. And then another problem is if you are say
an Hispanic dude, and you're a witness to a crime,
and it's a 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. Yeah, because eyewitness testimony
(21:23):
that crosses race or ethnicities is known to be very
unreliable because it's just more difficult for somebody of an
ethnicity or a race to separate or identify people of
another ethnicity or race.
Speaker 6 (21:40):
Yeah, and I don't think it's the case where people
are like, all white people look the same to me,
it's just weird brain science, right, you know, right, you
just have a harder time.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
From way back when we were basically tuktook and Tuktok
lived with fifteen other people that look just like him
because they'd all been inbreeding 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.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
What's jack fruit? Oh?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
That word jack fruits, the big huge thing, the big
huge one. Yeah, it actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle.
Uhreded like shredded pork vegan stand in.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Oh okay, it's really good. Gotcha, gotcha?
Speaker 6 (22:27):
All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about
the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Right after this.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
All right, so, run of the mill 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. There
are lineups where you'd look at someone in front of
your face, and then there are lineups like I had
(23:13):
in La where I look at photographs the ones. You know,
it's way more sexy for a TV show or a
movie to line them up in the traditional.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Way, right, it's extraordinarily sexy, like a live police lineup
like you see on TV.
Speaker 6 (23:26):
Sure, and then they're 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
on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or
ladies and you identify them usually, well, it depends. We'll
get into the fillers or the foils, but only usually
(23:50):
only one of those people is a suspect.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
In like the best ideal version of it.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Right.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
Then there's sequential, and that's when they bring out one
person 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.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
If it's a photo lineup, they show you one photo
at a time.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, I agree with you. I think sequential is head
and shoulders the better one of the of the two.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (24:15):
And here's the final little piece of how it can
vary is whether or not the administrator, that the person
that's in charge of administrating the lineup knows who the
purp is or not.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, that's a big one, man.
Speaker 6 (24:28):
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
gave here in this article is if they say, and
if they identify a filler or a foil aka a
(24:49):
person that was paid ten bucks say that's the person.
The administrator might.
Speaker 4 (24:54):
Say take your time, Yeah, are you sure like you
really need to take.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Your time, which is basically like saying row.
Speaker 4 (25:01):
Pretty much, they just.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Or conversely, if when they're doing it sequentially, when they
get to like number four, they're like, whoa, get a
load of this guy. Huh geez, look at that bag character.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
He's guilty of something.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
But they can't like even just a smile or something
like that.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
Off like a nonverbal que you don't even mean to.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Do, right, or you may mean to do because you
know that 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,
(25:46):
feel like it's their role. It's their job to pick
somebody 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,
(26:07):
one at a time or.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
All at once simultaneous.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yet right, the suspect may or may not be in
this lineup.
Speaker 6 (26:16):
Yeah, that seems like I think they found that reduced
mistaken identity rates were lower when they did this, So
you would think just always do that right, right.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Because it says to the witness like the person may
not 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 answer is 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, right, and it's your job
(26:52):
to find that person and you have to pick somebody. Yeah,
most people aren't going to think like, I can't say so,
I'm just not going to They're gonna be like three.
Speaker 6 (27:03):
Yeah, Well, first of all, it's a crime against you
most a lot of times when you're like picking out
this purp.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Sure.
Speaker 6 (27:10):
Yeah, so you want them to be you know, found
or whatever.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, that's a really good point too.
Speaker 6 (27:15):
You want you don't want them to get away with it.
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.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Right. That's why I admire you saying that, like with
the phone lineup, you know, not not being not just
being like.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
This these two right.
Speaker 6 (27:36):
Yeah, But if it that wouldn't matter to my case,
because if I would have said these two and if
they're like, na, that's not the lady whose car it was.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
But a lot of people still would have right, right, right,
And they probably.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
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 and they'd.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Been like, god, he was so close.
Speaker 6 (27:55):
Some other research, it's interesting that suggests when there is
a defender 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
(28:15):
just because I think kids and elderly might not fully understand.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
I think they have to pick.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Somebody, Okay, yeah, I agree. I think that's exactly what
it is too.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
But the research bears that out. It looks like.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Right, So there's there is some like 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
blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is
(28:51):
shown to the person at a time, or one live
suspect is brought out to be looked at one person
at a time, yeah, and is administered by a cop
or a worker or somebody who doesn't know who the
suspect is. That that's going to reduce the chance of
a misidentification or a failure of an identification, and that
(29:13):
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
that just completely rocked that idea that that's the case,
(29:36):
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 lineup actually produces worse results than
a simultaneous, non double blind one.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Right.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
But and 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 these statistics seriously.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Right, because methodologically it was a screwed up study, Like
they really dropped the ball on the study.
Speaker 6 (30:23):
Yeah, And I don't think we mentioned the two judgments either.
During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing there together, use what's
called relative judgment. In other words, you compare all the
dudes standing up there against one another, 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
(30:45):
to the people that came before or after.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Right, that's the hope, that's the ideal, right.
Speaker 6 (30:50):
Right, But with this reasearch in research and the study,
I kind of didn't even know what to think because
it sort 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, right,
So we ended up sort of back at square one
with the Illinois pilot program.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
It seems like, yeah, the reason why the method methodology
was so terrible. They used the double blind procedure for
sequential lineups, but they didn't use it for simultaneous lineups.
So if cops were advertently or inadvertently leading people with
simultaneous lineups, then of course those are going to produce
(31:30):
correct choices with suspects better than the one that's a
double blind sequential one. They compared apples to oranges in
this study. It's almost like a sixth grader came up
with how to actually conduct this study that the Illinois
legislature said, Illinois State Police, go go figure this out.
Do a three year study on this, and they came
(31:52):
back and said, huh yeah, and it was. It's terrible.
And the problem is is if it is true that
a sequential double blind study is 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 heardh they did the study and
(32:12):
it's actually worse not and the design of the study
was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (32:20):
They even went to the cops at the Illinois pilot program,
talked to them, and they said the majority of the
officers said they didn't think that it was superior and
said that witnesses who can identify the offender can do
so under either procedure, and officers express concerns that using
a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an investigator has tries
(32:42):
to build with a witness. So I interpret all that
as it's cops saying, can we just keep doing it
the way we've always done it?
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, because it gets results right. But the thing is
is 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 mugshots of people and
or I think in Canada they usually use twelve. But
(33:10):
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?
Speaker 4 (33:19):
You want to do a double blind, right.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
And then those that person has 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
cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making
it way too hard.
Speaker 6 (33:34):
Yeah. I mean they said in here that sometimes they
even have trouble coming up with the blind administrator, and
maybe it's a It probably has everything to do with budgets.
My thought is like, why isn't there one person that
does only this.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
That just is called the administrator.
Speaker 6 (33:54):
Right, and then so the line of administrator and goes
to the people's houses or runs them in the precinct
or whatever, and this is the only thing that they do, right,
I'll do.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
It, bring in the administrator.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Yeah, that's a TV show waiting to have it. Sure, Yeah,
I don't know. It's probably budgetary.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Its got to be.
Speaker 6 (34:15):
They also found with a lot of these when there's
multiple purpse, it just goes haywire. Yeah, because sometimes they'll
put two of the purpose in the same lineup right, right,
just super confusing.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
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 get people to stand in
as suspects right after this. All right, Chuck, So you
(34:58):
were just talking about how if you have lineup and
you put two suspects that you've got, say, there are
two guys who rob some lady, 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
(35:18):
you've done just then is increase the chance that somebody
could guess, just guess randomly at the suspect. Right.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Yeah, If you have five.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
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 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
(35:50):
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 to do than you
would think.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
Yeah, and it seems like a lot of The problem
with this is, and they even say so in the
NIJ 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 home, sometimes
they're in the precinct. And it seems like the two
(36:23):
heads aren't talking very much, right, 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
combine 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.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Sure, I mean, they know what works, and it works,
you know, but does it well, that's the question.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Right. So they fingered a collar, right, is that the.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Right the gumsh you finger to call it?
Speaker 6 (36:56):
Yeah, then it's all in a good day's work. They
finger the wrong collar, then it's no good.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
It's still all in. So one of the reasons it's
that somebody cop would put a two suspects in a lineup.
It's not just to 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.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
Yeah, this was hard to believe, Like, just they can't
find people sometimes.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Right, Well, and the reason why is because let's say
you have multiple witnesses, and each witness gives you a
different description of the perpetrator, right, right, Ideally you're going
to find a different lineup for each witness.
Speaker 6 (37:45):
Yeah, Like, if there's three witnesses, you should run three lineups, right,
because their descriptions are probably somewhat different.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Right. That can be difficult, right, 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 all the
other people in the lineup look like you know your suspect. Yeah,
that's one way to do it. Another is to do
(38:13):
the perpetrator description match strategy, which is you've got.
Speaker 4 (38:20):
And that's when you have no suspect, right, just witness accounts.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
You can have a suspect, but you're creating your lineup
based on what the what the witness has described the perpetrator.
Speaker 4 (38:30):
To look like, and then just throw the suspect in there, right.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Which can be bad for the suspect because if the suspect,
the person you actually think did it, doesn't look anything
like the eyewitness said. There's going to be four redheads
and the one blonde guy who's actually the suspect, and
he's going to stand out like a sore throum. 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, yeah the eyewitness described,
(38:55):
or all like the suspect that you've got, because you
don't want the suspect to stand out. And there's a
lot of techniques that they use to try to make
everybody look the same.
Speaker 4 (39:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (39:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:10):
Put them in Yankees hats. Right, Just line up a
bunch of guys in Yankees right.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging
outside of the you know that room where they.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
Walk them into wasn' Kramer in a lineup when he
was a suspect, a totally serial killer suspect.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Yes, I don't remember it was a serial killer, but
I remember he was in the line I he kept
turning the wrong way.
Speaker 6 (39:31):
Yeah, I think he was misidentified on the when they
went to LA to pitch the TV show. Huh, Kramer
got caught up in some like serial killer things. I
think of that, and I think of the great lineup
scene in the Usual Suspects.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Let's address that real quick.
Speaker 6 (39:46):
When they have to say something so well, we can't
repeat it here because there's bad words.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Right. No, 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.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
And they're not dressed the same.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
Yeah, it's it's a total movie lineup.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
It would never happen. No, Or are you going to
say about them saying something.
Speaker 6 (40:08):
Well, they had to recite a line. I don't know
how typical that is, though.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Uh, you me.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
When she did her line up, she remembered what the
guy was saying.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
Oh, and they say that, okay, so that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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, and she's like, really, what
I want him to say? Yeah, he's like, no, you
have to say what they actually said.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Oh yeah, how did that result? Did she get the guy?
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Oh? She picked him out immediately? Oh okay, yeah, yeah,
I think I got busted.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Yeah, man, you don't mug you me. I'll tell you that, buddy.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
You hear that, purpose.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Right, you started quaking in your boots.
Speaker 6 (40:46):
The one thing too, that caught me, uh sort of
off guard, is that I never thought about is the uh,
the part about whether or not they're clean shaven, Like
there could be details of omission, Like if an eyewitness
doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they either were clean
shaven or not, then I think they default to something
(41:06):
that may not be accurate. And so all of a sudden,
your lineup, well, your lineup should have all clean shaven dudes.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
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 shaven.
Speaker 6 (41:23):
And they should all be clean shaven in a lineup,
because if you have five clean shaven guys in one
filler or one foil with a big beard like.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Me, right, I might get picked out just because I
look different.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
Right exactly?
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Or 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, right,
so I can put this clean shaven suspect in with
four other guys who all have beards and make them
stand out. That's the opposite. And apparently there was this
New York Times article from years back about a guy
named that dude, what was his.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Name, casting agent, basically Robert Weston.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Yeah, Robert or western It's it's a pretty interesting little article.
But in the article it says that the Bronx cops
that use this guy to help fill lineups, which we'll
talk about in a second, 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,
(42:22):
see how everybody else to wear in 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,
you know, and instead just keep it on the on
the level, at least as far as the Yankees hat
brooms go.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
I so want to be a filler.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
I'm sure you could do it. I want you just
have to hang around long enough until a dude who
looks like you commits a crime, which in Atlanta's a
lot of hipsters running around. For sure.
Speaker 4 (42:52):
I don't look like a hipster.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I don't know, I.
Speaker 4 (42:56):
Look like it the hipster gone bad.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Oh yeah, need enough to be h. You look like
a hit and run hipster.
Speaker 4 (43:02):
Hipsters are super well coffed and like squared away.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
Oh I know it to me, you know, Yeah, your
jeenes aren't pegged.
Speaker 4 (43:09):
No, I look like a hipster who slept in.
Speaker 6 (43:12):
So back to Robert Weston, this guy in New York
at the time, at least, 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.
Speaker 4 (43:28):
I'm 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 it's
going to say pay a little bit more, get a
casting agent in there, get.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Some of those college educated fillers in there, right.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
I guess.
Speaker 6 (43:43):
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 purp is.
Sometimes they get other cops that are busy to stand in.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Right, I mean, these are people need people will go
to a police station and stand in the lineup for
ten dollars.
Speaker 4 (44:07):
Right, They get paid as much as the guy who
organized the party.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Right, But if Robert Weston stands in himself, he'll get
an extra twenty bucks on top of putting the thing together.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Right.
Speaker 4 (44:16):
How many times he tries to do that.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
But he even said, like if they want white guys,
I don't know any white guys. So they go to
homeless shelters for that. And that's very much what cops do.
Cops will go find people on the street. They will
go to homeless shelters. They will have casting agents like
Robert Weston on their speed dial, and what they'll say is,
I've got a middle aged white guy with a graying
(44:43):
beard and he's about six feet tall. Give me four
other people that match that description, and ideally four other
people that match that description will show up, and not
three and then one another total outlier or something like that.
Speaker 6 (45:00):
One cop was complaining about his work. It was kind
of funny, right, complaining about Robert Wesson. He was like,
he didn't bring in good people. He always like right.
Speaker 4 (45:07):
Budges, the ages and the races and stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
But the reason why they keep using this guy is
because he answers his phone, 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 a suspect for so long without
charging 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 bringing one witness just to
(45:31):
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. Yeah,
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 bring them out. That is the
(45:52):
one where like, all the t should be crossed and
the eyes should be dotted, because a good court will
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 eyewitness testimony out.
Speaker 6 (46:09):
The worst possible version of all 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 apprehended. 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
(46:30):
a police car handcuffed. They'll bring the person who was
robbed or whatever they're to the scene. They'll yank him
out of the back of the car and say, is
this the dirt bag who did it?
Speaker 4 (46:41):
Like just one guy.
Speaker 6 (46:42):
Yeah, and that's clearly the worst possible version of.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
All of this.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
And the guy's like, I need more pace, a pay,
I'm coming down. So one of the here's the reason
why that show up is so terrible, Chuck.
Speaker 4 (46:55):
Well, there's no other people that they're comparing them to.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
That's one. But they're also in handcuffs, in the back
of a cop car or something like that. They're in
place 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 is just a formality,
so I'll be like, yeah, sure, that was that person.
(47:17):
That's the first problem with it. The second problem is
is that from that point on, that person 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 holding the gun that they
were actually focused on, and from that moment on they
(47:39):
just get more and more certain that that was the
person because that person's not starring in their memories and
it's not just the problem with the show up, but
with any misidentification. When they see that person and that
person becomes seared in their brain, they're positive from that
point on and they can seem very confident in court,
which again he's buy even though it's garbage.
Speaker 4 (48:02):
Well, in weeks and months can go by, right 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 of all this.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
A lot of people say that, or at the very
least say this is eyewitness testimony. It's actually terrible testimony.
Actually it's terrible evidence.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
But let's do it anyway.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Right. But and if they did say that, if they
basically lowered what how much weight eyewitness testimony held in court,
then those cases that were built entirely on eyewitness testimony
wouldn't have a leg to stand on it. They have
to go build a bigger case.
Speaker 6 (48:44):
Yeah, But like in Yumi's case, it worked, it did. No,
it was like that guy might have walked, you know, right, That's.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
The problem is that, you know, if if twenty five
percent of the time is wrong, right, seventy five percent
of the time, is right, we think. So, I mean
it's not it's not like Arson investigation, which we're going
to do one on one day, Yeah, where it's just
totally made up. Like it does have some veracity, but
there's a lot of flaws with it, and.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
The lives are at stake though it's really dicey.
Speaker 1 (49:12):
They need to figure it out because of that. Yeah,
so they need to go do that now.
Speaker 6 (49:18):
I mean, can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified
and serving no, two decades in prison for something you
really didn't do?
Speaker 1 (49:27):
No, I really can't.
Speaker 6 (49:29):
I mean I remember how up said I got when
we did the Innocence Project. It's just, yeah, you hear
these stories and then they get out and they're like,
well here's here's four hundred thousand bucks.
Speaker 4 (49:37):
We feel pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Right, go get yourself something nice. Try to forget about
all this, right. Yeah, did you ever see that movie
An Innocent Man with Tom Selleck. It scared the Bejesus
out of me. The same thing happened to him when
he was when he was he was framed.
Speaker 4 (49:54):
Oh wait, that's high Road to China.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Oh right, I got my stuff? Makes it? No that's
down under that. Oh right, Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 4 (50:03):
Nope?
Speaker 3 (50:03):
All right, Well that's it for police.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Lineups for now. We'll do an update whenever they get
it figured out.
Speaker 4 (50:08):
We did one on police sketches, right, yeah, okay, is
this it?
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Are we done?
Speaker 4 (50:13):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:13):
We still got Arson investigation. We've got a lot all right, yeah, okay, okay.
If you want to know more about police lineups, then
I don't know, go hang around a police station. See
if you can stand in one learn firsthand.
Speaker 6 (50:28):
Okay, get a little sign that says I will be
your foil ten dollars.
Speaker 4 (50:33):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (50:33):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
And since I said ten dollars, it's time for listener.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
Now, I'm gonna call this youngest fan. This very cute email. Hey, guys,
love the podcast.
Speaker 6 (50:43):
You're doing it right, It's not this email is not
episode specific, but I had to tell you about this.
My husband and I welcomed our baby boy into the
world a couple of months ago. When I was pregnant,
we joked that the baby would think that one of
you was his dad because he heard your voices so often.
That's a very funny joke in a family, you know,
(51:06):
joke about the paternity of your child. 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.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
She was like, what's wrong with DOCN? Why isn't docin working.
Speaker 6 (51:23):
I couldn't get him to calm down with any of the
usual tricks, so I decided to heck with it. I'm
gonna put on the podcast, and I kid you not,
as soon as you guys started talking, he stopped crying.
My husband says it was coincidence. Jealous, I say, stuff,
you should know.
Speaker 4 (51:36):
Magic.
Speaker 6 (51:39):
Now we're back to always listening to you guys in
the car. You keep up the great work. And thanks
for soothing my baby boy. And that is from Sarah
Strantz and our youngest fan, Frank from beautiful Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email, Frank,
go to sleep quiet now.
Speaker 4 (51:56):
They named their baby after our chair?
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Pretty? Wouldn't that be amazing if they actually did it?
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Well? Now?
Speaker 1 (52:05):
And thank you also to unnamed husband for being a
good sport.
Speaker 4 (52:08):
Agreed.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
If you want to send us a great email about
how We're magic. 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 HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 5 (52:28):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's me Josham. For this week's select I've
chosen our twenty eighteen episode how police Lineups Work. It's
one of those things that you just kind of know
about and then you find out about it and you
say to yourself, how are we doing this. It's a
great episode. I think you'll enjoy it. So sit back, relax,
and get ready for police Lineups.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry out there outside the fishbowl,
and also there's guest producer Noel and our pal Ben.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
But yeah, I'm in the room this time, man, Yeah,
on the mic. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
This is way better than that time you have me
on the April Fools episode.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I may
remember Ben from that. I think it was two thousand
thirteen or fifteen something, ungodly time ago.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
It's my replacement.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, it was an April Fool's joke for the three
D printing episode. So this is your second time on
the show.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
Yeah, the Internet shredg you Ben was it were they
were you like a target of abuse.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I want to thank everybody for the very polite emails,
and as we could tell, thankfully, Chuck is fine.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, they took it easy on them. Okay, we have
very nice listeners, you know. And then Nol, this might
be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast,
even though you've guest produced it like a million times.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
I think I may have mumbled something in the background
the time. It really wow wow, Josh. So we're having
you two on.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Let's cut, let's get down of business, because you two
have a podcast together, right, Uh, Noel, you also run
mini Crush movie Crush.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
It's true. Yeah, you're also in a real world's colliding
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
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 Knowl have come together and made ridiculous history,
which is awesome.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Oh yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
We're just missing God.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'm starting to sweat. But you guys are on ridiculous
history together. We are, Yeah, tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Uh So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events
often not covered in your typical history class.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Sounds familiar, right.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
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 of people.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
It's surely not, surely not, but it did.
Speaker 5 (02:41):
It did, It did, And surely the US government did
not have a plan to shoot a nuclear missile at
the moon.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Right, that was just a Mister Shows sketch. Surely not,
but she also was. It was kind of parallel thinking.
Speaker 5 (02:53):
Is the Mister Show sketch happened before this story became declassified?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
It is?
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Nine yep.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
So our continuing mission with ridiculous history, not to sound.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Too star treky about it.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
A continual basis.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
And sometimes we do have to stop recording just for
a second because we're so tickled.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Do you really, Yeah, Wow, that's that's actually high quality,
mainly because we tickle each other.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I got to physically. Yeah, that's cheating, man. You're making
it sound so serious. It's actually a lot of fun.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
It is.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
It's a fun show. Right, Oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
I mean I'm giving been a hard time, but yeah,
that's definitely like we touch on from time to time.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
It it'll go into a heavier territory.
Speaker 5 (03:47):
Like, for example, we did an episode about how women
in Kansas in the nineteen twenties were imprisoned in labor
camps for having STDs. What that certainly falls under ridiculous
not exactly fun or funny.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Right haha, ridiculous. So it's it's it's all of those things.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
Some of them are you know, crack you up hilarious
moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by bunnies or you know,
the aforementioned SDT labor camps, or.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
The racist special Olympics that were held here in the States.
And we're a complete, well to borrow phrase we use
on the show, a complete ship show.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So so wait a minute, I think you are, like,
you need to name the state that hosted that.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Oh it was Saint Louis. Yeah, Saint Louis.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
And it's because the World's Fair was happening in Saint
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.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
And no one's going to come to your Olympics.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
And scared them in the early days of like, you know,
not the earliest days of the Olympics, when they brought
it back like in the you know, it was not
ancient Rome.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
It was not in fact ancient Rome.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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 their cockamamie ideas.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
Of like eugenics, ideas of kind of like white superiority,
and like they would have indigenous people competing in these
Olympic events. 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.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
And when supremacists can ruin anything, anything they put their
hands on, they really can't just turns to poop.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, we are doing an episode on flatulence later, so
stay tuned with you that there.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So before we give everything away, you guys, tell everyone
where they can find ridiculous history and win.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
You can find ridiculous history at our website.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
It's ridiculous History show.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
I think so the website, guys definitely can't prepared for this.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I've got a stack of notes right here here, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Rolling back.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So you can find us on 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'll 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 in all of those places. We also have
a community page that we're really proud of and really
(06:28):
happy with, called Ridiculous Historians on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Taking a total cue from the cisk army. Yeah nice.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Well, First of all, thank you for all of the
flattery that you've been heaping on us for the last
few minutes. It's much appreciated. But also thank you for
coming by. Appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Thank you guys for having yes yank so much.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Let's do this every week.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
That might be a let me check the sketch.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I gotta tell you, I love those guys, but I'm
glad to get out of that that new studio box.
Oh yeah, it's like a Fema trailer man. It's formaldehyde
wafting off slowly poisoning us. It is still off gassing.
It feels like, yeah, big time. It's in my hair, yeah,
which is now falling out.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
We're in bad shape. Well before, I like what you're wearing.
By the way, thank you.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself and
luckily I had a bunch of samples of our new
T shirt.
Speaker 6 (07:22):
Yeah, and this is not a just to plug everyone.
Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T
shirt from the Stuff you Should Know store. Yeah, because
they sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great, to
the guy who has one hundred T shirts, here's twenty more.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
This, Like, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
The size of it.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Look at the size. It's a perfect size. It's not
so big that it wraps around and gets all mangled
by my love handles. But it's also not so small
that it looks like, you know, a caved in chest.
You know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
I didn't remember that reference though.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I didn't either like they listened to the Pie Piper episode.
Oh there you go.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
That sounds like a you thing, Yeah, Josh, But.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
It was just an offhanded 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.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
By the way, I need to give a shout out
to Brittany Schiff. Brittany Schiff sent this idea to us.
Oh okay, great, And the reason, you know, we don't
often take well that's not true. We kind of keep
a kitty of listener suggestions, but we don't often like
do one the next week and then shout out the person. Sure,
(08:36):
but I thought we had fully exhausted our Crime and
Punishment series.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Nope.
Speaker 6 (08:41):
So I was delighted that Brittany Shiff sent this in
and I was like, why haven't we done police line up?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
I don't know, it's a great question.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
Was just sitting there, yeah, waiting.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yep. The only other one that's left is what kind
of shoes detectives wear?
Speaker 3 (08:58):
That is?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
That's the last one? You know what means is this? Yeah,
that's gum shoe or crape sold I think.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
You knew that, yeah, but I don't know how it
relates to cops.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
I guess they wore those because they were so comfortable.
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 jailhouse. And they say, hey, you come on
(09:31):
over here, how'd you like to make ten bucks? And
the person says exactly how copper and the cop says,
by standing in is what we call a filler in
a police lineup.
Speaker 6 (09:43):
Or they do like Emer Simpson and when they're like
a boat raffle that they said he had to come
down to the police station.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah he won a boat. Yeah, and then they beat
him merciless for like parking unpaid parking tickets.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
Also shout out to Beth at Shuster, who wrote this
article in the NIJ Journal the National Institute of Justice.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
I believe so, is that right? Yeah, they're pretty much
committed to keeping people from being wrongly convicted. So I
would guess the JAY stands for justice.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
Yeah, and this is a good start. And we had
some other stuff we added to it. But thank you Ms. Schuster,
yeah for your work.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yep. Well, I already led into the episode and it
didn't take, So let me try again. This nij article
you sent calls out a dude named Jerry Miller, who
back in nineteen eighty one was twenty two years old,
I believe, and Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day
when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping,
(10:47):
and raping a woman. Yeah, and he got convicted. He
was convicted because two people, two eyewitnesses, saw him in
a lineup picked him out, and then later at trial
the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but
who cares. There's two eyewitnesses that picked the schmoe out
of a lineup. He's done. Yeah, he did twenty four
(11:11):
years in prison. And you may notice from the tone
that I'm using here he was wrongfully convicted.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
He actually got out of prison and was living life
for leased on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet, a monitor constantly.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
As a registered sex offender.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Right, and then finally I think, oh, I'm not quite sure. Oh,
two thousand and seven. In two thousand and seven, as
part of the Innocence Project, Yeah, which we've done an
episode on with.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Yeah, that lady what is her name?
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Oh, Hauleen.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
I don't want to say Laurville, but it's definitely not
Paula is on.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Paula is on.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
Thank you, Jerry.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, I wanted to say Pauli Shore so bad. I
just knew it was wrong. But we did Incent right,
we did it Innocence Project episode And under the Innocence Project,
Jerry Miller was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did
not do this and lost twenty four years of his
(12:12):
life because of flawed eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 6 (12:16):
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 is sort
of more about how you know, it's such an imperfect system.
But sort of the takeaway from 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,
(12:39):
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, right, and we're just
it's kind of the best we got right now.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Right, Well, a lot of people are like, get rid
of eyewitness testimony really all together, 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 subject to basically the way our brains
(13:16):
are wired. We don't walk around videotaping everything that we see,
you know, we get constantly bombarded with sensory information, and
under normal circumstances, you see a stranger on the street,
you just see there's another human. I've identified them as
not a threat and keep walking by it. If that
person turned out to be accused of a crime or
(13:41):
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 really difficult task even harder.
Speaker 6 (14:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
So like this is on my mind.
Speaker 6 (14:20):
And I actually had a situation when I lived in
LA happened to me where I had to go through
a police lineup and I failed.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Oh really, was the suspect there?
Speaker 4 (14:31):
No?
Speaker 6 (14:32):
Well no, here's here's the quick version. Is I was
in a hit and run. This lady, these two lady,
these two younger girls, they were probably teenagers, hit me
from behind.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
In my car.
Speaker 6 (14:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
No. Were you shooting into the air again to slow down,
trying to shoot out their tires?
Speaker 3 (14:58):
No?
Speaker 6 (14:58):
But I did chase them because I was so mad
and you're adrenaline just shoots through 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.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Like I got them now.
Speaker 6 (15:16):
It wasn't a cul de sac, but it functioned like
a cul de sac. So I stopped where I was
got out of the car. Sure enough, twenty seconds later,
they come houling but back toward me, and 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
(15:37):
their car. The cops found the car, found the people,
and they're like, we didn't do that, and so.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Who are these girls? These teenagers?
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Well that's the long and short of it. Is all
you have to do and something like that.
Speaker 6 (15:51):
I say, didn't do it, and if I can't pick
you out, then you get away.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
And they showed me pictures.
Speaker 6 (15:58):
Of like, you know, these were like teenage young teenage
Hispanic women. They showed me probably 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.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
You know, well that's very sensible of you.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Yeah, I just didn't want to take a stab at it.
Speaker 6 (16:21):
So I was like, no, I have no idea, and
they're basically like sorry, They said they didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
It's like, but you have the car.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
And it's damaged, and like none of that matters. They're like, no,
not if you can't identify.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I mean, I could see that. They could be like, oh, yeah,
that happened some other times, I know, and some other
hit and run.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
I mean, but yeah.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
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 beyond like the color
of the car and sort of what it looked.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Like because you were seeing red.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Because you're right, that's that our bodies are not prime
to form memories. It's not where our energy. 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.
The other problem with lineups is or eyewitness testimony from lineups,
(17:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
So it's like you said, they're very They're very flawed.
It's a flawed system. The problem is is the wrong
people can go to jail and the people who actually
did it can get away with it. So that's an
extremely flawed system. And when something that important is on
the table, then it needs to be fixed. And there's
(17:45):
a lot of people looking into how it can be fixed,
but we're not there yet by any stretch.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
No, And here's a stat you were talking about the
DNA exoneration, seventy five percent of the first one and
eighty three exonerations in the US were wrongfully convicted because
of eyewitness testimony and police lineups.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
Say it again, seventy.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Five seventy five percent of the first one hundred and
eighty three. So, like, the Innocence Project is basically like
a pilot study to show through DNA exoneration all the
ways that we wrongfully convict people. And what is coming
to the front is eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Yeah, and at the basis of that is the police lineup, right.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
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 saw the person they're pointing to
and the defendants.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
Table yeah, or that that dramatic moment it's like a
movie trope. Now, you know, is the person in this room.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Right, Let the record show that this witness is pointing
at the defendant, right.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
So the problem is it has a huge impact, but
it's also so really cruddy wit, really cruddy evidence. There's
this guy he he had a great quote.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
He says that.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
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. Yeah, and that just there's no better
description of eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 6 (19:23):
If I was ever in 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 about that guy
behind me, and they would say no, and they would
point again, and I would move a little bit more and.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Be like, this is this witness is clearly disturbed.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And then if that, if that didn't work, you would
escalate to I'm rubber and you're glued.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yeah, that usually works, right.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
So there's a couple of other things that makes eyewitness
testimony problematic, Chuck. In addition to not being like human
video recorders.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
There are human vs.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
There are. There are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime, that
can make it really difficult to remember. If you're in
a fight or flight situation, yeah, you're not forming memories.
If there's a weapon, there are people tend to focus
on the weapon.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Sure you.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
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
are like, yeah, there was a gun. Interesting, Yeah, and
she went to a lineup and like picked the guy
out and yummy's bulletproof, so she is, So she's like,
take your gun and shove it. I'm not even going
to recognize it.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
No, but that makes sense.
Speaker 6 (20:39):
If someone pulls a gun on you, or has a
switchblade or some other kind of creepy weapon, the human
instinct is to focus your attention on that thing pointed
at you.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, and apparently people can really describe the weapon, right,
But you're focusing on the weapon. You're not focused on
the person who is holding the weapon typically.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
Which helps a little bit, but not as much as
the face.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Right. And then another problem is if you are say
an Hispanic dude, and you're a witness to a crime,
and it's a 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. Yeah, because eyewitness testimony
(21:23):
that crosses race or ethnicities is known to be very
unreliable because it's just more difficult for somebody of an
ethnicity or a race to separate or identify people of
another ethnicity or race.
Speaker 6 (21:40):
Yeah, and I don't think it's the case where people
are like, all white people look the same to me,
it's just weird brain science, right, you know, right, you
just have a harder time.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
From way back when we were basically tuktook and Tuktok
lived with fifteen other people that look just like him
because they'd all been inbreeding 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.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
What's jack fruit? Oh?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
That word jack fruits, the big huge thing, the big
huge one. Yeah, it actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle.
Uhreded like shredded pork vegan stand in.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Oh okay, it's really good. Gotcha, gotcha?
Speaker 6 (22:27):
All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about
the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Right after this.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
All right, so, run of the mill 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. There
are lineups where you'd look at someone in front of
your face, and then there are lineups like I had
(23:13):
in La where I look at photographs the ones. You know,
it's way more sexy for a TV show or a
movie to line them up in the traditional.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Way, right, it's extraordinarily sexy, like a live police lineup
like you see on TV.
Speaker 6 (23:26):
Sure, and then they're 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
on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or
ladies and you identify them usually, well, it depends. We'll
get into the fillers or the foils, but only usually
(23:50):
only one of those people is a suspect.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
In like the best ideal version of it.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Right.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
Then there's sequential, and that's when they bring out one
person 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.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
If it's a photo lineup, they show you one photo
at a time.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, I agree with you. I think sequential is head
and shoulders the better one of the of the two.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (24:15):
And here's the final little piece of how it can
vary is whether or not the administrator, that the person
that's in charge of administrating the lineup knows who the
purp is or not.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, that's a big one, man.
Speaker 6 (24:28):
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
gave here in this article is if they say, and
if they identify a filler or a foil aka a
(24:49):
person that was paid ten bucks say that's the person.
The administrator might.
Speaker 4 (24:54):
Say take your time, Yeah, are you sure like you
really need to take.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Your time, which is basically like saying row.
Speaker 4 (25:01):
Pretty much, they just.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Or conversely, if when they're doing it sequentially, when they
get to like number four, they're like, whoa, get a
load of this guy. Huh geez, look at that bag character.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
He's guilty of something.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
But they can't like even just a smile or something
like that.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
Off like a nonverbal que you don't even mean to.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Do, right, or you may mean to do because you
know that 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,
(25:46):
feel like it's their role. It's their job to pick
somebody 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,
(26:07):
one at a time or.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
All at once simultaneous.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yet right, the suspect may or may not be in
this lineup.
Speaker 6 (26:16):
Yeah, that seems like I think they found that reduced
mistaken identity rates were lower when they did this, So
you would think just always do that right, right.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Because it says to the witness like the person may
not 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 answer is 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, right, and it's your job
(26:52):
to find that person and you have to pick somebody. Yeah,
most people aren't going to think like, I can't say so,
I'm just not going to They're gonna be like three.
Speaker 6 (27:03):
Yeah, Well, first of all, it's a crime against you
most a lot of times when you're like picking out
this purp.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Sure.
Speaker 6 (27:10):
Yeah, so you want them to be you know, found
or whatever.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, that's a really good point too.
Speaker 6 (27:15):
You want you don't want them to get away with it.
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.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Right. That's why I admire you saying that, like with
the phone lineup, you know, not not being not just
being like.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
This these two right.
Speaker 6 (27:36):
Yeah, But if it that wouldn't matter to my case,
because if I would have said these two and if
they're like, na, that's not the lady whose car it was.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
But a lot of people still would have right, right, right,
And they probably.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
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 and they'd.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Been like, god, he was so close.
Speaker 6 (27:55):
Some other research, it's interesting that suggests when there is
a defender 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
(28:15):
just because I think kids and elderly might not fully understand.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
I think they have to pick.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Somebody, Okay, yeah, I agree. I think that's exactly what
it is too.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
But the research bears that out. It looks like.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Right, So there's there is some like 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
blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is
(28:51):
shown to the person at a time, or one live
suspect is brought out to be looked at one person
at a time, yeah, and is administered by a cop
or a worker or somebody who doesn't know who the
suspect is. That that's going to reduce the chance of
a misidentification or a failure of an identification, and that
(29:13):
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
that just completely rocked that idea that that's the case,
(29:36):
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 lineup actually produces worse results than
a simultaneous, non double blind one.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Right.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
But and 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 these statistics seriously.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Right, because methodologically it was a screwed up study, Like
they really dropped the ball on the study.
Speaker 6 (30:23):
Yeah, And I don't think we mentioned the two judgments either.
During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing there together, use what's
called relative judgment. In other words, you compare all the
dudes standing up there against one another, 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
(30:45):
to the people that came before or after.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Right, that's the hope, that's the ideal, right.
Speaker 6 (30:50):
Right, But with this reasearch in research and the study,
I kind of didn't even know what to think because
it sort 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, right,
So we ended up sort of back at square one
with the Illinois pilot program.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
It seems like, yeah, the reason why the method methodology
was so terrible. They used the double blind procedure for
sequential lineups, but they didn't use it for simultaneous lineups.
So if cops were advertently or inadvertently leading people with
simultaneous lineups, then of course those are going to produce
(31:30):
correct choices with suspects better than the one that's a
double blind sequential one. They compared apples to oranges in
this study. It's almost like a sixth grader came up
with how to actually conduct this study that the Illinois
legislature said, Illinois State Police, go go figure this out.
Do a three year study on this, and they came
(31:52):
back and said, huh yeah, and it was. It's terrible.
And the problem is is if it is true that
a sequential double blind study is 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 heardh they did the study and
(32:12):
it's actually worse not and the design of the study
was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (32:20):
They even went to the cops at the Illinois pilot program,
talked to them, and they said the majority of the
officers said they didn't think that it was superior and
said that witnesses who can identify the offender can do
so under either procedure, and officers express concerns that using
a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an investigator has tries
(32:42):
to build with a witness. So I interpret all that
as it's cops saying, can we just keep doing it
the way we've always done it?
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, because it gets results right. But the thing is
is 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 mugshots of people and
or I think in Canada they usually use twelve. But
(33:10):
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?
Speaker 4 (33:19):
You want to do a double blind, right.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
And then those that person has 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
cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making
it way too hard.
Speaker 6 (33:34):
Yeah. I mean they said in here that sometimes they
even have trouble coming up with the blind administrator, and
maybe it's a It probably has everything to do with budgets.
My thought is like, why isn't there one person that
does only this.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
That just is called the administrator.
Speaker 6 (33:54):
Right, and then so the line of administrator and goes
to the people's houses or runs them in the precinct
or whatever, and this is the only thing that they do, right,
I'll do.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
It, bring in the administrator.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Yeah, that's a TV show waiting to have it. Sure, Yeah,
I don't know. It's probably budgetary.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Its got to be.
Speaker 6 (34:15):
They also found with a lot of these when there's
multiple purpse, it just goes haywire. Yeah, because sometimes they'll
put two of the purpose in the same lineup right, right,
just super confusing.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
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 get people to stand in
as suspects right after this. All right, Chuck, So you
(34:58):
were just talking about how if you have lineup and
you put two suspects that you've got, say, there are
two guys who rob some lady, 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
(35:18):
you've done just then is increase the chance that somebody
could guess, just guess randomly at the suspect. Right.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Yeah, If you have five.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
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 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
(35:50):
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 to do than you
would think.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
Yeah, and it seems like a lot of The problem
with this is, and they even say so in the
NIJ 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 home, sometimes
they're in the precinct. And it seems like the two
(36:23):
heads aren't talking very much, right, 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
combine 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.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Sure, I mean, they know what works, and it works,
you know, but does it well, that's the question.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Right. So they fingered a collar, right, is that the.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Right the gumsh you finger to call it?
Speaker 6 (36:56):
Yeah, then it's all in a good day's work. They
finger the wrong collar, then it's no good.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
It's still all in. So one of the reasons it's
that somebody cop would put a two suspects in a lineup.
It's not just to 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.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
Yeah, this was hard to believe, Like, just they can't
find people sometimes.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Right, Well, and the reason why is because let's say
you have multiple witnesses, and each witness gives you a
different description of the perpetrator, right, right, Ideally you're going
to find a different lineup for each witness.
Speaker 6 (37:45):
Yeah, Like, if there's three witnesses, you should run three lineups, right,
because their descriptions are probably somewhat different.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Right. That can be difficult, right, 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 all the
other people in the lineup look like you know your suspect. Yeah,
that's one way to do it. Another is to do
(38:13):
the perpetrator description match strategy, which is you've got.
Speaker 4 (38:20):
And that's when you have no suspect, right, just witness accounts.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
You can have a suspect, but you're creating your lineup
based on what the what the witness has described the perpetrator.
Speaker 4 (38:30):
To look like, and then just throw the suspect in there, right.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Which can be bad for the suspect because if the suspect,
the person you actually think did it, doesn't look anything
like the eyewitness said. There's going to be four redheads
and the one blonde guy who's actually the suspect, and
he's going to stand out like a sore throum. 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, yeah the eyewitness described,
(38:55):
or all like the suspect that you've got, because you
don't want the suspect to stand out. And there's a
lot of techniques that they use to try to make
everybody look the same.
Speaker 4 (39:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (39:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:10):
Put them in Yankees hats. Right, Just line up a
bunch of guys in Yankees right.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging
outside of the you know that room where they.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
Walk them into wasn' Kramer in a lineup when he
was a suspect, a totally serial killer suspect.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Yes, I don't remember it was a serial killer, but
I remember he was in the line I he kept
turning the wrong way.
Speaker 6 (39:31):
Yeah, I think he was misidentified on the when they
went to LA to pitch the TV show. Huh, Kramer
got caught up in some like serial killer things. I
think of that, and I think of the great lineup
scene in the Usual Suspects.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Let's address that real quick.
Speaker 6 (39:46):
When they have to say something so well, we can't
repeat it here because there's bad words.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Right. No, 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.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
And they're not dressed the same.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
Yeah, it's it's a total movie lineup.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
It would never happen. No, Or are you going to
say about them saying something.
Speaker 6 (40:08):
Well, they had to recite a line. I don't know
how typical that is, though.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Uh, you me.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
When she did her line up, she remembered what the
guy was saying.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
Oh, and they say that, okay, so that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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, and she's like, really, what
I want him to say? Yeah, he's like, no, you
have to say what they actually said.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Oh yeah, how did that result? Did she get the guy?
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Oh? She picked him out immediately? Oh okay, yeah, yeah,
I think I got busted.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Yeah, man, you don't mug you me. I'll tell you that, buddy.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
You hear that, purpose.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Right, you started quaking in your boots.
Speaker 6 (40:46):
The one thing too, that caught me, uh sort of
off guard, is that I never thought about is the uh,
the part about whether or not they're clean shaven, Like
there could be details of omission, Like if an eyewitness
doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they either were clean
shaven or not, then I think they default to something
(41:06):
that may not be accurate. And so all of a sudden,
your lineup, well, your lineup should have all clean shaven dudes.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
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 shaven.
Speaker 6 (41:23):
And they should all be clean shaven in a lineup,
because if you have five clean shaven guys in one
filler or one foil with a big beard like.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Me, right, I might get picked out just because I
look different.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
Right exactly?
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Or 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, right,
so I can put this clean shaven suspect in with
four other guys who all have beards and make them
stand out. That's the opposite. And apparently there was this
New York Times article from years back about a guy
named that dude, what was his.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Name, casting agent, basically Robert Weston.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Yeah, Robert or western It's it's a pretty interesting little article.
But in the article it says that the Bronx cops
that use this guy to help fill lineups, which we'll
talk about in a second, 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,
(42:22):
see how everybody else to wear in 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,
you know, and instead just keep it on the on
the level, at least as far as the Yankees hat
brooms go.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
I so want to be a filler.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
I'm sure you could do it. I want you just
have to hang around long enough until a dude who
looks like you commits a crime, which in Atlanta's a
lot of hipsters running around. For sure.
Speaker 4 (42:52):
I don't look like a hipster.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I don't know, I.
Speaker 4 (42:56):
Look like it the hipster gone bad.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Oh yeah, need enough to be h. You look like
a hit and run hipster.
Speaker 4 (43:02):
Hipsters are super well coffed and like squared away.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
Oh I know it to me, you know, Yeah, your
jeenes aren't pegged.
Speaker 4 (43:09):
No, I look like a hipster who slept in.
Speaker 6 (43:12):
So back to Robert Weston, this guy in New York
at the time, at least, 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.
Speaker 4 (43:28):
I'm 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 it's
going to say pay a little bit more, get a
casting agent in there, get.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Some of those college educated fillers in there, right.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
I guess.
Speaker 6 (43:43):
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 purp is.
Sometimes they get other cops that are busy to stand in.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Right, I mean, these are people need people will go
to a police station and stand in the lineup for
ten dollars.
Speaker 4 (44:07):
Right, They get paid as much as the guy who
organized the party.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Right, But if Robert Weston stands in himself, he'll get
an extra twenty bucks on top of putting the thing together.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Right.
Speaker 4 (44:16):
How many times he tries to do that.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
But he even said, like if they want white guys,
I don't know any white guys. So they go to
homeless shelters for that. And that's very much what cops do.
Cops will go find people on the street. They will
go to homeless shelters. They will have casting agents like
Robert Weston on their speed dial, and what they'll say is,
I've got a middle aged white guy with a graying
(44:43):
beard and he's about six feet tall. Give me four
other people that match that description, and ideally four other
people that match that description will show up, and not
three and then one another total outlier or something like that.
Speaker 6 (45:00):
One cop was complaining about his work. It was kind
of funny, right, complaining about Robert Wesson. He was like,
he didn't bring in good people. He always like right.
Speaker 4 (45:07):
Budges, the ages and the races and stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
But the reason why they keep using this guy is
because he answers his phone, 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 a suspect for so long without
charging 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 bringing one witness just to
(45:31):
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. Yeah,
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 bring them out. That is the
(45:52):
one where like, all the t should be crossed and
the eyes should be dotted, because a good court will
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 eyewitness testimony out.
Speaker 6 (46:09):
The worst possible version of all 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 apprehended. 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
(46:30):
a police car handcuffed. They'll bring the person who was
robbed or whatever they're to the scene. They'll yank him
out of the back of the car and say, is
this the dirt bag who did it?
Speaker 4 (46:41):
Like just one guy.
Speaker 6 (46:42):
Yeah, and that's clearly the worst possible version of.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
All of this.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
And the guy's like, I need more pace, a pay,
I'm coming down. So one of the here's the reason
why that show up is so terrible, Chuck.
Speaker 4 (46:55):
Well, there's no other people that they're comparing them to.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
That's one. But they're also in handcuffs, in the back
of a cop car or something like that. They're in
place 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 is just a formality,
so I'll be like, yeah, sure, that was that person.
(47:17):
That's the first problem with it. The second problem is
is that from that point on, that person 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 holding the gun that they
were actually focused on, and from that moment on they
(47:39):
just get more and more certain that that was the
person because that person's not starring in their memories and
it's not just the problem with the show up, but
with any misidentification. When they see that person and that
person becomes seared in their brain, they're positive from that
point on and they can seem very confident in court,
which again he's buy even though it's garbage.
Speaker 4 (48:02):
Well, in weeks and months can go by, right 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 of all this.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
A lot of people say that, or at the very
least say this is eyewitness testimony. It's actually terrible testimony.
Actually it's terrible evidence.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
But let's do it anyway.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Right. But and if they did say that, if they
basically lowered what how much weight eyewitness testimony held in court,
then those cases that were built entirely on eyewitness testimony
wouldn't have a leg to stand on it. They have
to go build a bigger case.
Speaker 6 (48:44):
Yeah, But like in Yumi's case, it worked, it did. No,
it was like that guy might have walked, you know, right, That's.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
The problem is that, you know, if if twenty five
percent of the time is wrong, right, seventy five percent
of the time, is right, we think. So, I mean
it's not it's not like Arson investigation, which we're going
to do one on one day, Yeah, where it's just
totally made up. Like it does have some veracity, but
there's a lot of flaws with it, and.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
The lives are at stake though it's really dicey.
Speaker 1 (49:12):
They need to figure it out because of that. Yeah,
so they need to go do that now.
Speaker 6 (49:18):
I mean, can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified
and serving no, two decades in prison for something you
really didn't do?
Speaker 1 (49:27):
No, I really can't.
Speaker 6 (49:29):
I mean I remember how up said I got when
we did the Innocence Project. It's just, yeah, you hear
these stories and then they get out and they're like,
well here's here's four hundred thousand bucks.
Speaker 4 (49:37):
We feel pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Right, go get yourself something nice. Try to forget about
all this, right. Yeah, did you ever see that movie
An Innocent Man with Tom Selleck. It scared the Bejesus
out of me. The same thing happened to him when
he was when he was he was framed.
Speaker 4 (49:54):
Oh wait, that's high Road to China.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Oh right, I got my stuff? Makes it? No that's
down under that. Oh right, Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 4 (50:03):
Nope?
Speaker 3 (50:03):
All right, Well that's it for police.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Lineups for now. We'll do an update whenever they get
it figured out.
Speaker 4 (50:08):
We did one on police sketches, right, yeah, okay, is
this it?
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Are we done?
Speaker 4 (50:13):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:13):
We still got Arson investigation. We've got a lot all right, yeah, okay, okay.
If you want to know more about police lineups, then
I don't know, go hang around a police station. See
if you can stand in one learn firsthand.
Speaker 6 (50:28):
Okay, get a little sign that says I will be
your foil ten dollars.
Speaker 4 (50:33):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (50:33):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
And since I said ten dollars, it's time for listener.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
Now, I'm gonna call this youngest fan. This very cute email. Hey, guys,
love the podcast.
Speaker 6 (50:43):
You're doing it right, It's not this email is not
episode specific, but I had to tell you about this.
My husband and I welcomed our baby boy into the
world a couple of months ago. When I was pregnant,
we joked that the baby would think that one of
you was his dad because he heard your voices so often.
That's a very funny joke in a family, you know,
(51:06):
joke about the paternity of your child. 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.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
She was like, what's wrong with DOCN? Why isn't docin working.
Speaker 6 (51:23):
I couldn't get him to calm down with any of the
usual tricks, so I decided to heck with it. I'm
gonna put on the podcast, and I kid you not,
as soon as you guys started talking, he stopped crying.
My husband says it was coincidence. Jealous, I say, stuff,
you should know.
Speaker 4 (51:36):
Magic.
Speaker 6 (51:39):
Now we're back to always listening to you guys in
the car. You keep up the great work. And thanks
for soothing my baby boy. And that is from Sarah
Strantz and our youngest fan, Frank from beautiful Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email, Frank,
go to sleep quiet now.
Speaker 4 (51:56):
They named their baby after our chair?
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Pretty? Wouldn't that be amazing if they actually did it?
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Well? Now?
Speaker 1 (52:05):
And thank you also to unnamed husband for being a
good sport.
Speaker 4 (52:08):
Agreed.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
If you want to send us a great email about
how We're magic. 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 HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 5 (52:28):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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