Tim Valentine – Forensic Facial Identification (2015)

Автор: Tim Valentine
Название книги: Forensic Facial Identification (2015)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Судебная медицина
Страницы: 339
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Forensic Facial Identification discusses the latest scientific and technical advancements in the field and their implications for practice in psychology, criminology, and law.

Provides an up-to-date set of best practices for forensic facial identification
Reviews current procedures for different facial identification methods and their reliability
Covers eyewitness testimony, line-ups, facial composites, anthropological face reconstructions, CCTV images, and computerized automatic face recognition systems
Incorporates case studies which put the latest research and technology in the proper legal context

The criminal justice system involves a pantheon of values, and it is not
always easy to figure out the best course of action when one of those
values appears to clash with another. And so it is the case with our
value about avoiding the wrongful prosecution of innocent people and
our value about ensuring the correct prosecution of guilty people.
Forensic Facial Identification is a superb edited volume whose contributors
collectively worry about both of these values, how to balance
them, and how scientific evidence on facial identification can help us
think about the legal structures that should exist in a world that has a
good balance.
Forensic Facial Identification is primarily about the problem of distinguishing
accurate eyewitness testimony from mistaken testimony.
It is broader than most books on eyewitness testimony in that it concerns
not only identification of eyewitnesses who might have actually
seen the robbery, or been a victim of the rape, but also the identification
of perpetrators from closed‐circuit television images, as is becoming
increasingly common with the proliferation of cameras throughout our
society. And it also concerns the identification of deceased individuals
by reconstructions of their faces as they appeared in real life, as happened,
for example, when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed.
How do you think we know for sure that the man who was shot and
killed on May 2, 2011, inside a private residential compound in Pakistan
was really the Saudi Arabian bin Laden? The introductory chapter
does a splendid job of briefly reviewing these topics – and ones not
mentioned – that readers will find in each chapter so there is no need
to repeat this review here.
Forensic Facial Identification is broader than most books on eyewitness
testimony in other ways. Each chapter begins with a specific case that is used by the chapter authors to guide discussion. The cases, and
discussions, cover many regions of the world, mostly the UK and US,
but also Australia and New Zealand in particular. The cases are sometimes
famous, as is that of the murder of the foreign minister Anna
Lindh in Sweden in 2003, and sometimes not famous, as in the case of
a fast food worker in Manchester, UK, who was accused of rapes in
2009 and 2010. The cases are historical, as in the case of Adolf Beck
who was convicted in 1896 in London for defrauding women. Most are
more modern, as in the numerous cases of wrongful conviction uncovered
by the New York‐based Innocence Project.
One case that is mentioned frequently (in several chapters) is a
recent case that was decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court (State v.
Henderson). Since the present authors did not go into much detail
about this case, and it has been so significant in the US, I thought I
would use my “forward platform” to say a bit more about it. In that
murder case, the defendant Larry Henderson was accused of being
involved in a shooting in an apartment in Camden, New Jersey. About
two weeks after the murder, a surviving witness who had been in the
apartment identified Henderson from a set of photos. A subsequent
identification at trial resulted in Henderson’s conviction. It might seem
like an open and shut case, but actually there were serious problems
with the initial identification. It turns out that the witness only picked
Henderson’s photo after the investigating officers put on some “pressure”
and did some “nudging”, as the behaviour of those officers would
later be characterized. More specifically, it appears that when the key
witness first looked at the photos, he did not see anyone he recognized.
He finally narrowed things down to two photos but was indecisive.
Pressure and nudging cracked the indecisiveness. On top of this, it
turned out that the witness himself had, during the day and just prior
to the shooting, consumed large amounts of alcohol and crack cocaine.
Henderson appealed his conviction, and when that appeal was heard
by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 2011, the criminal justice world
paid attention. That decision showed a deep appreciation of the eyewitness
problems in the case and a sophisticated appreciation of the science
of eyewitness testimony, and the ruling rather dramatically
changed the legal standard for how eyewitness evidence is assessed in
a criminal case.
What now happens in New Jersey is this. A defendant who can show
some evidence of suggestive influences on witness testimony is entitled
to a court hearing in which all the psychological factors bearing on the
testimony are reviewed and analysed. After this scrutiny, if the judge
still decides to admit the testimony at trial, then the judge must also
provide to the jury a set of instructions that can guide them on how to think about the eyewitness evidence. Over the next year or so, those
instructions were crafted by a committee, which produced a 26‐page
document that can be found on the internet at: www.judiciary.state.nj.
us/criminal/ModelCrimJuryChargeCommHENDERSONREPORT.pdf
Curious as to what happened to Henderson after his successful
appeal, psychology professor John Wixted found a prosecutor who gave
him an update. According to this source, another hearing was held in
which it was determined that proper procedure had been followed during
Henderson’s initial trial, which meant that his original guilty verdict
was upheld. Of course the procedure might have been “proper”
during the trial, but that does not mean that the early identification
“activities” shouldn’t make us suspicious about whether the identification
of Henderson was truly accurate. For now, we have to live with
that uncertainty.
The Henderson decision changed the way eyewitness evidence is handled
not only in cases where there are questions about the role of law
enforcement in producing an identification, but in cases where law
enforcement played little or no role. There was a companion case to
Henderson that has not received nearly the same attention, but is
important because it extends these safeguarding procedures to a wide
array of cases. The companion case (New Jersey v. Chen) involved some
titillating facts. One Sunday in 2005, Mr Kim got a phone call from his
ex‐girlfriend, Cecilia Chen, the first such call since they had ended their
relationship in 2000. Kim told Chen he was happily married and expecting
a child; Chen told Kim she was not doing well and wondered about
what would have happened had they not broken up. Three days later,
Kim’s wife Helen was home alone, five months pregnant, and recovering
from surgery. A woman came to the Kim home, said her car had broken
down and she needed to use the bathroom and phone. The intruder then
stabbed Helen with a kitchen knife. Soon thereafter, in discussions with
his wife, Kim thought the intruder might be Chen. They accessed Chen’s
website and looked at photos of her, and Helen became “ninety percent
positive” after viewing one particular photo. So we have a case in which
key aspects of the identification process were independent of any law
enforcement, but nonetheless rather suggestive. Cases with such facts
would also, after Henderson, be entitled to the same legal safeguards,
namely the hearing and the judicial warnings.
The policy innovations resulting from the Henderson case will hopefully
reduce the likelihood of mistaken identification and wrongful conviction
that can result. It remains to be seen whether subsequent
research confirms the effectiveness of this bold direction.
Forensic Facial Identification not only presents the basic science in
each chapter, but also discusses other policy recommendations. There are recommendations concerning the procedures used to obtain an
identification in the first place, such as double‐blind testing. There are
recommendations concerning the interviewing process, such as taking
steps to avoid allowing errors to creep into the early descriptions of
witnesses. There are recommendations about the use of composites,
mugshot searches, showups, and street identifications, face matching
and more. Collectively these authors express their appreciation of procedures
that will provide some protection for a suspect who is innocent.
But what about catching the guilty? Sadly, some of the reforms may
come with a cost, because they reduce correct identifications. So what
to do? The editors of Forensic Facial Identification came to a resolution
that I very much appreciated: (spoiler alert; skip if you don’t want to
know yet)
…the potential disadvantage from adopting these recommendations
is no reason to abandon the more important duty to avoid
wrongfully prosecuting innocent suspects. Indeed a mistaken identification
may result in an investigation being terminated because an
innocent person has been charged, leaving the guilty free to commit
further offences. The justice obtained from maximizing the rate of
suspect identifications from unfair procedures would give a false
sense of security.
Forensic Facial Identification should be applauded for its heroic
efforts to offer society a true sense of security. Hopefully its messages
will be read by many who care about fairness, and how psychological
science can help us achieve it.