LYIN' EYES :

True Confessions : Two simple measures could go a long way toward ensuring that findings of criminal guilt are genuine (Margaret Talbot, July/August 2002, The Atlantic Monthly)

Experts have come up with two very good ideas for making wrongful convictions less likely. One is to improve the standard police lineup by letting witnesses see only one purported suspect at a time, so that they can make an absolute judgment about each one. When witnesses see six people at once, they make relative judgments, comparing the six and picking whoever looks most like the person they remember from the crime scene, rather than evaluating each individually. Conducting lineups sequentially seems like a minor change, but research by Wells and others has shown that it reduces the number of mistaken identifications-by as much as one half-without significantly reducing the number of correct ones. Ensuring that the detective running the lineup does not know who the real suspect is, and so does not make leading comments (Don't you want to look at number three again?), helps too, for the same reason that good clinical research is double-blind: otherwise it's easy to contaminate the results with intentional or unintentional bias.

The second proposal is to videotape all police interrogations, so that a reliable record exists of the questioning that produced a confession-how leading, how coercive, how open-ended-and of the suspect's comportment during it.

Several years ago George Will wrote a column, Innocent on Death Row (George F. Will, April 6, 2000, Washington Post), and made an argument that it seems to us that death penalty supporters have a particular obligation to take seriously : that the criminal justice system, which is after all just another governmental operation, must routinely make mistakes and we must therefore approach with trepidation the idea of taking lives based on its verdicts. This is not necessarily to say that the death penalty may never be warranted nor that we can never be confident that the person we're executing is guilty, but it is to say that we, conservatives in particular, have a heightened duty to try to maximize the certainty of findings of guilt.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 17, 2002 9:42 PM