Sequential Line Ups as Employed by Security Enforcement - Essay Sample

Introduction

Law requirement depicts the entire procedure where people and offices are in charge of upholding laws and keeping order and open security in a community. This usually is achieved through identification of lawbreakers and reforming them accordingly or charging them with their specific offense. For the police and related security enforcement firms, the simultaneous line-up has been extensively deployed across various states.in mine, it is a common practice. The simultaneous line-up revolves around identification of a person who committed the crime by either parading a couple of suspects thought to be guilty of an offense or fishing out the main suspect. Elsewhere, pictorial representations of a bunch of suspects may also be used. Here, pictures of various suspects in a case may be displayed to an individual helping in solving a crime, in a bid to pick out the main culprit from the ones represented through the photos. \

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The line-ups can further be divided into two; either the sequential line-ups or the simultaneous lineups. For the case of the simultaneous lineups, witnesses helping in solving a crime are usually advised to employ relative judgment on what transpired, as they identify the culprit. However, for the sequential line-ups, witnesses are usually compelled to adopt absolute judgment while picking out an offender from those arraigned.

Somehow, law enforcement agencies have been notably slow to adopt the sequential line-up procedure. This is mostly attributed to the fact that sequential line-ups have not been totally effective in suspect identification as such. The number of true and otherwise false identifications compare in almost a similar manner. Various research case studies have also shown that sequential line-ups ultimately vary as a subject of the methodology used in the identification. The information obtained due has been thought to be scanty and insufficient at times to be used in a court of law when presenting incriminating evidence to help put the suspects in rehabilitation. This can partially be attributed to the fact that most eyewitnesses called upon for identification usually fail to exercise the ultimate mental judgment required in the identification. Notably, this alludes to the fact that the image is only in their memory thus only they can be certain on whether the criteria they pick upon to make a sound judgment on the suspects is worth banking on. Also, in some instances, the physicality traits of the suspects may turn out to be similar hence creating more uncertainties. Cost employed in maintaining photographic data is otherwise costly.

Further parameters involved in identification have also been to blame for the inefficiency as associated due. This is as outlined. First, the presence of various weapons used in the violence in the investigation room may intimidate the witness. Witnesses may see a weapon that may trigger further thought and as such distracting them from the ultimate process of identification. Secondly, differences and similarities alike for traits such as race, age, and ethnicity for the witnesses may hinder identification of the suspect as required. This is to say that in any given line up where the suspect involved is present and arraigned, irrespective of all of the witness traits quoted above, witnesses usually identify the offender with ease. However, should there exist a situation where the actual crime offender is not in the line-up as arraigned, various witnesses struggle to identify the suspect, in any case, they become even more mixed up. Thirdly, the instructions pre-given on the criteria of suspect identification may also confuse witnesses hence hindering progress made in the investigation. This will mostly be noted by instructions which insinuate that there exist half chances for the suspect presence on the line-up. This increases the heights of cases of mistaken identity as attributed to witnesses confusion. Lastly, physical fillers may result in a suspect standing out from the rest hence impairing the judgment of witnesses in selection.

Hence, as outlined, sequential line-ups can't be counted on ultimately.

References

Carlson, C. A., Gronlund, S. D., and Clark, S. E. (2008). "Line up composition, suspect position, and the sequential lineup advantage" Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, 14, 118-128.

Haw, R.M. and Fisher, R.P. (2004) "Effects of Administrator-Witness Contact on Eyewitness Identification Accuracy," Journal of Applied Psychology, 89 (6). 1106-1112.

Klobuchar, A., N. Steblay, and H.L. Caligiuri, "Improving Eyewitness Identifications: Hennepin in County's Blind Sequential Line up Pilot Project," Cardozo Public Law, Policy, and Ethics Journal (2006).

Steblay, N., Observations on the Illinois Line up Data, May 3, 2006, available at http://web.augsburg.edu/~steblay/ Observations On The Illinois Data pdf (accessed April13, 2019).