Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contact details:
Professor G. M. Davies
School of Psychology
Henry Wellcome Building
University of Leicester
Lancaster Road
Leicester LE1 9HN
United Kingdom
Abstract
and describes some illustrative cases of persons innocent of the crime, but who were
nevertheless convicted on the basis of honest but mistaken identification. The review
demonstrates that despite changes to procedure instituted by the Devlin Report in 1976
and developments in the use of video parades as an alternative to the traditional live
parade, miscarriages of justice still occur. The authors argue that, in the light of
developments in CCTV and DNA profiling and of what is now known about the inherent
According to Devlin (1976), the first recorded use of an identification parade in England
was by the London Metropolitan Police in 1860. Police forces the world over use such
parades(or ‘line-ups’ as they are termed in the United States) as a means of establishing
whether a suspect held by the police is in fact the person an eyewitness saw at the scene
advantages over such suggestive procedures as confrontation (The witness is shown the
suspect and asked ‘Is this the man that you saw?’) or dock identification (The witness is
called upon to confirm at trial that the person they saw in connection with the crime is the
person standing in the dock) (Rust & Tredoux, 1997). However, proof of guilt based
purely on the basis of a positive identification at a parade has led to many miscarriages of
sufficient to prove a case against an accused, such problems seem likely to persist
(Thomson. 1995). This paper surveys the history of identification procedures in England
and Wales and some of the celebrated cases of mistaken identification which have
resulted from their use (or misuse). It divides that history into three phases: from the
dawn of the Twentieth Century until the landmark Devlin Report in 1976; the Devlin
Report and its immediate aftermath, and post-Devlin until today. It considers the
whether the identification process can ever be entirely immune from the inherent
psychological fallibility of human perception and memory and whether the time has now
Identification Pre-Devlin
When the Metropolitan Police introduced formal identification parades, they also
produced a series of guidelines designed to ensure that they were fair to the accused and
the witness (Devlin, 1976). However, this simple guidance was insufficient to save
Adolph Beck from twice being found guilty on the basis of identification evidence alone
for crimes he did not commit. In 1895, Beck was first convicted for a series of confidence
of the con-man’s victims. Beck served six years in prison before being released in 1901,
only to be convicted once more in 1904 for a new series of the same audacious frauds,
where again, the only evidence against him were positive identifications, this time by
four more victims. Despite his denials, Beck was found guilty by a jury and only the
timely deferral of sentence by a sceptical judge prevented a further long prison term. In
the interim, the real fraudster, Wilhelm Meyer, was arrested in the act of pawning some
of the proceeds of his crimes. Beck was pardoned and awarded compensation and a Court
of Enquiry set up to investigate the causes of these twin miscarriages of justice (Watson,
1924).
The Enquiry noted that Beck and Meyer bore only a passing resemblance to each other,
but that the persons who stood on the parade with Beck (the foils) were haphazardly
recruited from passers-by and all were younger than Beck. Only one had a moustache
which had figured prominently in the original descriptions of the suspect. The Enquiry
concluded that:
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“Evidence as to identity based upon personal impressions, however bona fide, is perhaps
of all classes of evidence the least to be relied upon, and therefore, unless supported by
the facts, an unsafe basis for the verdict of a jury” (Watson, 1924, p. 250).
The major legal consequence of the Enquiry was the establishment of the Court of
Criminal Appeal but the law on identification was not changed. The Metropolitan Police
guidelines were slightly revised, but their status remained advisory rather than mandatory
In 1925, a further circular was issued to all forces regarding the conduct of parades. It is
noteworthy that many of the precautions which would now be regarded as essential to a
fair parade were already in place in England by this date. They included that an officer,
other than the investigating officer, should be in charge of the parade; that witnesses
should not be shown photographs or descriptions of the suspect prior to the parade; that
the suspect should be placed as far as possible among persons of similar height, age and
general appearance and that a full record of every circumstance at the parade should be
made, irrespective of the outcome (see appendix 6, Report of the Royal Commission on
Police Powers and Procedure, 1929). However, the mere existence of this new guidance
was insufficient to prevent a further case of mistaken identity, this time involving a Major
Sheppard, a military officer of impeccable rectitude, who was accused of stealing money
Again, the only evidence against Major Sheppard was of identification: by the robbed
woman herself and the hall porter of the block of flats from which she operated. Like
Beck, Sheppard was arrested after being accosted and accused in the street by the
outraged victim. Like Beck, the identification parade left much to be desired in terms of
composition. Major Sheppard reported that the members of the parade had been hastily
assembled from passers-by and that “None looked the least like an army officer and four
of them were wearing chokers [high neckties then favoured by members of the working
class]” (Rolph. 1957, p. 37). While the hall porter also eventually identified Major
Sheppard as the ‘Major Trevor’ who had carried out the theft, an alert detective,
dissatisfied with this tentative identification, discovered and arrested the real ‘Major
A further Court of Enquiry was set up under J.F.P. Rawlinson which confirmed the
haphazard way the parade was assembled and conducted and his report emphasised the
importance of ensuring foils were of similar appearance and recommended that suspects
should have the right to legal representation at a parade (Rawlinson, 1925). The
guidelines were further revised and it seems likely that it was at this time that ‘standards
of dress and grooming’ was added to the list of criteria to consider in selecting foils
(Shepherd et al., 1982). The Rawlinson Report was also considered by the Royal
Commission on Police Powers and Procedures in 1929 who commented that “At best,
identification parades are rough and ready tests, but on this account the accused should
only be identified when the recollection of his appearance is clear and sharp” (Report of
the Royal Commission Report, p. 26). The Commission’s report is also notable for
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anticipating several of the issues currently under debate today. They were alert to the
possibility of identification through elimination: there is a danger that the witness will
pick “not the accused person, but the person in the parade who most resembles their
recollection of the culprit, disregarding apparently the alternative that he may not be
present at all” (Royal Commission Report, pp. 46-47). The Commission’s remedy was to
propose experiments on what are now termed ‘blank parades’-where the witness is
required to inspect two parades and the accused only appears in one-to test for a readiness
to chose purely on the basis of resemblance. However, this recommendation was not
taken up and the legal status of identification evidence as proof of guilt remained
The revised 1925 Guidelines remained in force for more than 40 years but that did not
still concerns over cases based on identification evidence alone. In 1961, the Lord Chief
Justice drew the attention of his fellow judges to the need for vigilance in cases involving
critique of the contemporary law and procedure on identification which called for reform,
though not for the outright abolition of conviction by identification alone (Williams &
Hammelman, 1963). Public concern over mistaken identification was aroused once more
by the case of James Hanratty who was hung for the murder of Michael Gregson in 1961
(Foot, 1971). A key element of the prosecution case was the identification of Hanratty by
Valerie Storie who had spent some time in the company of the murderer as he drove
around in Gregson’s car and who herself had been badly wounded in the fusillade of
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shots which killed Gregson. Questions were raised as to the fairness of the parade and in
particular the request instigated by Miss Storey for each member of the parade to speak a
key phrase she recalled her assailant saying in a cockney accent. Hanratty was certainly a
Londoner, but may have been the only one on the parade, as the volunteer foils were all
servicemen drawn from a military camp well outside London (Foot, 1971).
Faced with continuing concern, the Home Office revised its Code of Practice on
Identification again in 1969, a feature of which was to emphasise further the dangers of
identification following the viewing of photographs of the accused, but the new
guidelines did not entirely rule out the practice. The repeated showing of photographs
was a key feature in yet another misidentification case in which George Ince narrowly
escaped the gallows in 1973 for a murder he did not commit (Cole & Pringle, 1974). It
was against this background that in 1974, the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins,
appointed a leading High Court Judge, Lord Devlin, to review the law and procedure in
Lord Devlin in his report (Devlin, 1976) reviewed not only high profile cases such as that
of Ince but produced some much-needed statistics on the scope of the problem of
mistaken identity. Devlin reported that since 1945, there had been some 38 cases of
verified mistaken identity in England and Wales. This was almost certainly an
underestimate, in that this figure included only cases where a conviction had been
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quashed and a free pardon awarded; there would be many more cases of disputed or
doubtful identifications, but where legal action to overturn the original conviction was
not successful. In 1973-74, for instance, Devlin reported that the Court of Criminal
Appeal heard some 67 cases involving identification evidence of which nearly half (48%)
were allowed, including five involving more than one witness. The Devlin Report dealt at
length with one such case, that of a Hungarian émigré, Lazlo Virag.
Virag was charged in 1969 with attempted murder, using a firearm to resist arrest and
theft from parking meters in Liverpool and Bristol. The prosecution case against him
rested solely on eight positive identifications, five from police officers and three from
members of the public who had been involved in a chase after the Bristol crimes. One of
the police officers, who had been wounded in the chase told the court ‘His face is
imprinted on my brain”. Virag offered an alibi defence, but none of his witnesses from
the émigré community turned up to support him at trial. Virag was found guilty and
sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Two years later, police arrested George Payen for
an unrelated offence. In his flat they discovered the gun which had fired the shots in the
chase and fingerprints which were matched to the Liverpool and Bristol offences. Payen
himself refused to directly admit his guilt, but confirmed that Virag was not involved. In
1974, Virag was pardoned and released and awarded compensation for wrongful
conviction. As in the Beck case, Virag and Payen bore little obvious physical resemblance
to each other, apart from being both of Middle European origin. Unlike the Beck case, the
prevailing guidelines (Shepherd et al., 1982), but all the civilian witnesses who had
identified Virag had been shown photographs of him prior to the parade.
Devlin’s recommendations
“We are satisfied that in cases which depend wholly or mainly on eye-witness evidence of
identification, there is a special risk if wrong conviction. It arises because the value of
such evidence is exceptionally difficult to assess; the witness who has sincerely convinced
himself and whose sincerity carries conviction is not infrequently mistaken. We have
found no forensically practical way of detecting this sort of mistake.” (Devlin, 1976.
p.149).
In preparing his report, Devlin had also taken evidence from psychologists as well as
lawyers. He had been sufficiently impressed with their science to add this rider:
directed to establishing ways in which the insights of psychology can be brought to bear
on the conduct of identification parades and the practice of the courts” (Devlin, 1976.
p.149).
Devlin also proposed a further overhaul of the Guidelines for the conduct of
explicitly mention the possibility that the suspect was not on the parade and that they
should only identify someone if they were confident that they were present on the parade-
photographic record of a parade and making this available to the court and giving the
Guidelines statutory status - were not implemented until 1984 and one - making the initial
description provided by the witness available to the Defence at trial-did not become law
until 1995.
There was a similar reluctance by the courts to implement Devlin’s most radical
circumstances. This was not implemented. Instead, the Court of Appeal, in a series of
Guidelines’ (R v Turnbull and others, 1976). The Court sought to make a distinction
between what they termed ‘good’ and ‘poor’ quality identifications. A ‘good’ quality
identifications was represented by a case where the witness had a prolonged opportunity
to view the suspect (a kidnapping where the victim spent some time with the kidnapper,
who made no effort to disguise their appearance was offered as an example), while a
‘poor’ quality identification might be based on a fleeting glimpse lasting just a few
seconds, such as a witness might gain of robbers fleeing from a bank raid. In the absence
quality identifications, but conviction would be upheld in cases in cases involving good
quality identifications. In all instances, judges, in their summing up should warn juries of
single witness. Judges should also systematically rehearse with juries the key
suspect from the witness- before sending them out to consider their verdict.
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England and Wales right up to the present day. Devlin was disappointed in the reaction of
the judiciary to his more radical proposal to all but abolish identification-only cases and
suggested that the attempt to distinguish reliable from unreliable identifications would
not stem the tide of miscarriages of justice (Devlin, 1982). Devlin’s prophecy has been
amply fulfilled in the intervening years and psychologists have played a significant role
Some of the cases involving disputed identification have arisen through the failure of
judges to apply the Turnbull ruling appropriately in their summing up. One such was the
case of John Thomas O’Neill in 1986. A man with Manchunian accent robbed a shop at
gunpoint and O’Neill was put on a parade at which he was identified by one of four
witnesses who inspected the parade. There was no other evidence other than the accent
to link O’Neill to the crime. O’Neill’s conviction was reversed on appeal, the judges
noting the paucity of other evidence supporting his conviction and the failure of the judge
to give due weight to the Turnbull cautions in his summing up. In 1991, Steven Davis
was convicted of armed robbery, the principal evidence against him again being that of
identification. A heavily disguised gunman had robbed a jeweller who later selected
Davis from a parade, although two other witnesses who had seen the robber leaving the
shop without disguise failed to select him. Indeed, one of these witnesses said that the
person that they saw was not on the parade. The judge in his closing address to the jury
13
failed to give the appropriate Turnbull warning until prompted by the Defence. The judge
then quickly read aloud the relevant passage from a standard legal text before adding that
he expected the jury as good citizens to exercise their common sense and bring in the
correct verdict. The conviction was subsequently reversed on appeal because of the
Judge’s misdirection (Davies, 1996). In both these cases, the first author wrote reports for
the Defence at Appeal. As is the practice in the United Kingdom, identification matters
are regarded as knowledge within the province of the jury and the possibility of a
However, such reports are seen and read by judges and it is evident from written verdicts
The examples offered by the Turnbull judgement of good and poor quality identifications
left ample latitude between the two extremes cited for individual prosecutors and judges
to exercise their idiosyncratic judgement. In 1981, John McGranaghan was given two life
terms for a series of three prolonged and aggravated sexual assaults which had taken
place at night in the victims’ own bedrooms. No forensic or other evidence linked
McGranaghan to the crimes, but all three victims had picked him out at identification
parades with varying degrees of certainty. The parades had taken place between eight
months and two and a half years after the assault and all the victims admitted only having
had the briefest of glimpses of the offender who had gone to some lengths to avoid being
14
seen by his victims. The judge’s summing up was fully in accord with the Turnbull
requirements and emphasised the fleeting nature of the identifications, but the jury still
convicted. Some 10 years later, following a sustained campaign to which again, the first
author contributed an analysis of the identification evidence, the conviction was officially
evidence which exonerated MacGranaghan, who was released and officially compensated
poor quality identification in Turnbull terms appears not to have been exceptional. A
review of a large sample of identification parades by Slater (1994) found that % involved
witnesses who claimed to have seen the suspect for 1 minute or less. Research with
actual witnesses shows that rates of positive identification are significantly affected by
exposure time (Valentine, Pickering & Darling, 2003), but the Turnbull criteria do not
With the possible exception of the O’Neill case, all these cases might claim to have
the corroboration was frequently very weak and without the identification evidence could
not have been regarded as strong evidence against the accused. For instance, in
MacGranaghan’s case, it amounted to his car being seen in the general area at the time of
one of the assaults; in Davis’s case, it was an alleged slip of the tongue which was
interpreted as incriminating.
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The same concern over strength of ‘corroborating’ evidence was raised in relation to the
conviction of Barry George for the murder of the television personality Jill Dando in
1999. George, unemployed and learning disabled, lived in the vicinity of Ms Dando and
was a familiar figure in the neighbourhood. Her death bore all the hallmarks of an
professional execution and police announced they were searching for such a killer. When
a composite was issued by the police in their increasingly desperate search for the
murderer, a number of names were suggested by members of the public including Barry
George. However, the police considered him a low priority suspect and was eventually
arrested and put on a parade a month later. He was seen, either in a conventional parade
after the murder. Only one witness (at a video parade, held after 17 months), positively
identified George as the man she had seen for six seconds (her own estimate) in the street
some hours before the murder. This witness was given a lift home by the police together
with two female witnesses who had failed to make an identification. In conversation, she
mentioned that she had selected the suspect and had been asked to make a statement by
However, the only two witnesses who had actually seen the murderer leave Ms Dando’s
house failed to identify George and another witness, a postman who had subsequently
met George, stated that he was uncertain whether he was the same man he had seen on
George was interviewed by the police and disclaimed all knowledge of, and interest in,
Ms Dando (though newspaper cuttings found at his flat suggested otherwise). There was
16
some evidence that he had sought to create a false alibi for the time of the shooting. In
addition, police recovered a coat from his flat, in the inside pocket of which was
recovered from the scene of the crime. The prosecution relied on this forensic evidence,
evidence of his dishonesty and the identifications, at his trial in 2001. However, the
identification evidence was central to their case (Valentine, in press). Controversially, the
majority verdict (Lomax, 2005). Two appeals followed and at the second in 2007, which
focussed on the evidential weight to be attached to the firearms residue, George’s appeal
was allowed and there will be a fresh trial, where, no doubt, the issues around the
The identification procedures used in the Barry George case featured both live and video
parades. The use of video as a substitute for a live parade had first been permitted in the
revision of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in 1991 (Home Office, 1991),
but it was not until 2002 that their use became commonplace among British police forces.
By the time PACE was revised again in 2004 (Home Office, 2004), video parades had
become the preferred method of establishing identification in England and Wales. Today
live parades are virtually extinct in the United Kingdom (Valentine, in press). From the
perspective of the Home Office, video offered significant savings in terms of costs and
personnel. Between 1990 and 1992, the number of live parades conducted in England and
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Wales rose almost three times to 6,853 per annum (Slater, 1994); almost half of all live
parades had to be cancelled at short notice due to the absence of suitable foils or the
suspect not attending (Pike, Brace & Kynan, 2002). For the police, video parades had the
advantage of being highly portable and replicable: they could be taken to a victim’s
presence of their legal representative). From the perspective of the victim, a video parade
could be assembled much more rapidly and could provide a less threatening test for the
witness than being physically in the presence of the accused (Valentine, in press). But
The procedure used in video parades involves the accused first making a 15 s video clip.
The accused is videoed in a head and shoulders shot, first facing ahead and then turning
their head to give a left profile and then a right.. The video is then matched to eight foils
from a database of approximately 14, 000 video clips which are broadly representative in
terms of gender, ethnic background and physiognomy. The final selection of foils is
normally done in conjunction with the accused and/or their legal representative.
Distinctive facial deformities and scars can be added digitally to all photographs to
increase comparability. Witnesses are shown all nine foils (the accused may select their
position in the sequence) consecutively once through at their own pace and then again. It
is on this second viewing that witnesses need to indicate whether the accused is present
and if so, their position in the array. Thus, the video parade requires witnesses to make a
decision on each face shown, rather than a judgement from an array, avoiding the
Commission and more recently by Lindsay and Wells (1995) in their discussion of the
Psychologists were involved in the evaluation of the system at the pilot stage. Samples of
video parades and photographs of conventional parades derived from actual criminal
investigations were compared using a ‘mock witness’ paradigm: volunteers were given
the description of the suspect furnished by the real witness and asked if they could pick
out the accused purely on the basis of fit to description. Volunteers were able to select
25% of the suspects from the live parades purely on the description but only 15% from
the video parades, the latter result being no higher than would be expected by chance,
suggesting that video parades were fairer than traditional parades (Valentine and Heaton,
1999). Similar results suggesting that video parades are fairer to the accused have been
obtained when parades featuring exclusively suspects from the ethnic minorities have
been studied (Valentine, Harris, Colom, Piera & Darling, 2003). In addition, video
parades have the advantage that they can be run as a double-blind: the officer
administering the parade can be ignorant as to which clip features the accused, avoiding
any unconscious or conscious bias, though such a procedure is not yet mandatory under
There are some inevitable drawbacks with video parades. Witnesses viewing head and
shoulders shots are given few clues as to the height or build of an accused. In the Dando
case, the two witnesses who made retrospective identifications from video later claimed
they would have readily identified George from his build and general appearance. There
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is also a constant need to update the library of foils in order to keep pace with vagaries of
fashion. However, the rapid disappearance of the traditional parade is a tribute to the
A new dimension to the identification debate has been the growth in the use of Closed-
legitimately claim to be the world capital of CCTV, with an estimated 4.25 million
cameras installed across the country (Norris, McCahill & Woods, 2004). Most city
centres are covered by networks of cameras which feed into a central control room where
operators can detect street crime and monitor suspects. Links with the police enable
operators to summon officers to make arrests or deal with incidents. Public transport,
motorways and shopping arcades are routinely fitted with cameras which record in real
time. The movements of the offenders through cities in major crimes can be traced
facilitated tracking those responsible for the murder of James Bulger in February 1993
and the London bus and tube bombings of July 2005 and the retrieved images have
arise. When identification from surveillance footage was first used, it was not appreciated
by senior politicians in the Home Office that exactly the same issues of human frailty in
traditional identification procedures (Davies & Thasen, 2000). It took the tragic death of
Jean Charles De Menezes to illustrate the limitations as well as the advantages of video
as an identification aid.
Following the second and unsuccessful attempt to bomb the London bus and tube
network in July 2005, Metropolitan Police officers kept watch on a block of flats in
London where it was believed a suspect, Hussain Osman, was living. At around 9.30 in
the morning, an officer saw a man emerge from the house that he thought resembled a
still image of Osman, taken from CCTV footage. The officer believed it might be the
suspect and contacted his Operational Commander who ordered that the man should be
followed. The suspect’s erratic progress, going first to one Underground Station and then
another, getting off a bus and then back on again, further increased suspicion that the man
being followed was indeed Osman. When the suspect entered Stockwell Underground
Station, the surveillance team were ordered by their Operational Commander to prevent
him from boarding a train. At this point, a second armed surveillance team arrived post-
haste at the station and pursued the suspect down onto the platform where he had just
boarded a train. The officers too then jumped into the carriage and confronted the
innocent suspect, Jean Charles De Menezes, before shooting him dead in circumstances
As so often in cases of mistaken identity, the physical resemblance between Osman and
De Menezes was slight: De Menzes was Brazilian and Osman was of Ethiopian origin
21
and their facial features and build were very different. At a subsequent trial alleging a
Authority produced a striking composite which directly contrasted the two men’s half-
reported he had been unable to replicate this particular effect and thought it could only
have been achieved by digitally resizing and repositioning facial features ( “Menezes
picture ‘was manipulated’”, 2007). The Metropolitan Police were found guilty of failing
to protect the health and safety of Mr De Menezes and fined £175,000 plus costs. It was
earlier reported that the Police had offered the De Menezes family substantial
Even prior to the De Menezes tragedy, there was considerable psychological research
from video footage. Recognition of strangers from still photographs is surprising poor
and vulnerable to misleading contextual cueing (Thomson, 1988). Just how poor
Greenwood, Hancock, Burton & Miller (1999), who reported a 30% error rate when
participants were required to match a high quality video still of a male face to one of
array of nine high quality still photographs. This average performance concealed
widespread variations and individual faces generated up to 80% error rates. Similar rates
of error were demonstrated when matching was completed against a moving video of the
target (Davies & Thasen, 2000). These studies used high-quality video images; when
poorer images of the kind typically derived from working CCTV systems were employed,
22
considerably higher overall error rates were reported (Henderson, Bruce & Burton, 2001).
When participants were required to match a single image to a target in a task reminiscent
of that of the officer in the De Menezes’ case, 45% of participants believed two images of
the same person were different people (Henderson et al., 2001). An interesting paradox is
that when the observer is familiar with the appearance of the target, accuracy rates are
very high even with degraded recordings: 91% compared to just 55% when there is no
In ‘real world’ settings, there will be situations where the CCTV controller will be
familiar with the appearance of a suspect and the research by Burton et al suggests high
accuracy may be achieved, but in most instances, controllers will not know the suspect
(Valentine, 2008). Can technology, in the form of automatic facial recognition systems
solve the problem? Research suggests that such automatic systems can work well under
laboratory conditions, but performance with actual images taken from standard CCTV
footage is very much poorer (Davis, 2006). For the foreseeable future, most matches will
be achieved by the human operator comparing by eye a stored image with a still
photograph of the suspect, with all the attendant risks of false positive and false negative
Conclusions
This brief review of over a century of identification practice shows that despite
refinements which have removed most of the more obvious shortcomings of police
procedure, errors still occur. It seems that Devlin’s (1976) damning indictment of “the
23
special risks of wrong conviction” following identification still holds true. It would be
good to report that psychologists had discovered some clear correlate of witness
choices. However, attempts so far in laboratory experiments to use such factors as levels
Psychologists have examined data sets derived from police sources to try to establish
parades. Valentine, Pickering and Darling (2003) examined the choices made by 640
witnesses who attended 314 traditional parades held in London in 2000. The authors
examined what factors influenced the likelihood of a witness choosing the suspect.
Among the factors predicting witnesses who selected the suspect were seeing the suspect
for more than a minute; being less than 30 years of age, and making a rapid decision.
significantly effected by whether the offender had brandished a weapon (cf Maas &
Kohnken, 1989); was of a different race (cf Meissner & Brigham 2001 ), and
performance did not decline exponentially over time (cf Shepherd 1983). This underlines
the fact that, contrary to the laboratory research ethos with its emphasis upon the
determined multi-factorially, with one variable sometimes masking another: for instance,
the presence of a weapon may be associated with closer physical proximity between
Valentine et al (1983) report that overall, some 41% of witnesses selected the suspect,
21% selected a foil and the remaining 39% made no choice. These figures are very much
in line with earlier surveys in England (Slater 1994; Wright & McDaid, 1996), but in the
how many suspects were in fact offenders. On the basis of their figures, Valentine et al
estimate that between two and three percent of suspect selections are unreliable, which
even based on Slater’s figures for the total number of parades from 1994, gives a total of
over 200 false identifications per annum. Given that the number of parades will have
increased significantly since 1994, especially with the availability of video parades, this
suggests that the mistakes described in this paper may represent just the most visible
noted, in the absence of a reliable automated recognition system, the advent of CCTV
will simply replicate many of the problems of more traditional identification procedures.
However, the emergence of DNA profiling has revolutionised forensic identification and
the system has evolved to establish reliable data from smaller and smaller samples, such
that even the offender’s touch may be sufficient to leave identifiable residue ( Nardo,
2007). Indeed the arrival of DNA identification has enabled some miscarriages of justice
based on corporeal identification to be rectified. In the United States, of the first 200
wrongful convictions overturned by the Innocence Project (n.d.), more than 75%
involved cases where the principal evidence against the accused consisted of corporeal
25
identification, but the DNA evidence pointed to another person being responsible for the
and Wales is any less, given the progressive refinement and national application of
identification guidelines.
When Lord Devlin wrote his report in 1976, corporeal identification remained the norm
and the recent developments in CCTV and DNA profiling could not have been foreseen.
Perhaps now is the time to return to his original proposals and consider using
words of the 1929 Royal Commission, parades should be seen as a “rough and ready
method” for establishing a case against a suspect rather than final and convincing proof
of their guilt: the beginnings of an investigation rather than, as so often today, the
conclusion. Many of the victims of identity laws over the years would surely support this
view.
Postscript
On January 19, 2007, Sir Stephen Richards, the Lord Justice of Appeal, granted the
application which permitted the Metropolitan Police to be prosecuted under Health and
Safety legislation for the mistaken shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes. Two days later,
Sir Stephen was charged with two counts of indecent exposure on a suburban railway
train. Sir Stephen had been selected by the complainant from an identification parade. At
his trial, Sir Stephen insisted he was an unlikely suspect: he always travelled on the same
train, in the same coach, and was well-known to many of his fellow-passengers. He even
26
suffered the indignity of producing in open court his black Calvin Klein briefs which he
patiently explained, physically prevented him from exposing himself in the manner
described by the woman passenger. After hearing from the accused and his wife, the case
was stopped and Sir Stephen acquitted, yet another victim, it would seem, of mistaken
identity (Rozenberg, 2007). ‘History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the
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Author Note
This article is based on a paper read at the 30th International Conference of the Academy
of Law and Mental Health in Padua, Italy, June, 2007. The review of pre-Devlin
procedures is derived from a chapter written by the first author for Shepherd, Ellis and
Davies (1982) which also contains further detail on the cases cited. Address for
Wellcome Building, Lancaster Road, Leicester, LE1 9RH, United Kingdom; e-mail:
gmd@le.ac.uk