Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

suggestive as to render the identification unreliable

and therefore a violation of due process. However,

such a determination must be considered “on the

totality of the circumstances.” For example, in Stovall

v. Denno(1967), the identification procedure did not

violate due process because the victim’s critical med-

ical condition justified the hospital room showup and

the victim subsequently identified the defendant at

trial. In another case, the totality of the circumstances

analysis indicated that due process was violated

because the witness was not able to definitively iden-

tify the defendant during either a suggestive lineup or

a showup. In that case, it was only after the third

exposure to the defendant that the witness produced a

confident identification.

Using the criteria described above, the Court (with

five justices in the majority) concluded that the

showup procedure was not unnecessarily suggestive.

First, the victim had ample opportunity to view her

attacker, both “under adequate artificial light...and

under a full moon outdoors.” Second, the witness was

“no casual observer,” suggesting that she had paid

close attention to the culprit’s face during the assault.

Third, her description was “more than ordinarily thor-

ough,” including mention of the assailant’s height,

age, skin tone, and voice. Fourth, she displayed a high

level of certainty in her identification, saying “I don’t

think I could ever forget [that face].” Finally, although

7 months had passed between the crime and the iden-

tification of Biggers, the Court reasoned that because

the victim never made any other identifications, in

spite of many opportunities to do so, “her record for

reliability was thus a good one, as she had previously

resisted whatever suggestiveness inheres in a

showup.” Therefore, according to the totality of the

circumstances analysis, reports on the criteria were

acceptable, suggesting that the witness’s identification

was accurate in spite of the suggestive procedure used

to obtain it. The recommendations articulated in

Biggers were upheld in Manson v. Brathwaite(1977);

the Court has not revisited recommendations for eval-

uating eyewitnesses since 1977.

At the time these recommendations were issued, the

field of psychology and law was in a nascent stage; the

flagship journal of the field, Law and Human

Behavior,had not yet been established. Therefore, the

justices relied on intuition rather than empirical evi-

dence when designing a set of criteria. Although the

criteria are intuitively appealing, several significant

problems exist.

Certainty, View, and Attention:

Subjective Criteria

Three of the five Biggerscriteria—certainty, view, and

attention—are subjective reports produced by the eye-

witness, the very person whose accuracy is at issue in

a criminal trial. The most problematic of these is

undeniably witnesses’ certainty. Perceivers naturally

assume that a confident witness is an accurate one.

This belief is well-founded under certain circum-

stances. When witnessing conditions vary widely,

there is a strong relationship between confidence and

accuracy: Witnesses who had a poor view are less con-

fident than witnesses who had a good view. However,

the integrity of the relationship between confidence

and accuracy is easily compromised. For example,

information suggesting that a co-witness identified the

same person inflates certainty, as does identifying the

person believed to be the culprit by the photo-spread

administrator. The details of the Court’s certainty rec-

ommendation suggest that there may have been some

awareness that confidence is malleable. The critical

confidence report, from the Court’s perspective, was

certainty “at the time of the confrontation,” not confi-

dence at the time of the in-court identification. It is

possible that the Court’s specification derived from an

awareness that subsequent reports were vulnerable to

influence by external variables.

Unfortunately, the Court’s stipulation that certainty

at the time of the identification is the relevant report

does not ensure that this reported certainty provides

useful information about accuracy. Indeed, simple

manipulations can dramatically distort witnesses’

memories of how certain they were at the time of their

identification. A recent meta-analysis summarized the

results of 20 experimental tests with more than 2,400

participants. Witnesses who were told that their iden-

tification was correct (i.e., “Good, you identified the

suspect”) reported recalling greater certainty in their

identification than did witnesses who were told noth-

ing about the accuracy of their identification. This

inflation is especially troubling because in the original

experiments, witnesses made identifications from tar-

get-absent photo spreads, meaning that their inflated

confidence accompanied an incorrect identification.

More troubling, this simple manipulation also dis-

torted reports on the two other subjective criteria.

Eyewitnesses who heard that their identification was

correct reported better views and paying more atten-

tion compared with witnesses who heard nothing

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