Innocence Project to grade Texas' lineup policies.

TX - The Innocence Project of Texas is preparing to grade about 1,200 law enforcement departments statewide on their compliance with a law that requires police agencies to adopt eyewitness identification policies.

“Unless somebody is really grading their papers, nobody knows whether the law is really being implemented,” said Scott Henson, a policy consultant for the Innocence Project.

Last year, Texas legislators approved a measure that required police agencies to adopt policies meant to prevent faulty eyewitness identification in criminal cases. Under the law, departments were required to adopt a written policy by Sept. 1. Last week, the Innocence Project sent the departments letters requesting copies of their lineup policies.

Faulty eyewitness identifications are the leading cause of wrongful convictions, according to the New York-based Innocence Project. In 297 DNA exonerations across the nation, the Innocence Project reported, mistaken identifications contributed to 75 percent of the wrongful convictions.

In 2008, the Justice Project, a criminal justice reform group, found that 88 percent of Texas police departments had no guidelines for conducting lineups. In 2011, state Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, and state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, wrote a bill that required departments to adopt best practices. Under the law, if a department doesn't adopt a policy or fails to follow it, the defense can inform the jury that evidence was not collected using best practices. And in a recent ruling, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that a judge abused his discretion by not allowing expert testimony about eyewitness identification and its potential flaws in a case where best practices where not used.

Legislators instructed the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas at Sam Houston State University to develop a model policy on eyewitness identification that departments could use as a template.

That policy sets out guidelines for conducting lineups in a way that does not suggest to witnesses whom they should select. Those guidelines are the criteria against which the Innocence Project of Texas plans to judge the policies that departments have adopted, Henson said.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-dept-criminal-justice/texas-court-of-criminal-appeals/innocence-project-grade-witness-lineup-policies/