Police lineups lead to wrongful convictions, five states change lineup procedure.

Police are dramatically changing the way they conduct suspect lineups after a mounting number of wrongful convictions based on mistaken identifications.
At least five states — Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia — and some major U.S. cities have either revamped or started changing the way law enforcement officials use photographic lineups to identify suspects. Since changing its policy in April, Dallas Police Lt. David Pughes says the department has conducted 1,400 lineups and believes "we're bringing a stronger piece of evidence to court."
Analysts say the changes are transforming the way police investigate crime.
"Challenges to lineups were first dismissed as misguided academic exercises, until (law enforcement officials) could see the concrete disasters resulting in exoneration," says Iowa State University psychology professor Gary Wells, an expert on eyewitness identification.
Of the 242 people exonerated through DNA testing in the past two decades, about 75% of those wrongful convictions involved some form of mistaken eyewitness identification, according to the Innocence Project, which attempts to exonerate the wrongfully convicted using DNA evidence. Stephen Saloom, Innocence Project policy director, says the group is pursuing lineup changes in 10 states during the next year.






Link: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-09-16-police-lineups_N.htm