Pretrial Identification

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The police use many different methods to identify potential suspects and besides the concerns of self-incrimination and right to counsel there is also the concern of how reliable the technique is (Hall, 2014). Pretrial identifications are based on an individual’s perception of an incident (Hall, 2014). So, if five witnesses were identifying a potential suspect from a lineup, they all could have perceived the details of that incident differently and causing an unreliable identification (Hall, 2014). The amount of time from the incident to the lineup can have a dramatic factor in the reliability of the identification (Hall, 2014). The more time that goes by, the more unreliable a pretrial identification can be. Also, each witness or victim …show more content…
Supreme Court case, United States v. Wade, revealed the following revelation. “The identification of strangers is proverbially untrustworthy….A major factor contributing to the high incidence of miscarriage of justice from mistaken identification has been the degree of suggestion inherent in the manner in which the prosecution presents the suspect to witness for pretrial identification” (Hall, 2014, p. 506). The fact is that these suggestions are not just conducted intentionally, but they also can be unintentional (Hall, 2014). A pretrial identification that I would find to be unduly suggestive would include the types of photos used in a photographic array. If I were the prosecution, and had three witnesses and one victim to identify two suspects using a photo array, the types of photos I showed in the array would have a significant impact on how suggestive the technique is. For example, if all the photos of the potential suspects were displayed using their mug shots, which displayed these individuals in black and white striped jail uniforms while the other photos showed individuals in civilian cloths being free in society, I believe that would be too suggestive of who is guilty. Also, if the two suspects were white males in their mid-twenties and the photos used in the array only had the two suspects photos while the rest where black males in their mid-forties, this would also be too suggestive of who the witnesses are to