Duke Lacrosse Photo ID QuestionedThis could be a
very big deal.
According to the police report, the alleged victim was shown a police lineup of 46 photos individually depicting all the Duke lacrosse team members except for freshman goalie Devon Sherwood, the only black member of the team. He was excluded because the alleged victim told police her attackers were white.
After being shown the pictures in a sequence of PowerPoint slides, the document adds, the woman said she could identify the two players indicted April 17 with 100 percent certainty. She picked out Reade Seligmann as the attacker who forced her to perform oral sex and Collin Finnerty as the second man to rape and sodomize her.Gary Wells, president of the American Psychology-Law Society, described it as "a multiple-choice test without any wrong answers."
By including "fillers," or non-suspects, in a police lineup, an accuser has to pick past the filler to choose people who actually might have committed the crime.
"Without fillers as a control, the process has no internal credibility check," Wells said.How many times have you seen in a police drama a witness identify one of the cops, who clearly wasn't involved in the crime?
