What a photo lineup is,
and what the file must show.

Three identification procedures account for most of the work. A photo array presents the witness with a set of photographs, one of them the suspect and the rest fillers. A live lineup does the same with people, and requires custody of the suspect and enough participants for the presentation to be fair. A show-up presents a single person to a witness, usually near the scene and soon after the report.

The choice among them is driven by circumstance. A show-up is a field procedure, used when a person matching the description is detained close in time and place to the offense, and it carries a built-in risk of suggestion that policies are written to control: there is one person, and the police brought the witness to look at him. Many agencies write instruction, transport and documentation requirements around it for that reason rather than treating it as an ordinary array.

A photo array is the procedure most often available, because it does not require the suspect to be in custody, and it is the one most often examined afterward, because it leaves the most paper. Practice varies between agencies. The analysis reads each procedure against the agency’s own policy first, then against the national standards, model policies and training curricula that describe generally accepted practice; the working vocabulary is collected in the investigations lexicon.

In a deficient-investigation review the identification procedure is rarely examined alone. It is read next to the rest of the file, because the commitment that produces a suggestive array tends to leave other marks nearby. That pattern is the subject of tunnel vision; the array is simply where it is easiest to see, because the procedure has to be assembled, administered and documented in a single sitting, and each of those leaves paper.

The record request follows the procedure. Counsel should have the array as the witness saw it, the instruction form or the recording of the instructions, the administrator’s identity and role in the investigation, the witness’s contemporaneous words, the report describing the session, and the agency’s policy in force on the date. A procedure conducted well produces all of it. A procedure conducted badly often produces a single line in a supplemental report.

Neither result is the default. Where the file shows fillers selected so nobody stood out, an administrator who could not signal, instructions given and a confidence statement taken, the report says so, and that is a substantial finding for the prosecution or for counsel defending an agency; it is the same finding a wrongful conviction review tests for from the other side of the file. Where the file shows none of it, the deficiency is stated as a practices matter, item by item, against the policy in force on the date. An identification that cannot be examined is not thereby wrong; it is unexaminable, and that is what the report says.