Forensic Psychology For Dummies (39 page)

Here’s an example of unconscious transference in an actual case.

At the railway station the ticket clerk was robbed at gunpoint. He later identified a sailor as his assailant. On the day of the robbery, however, the sailor was away at sea. The forensic psychologist reviewing the case realised that the sailor had been an obvious victim of unconscious transference. The ticket clerk picked him out from the police line-up because his face was familiar. As it turned out, the sailor was based near the railway station and had bought train tickets from the same clerk on three different occasions before the robbery took place.

Minimising bias: Good practice recommendations

To cut the risk of bias in police line-up identifications, the American Psychological Association recommends the following:

Double-blind testing:
The person managing the line-up should have no knowledge of the identities of the persons in the line-up or of the culprit.

Keeping eyewitnesses informed:
The eyewitnesses should be told whether the culprit is going to be present in the line-up.

Lookalikes:
Make sure that the persons selected in the line-up resemble the description of the suspect given by the eyewitness.

Confidence of the eyewitness:
To be assessed and recorded at the time of identification.

Impartiality:
Make no comment about the person the eyewitness chooses.

Sometimes the recommendations of the American Psychological Association on bias are completely disregarded by the court. For example, a judge or attorney may ask the witness ‘Is the person who you saw leaving the premises with the stolen goods here in court?’ And the witness is face-to-face with the accused standing in the dock. This is a situation in which:

The suspect is put at a disadvantage.

The court assumes that the suspect appeared in the police identification process.

Only the one suspect is presented to the witness in the court proceedings.

A witness who’s feeling insecure or unsure about his testimony can hide behind the legal formalities.

Asking a witness to identify the person standing in the dock as the person he saw at the time of the crime is an unsafe and unsound means of seeking witness corroboration, and yet many jurisdictions around the world use this procedure with great confidence.