Wells’ eyewitness evidence research continues to garner national attention

Megan Mcgurk

One ISU professor’s research has improved how eyewitness evidence is handled.

Gary Wells, distinguished professor of psychology, said he has been doing eyewitness identification research for more than 20 years and has tried to find ways to make eyewitness identification more reliable.

“It turns out that one of the things we learned really early on with this research is that eyewitnesses commonly make mistakes on identifications,” he said.

Wells said there are eyewitness identification problems that have led to wrongful convictions, most of which have been sexual assault cases.

He said forensic DNA has made it possible to overturn convictions by testing preserved evidence from past cases.

“The evidence that led them to be convicted was a mistake of eyewitness identification,” Wells said.

Wells said in 1996, Attorney General Janet Reno started to pay more attention to his research because of misidentification problems.

“By 1997, Reno appointed a panel of prosecutors, police and a defense attorney to help develop national guidelines in order to improve this evidence,” he said.

Craig Anderson, professor and chairman of psychology, said Wells was one of the people chairing the group that set up new guidelines for how to handle eyewitness evidence.

Wells said one guideline deals with how police warn eyewitnesses about lineups.

“Police should warn the eyewitness prior to viewing any lineup that the actual perpetrator might not be there,” he said. “When you don’t warn them of that, most everyone will pick someone.”

Wells said another guideline is to only put people who match the perpetrator’s description in lineups.

“If not, this directs attention to the one person who does,” he said.

He said the guidelines also recommend that police bring people in a lineup in front of an eyewitness one by one. This way, the witness can’t compare the people in the lineup and pick the person who simply looks most like the perpetrator.

Wells said the guidelines are not law but recommendations of how police are to act with eyewitnesses.

Anderson said this research has gotten more attention than other laboratory-based research in psychology.

“This is the first lab-based research that has had a huge impact on national policy,” he said.

Wells said he has done about half of his laboratory-based research at Iowa State.

“Most of it has been done using students as eyewitnesses,” he said.