Gary Wells, an Iowa State professor of psychology, was featured on a segment of the CBS News program “Eye to Eye” on August 17.

The segment, which dealt with the validity of eyewitness accounts and police lineup procedures, used film clips of experiments conducted on the ISU campus.

Wells has questioned the methods police use to interrogate eyewitnesses during lineups in books and psychology journals.

“The whole business is unregulated,” Wells said.

“The person who administers the lineup should not know who the real suspect is,” he added

Wells said he gets several requests a week to testify in criminal cases on the techniques police officers use to question eyewitnesses.

“You really do not need to use strong-arm tactics to manipulate eyewitnesses,” Wells said on the program.

The segment focused on a murder investigation in the Nevada.

The case drew controversy because five eyewitnesses identified a suspect, even though their was overwhelming evidence to show the suspect’s innocence.

Wells was not asked to testify for the case, but his experiment concluded that eyewitness accounts can many times be wrong.

In his experiment with ISU students, almost 85 percent of the participants misidentified the culprit of a staged crime.