Chapter 32 — Self-Check Quiz

25 questions: multiple choice and short answer. Try them closed-book. The answer key is in the collapsed block at the bottom.

Multiple choice

1. Among the causes of wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA, mistaken eyewitness identification was: - A. Rare, behind every forensic method - B. Present in a large majority — more than any single discredited forensic method - C. Never a factor - D. Significant only in property crimes

2. Human memory is best described as: - A. A video recording stored intact and replayed on demand - B. A reconstruction assembled fresh from fragments, expectations, and post-event information - C. A perfect record that only fades with time - D. Reliable in proportion to the witness's confidence

3. An estimator variable is: - A. A choice the police make about how to run the lineup - B. A witnessing condition (light, distance, stress) the system can only estimate after the fact and cannot change - C. A statistical error in DNA typing - D. The witness's level of education

4. A system variable is: - A. The amount of light at the crime scene - B. The distance from which the witness saw the perpetrator - C. A controllable feature of how the identification is collected (lineup composition, instructions, administrator, feedback) - D. The witness's stress level during the crime

5. "Weapon focus" refers to: - A. The police focusing on recovering the weapon - B. Witnesses fixating on a weapon at the expense of encoding the perpetrator's face - C. A type of lineup - D. The prosecution's emphasis on the weapon at trial

6. The cross-race effect is: - A. A form of deliberate racial bias by witnesses - B. The robust finding that people are, on average, worse at recognizing faces of a race other than their own - C. A rule about lineup composition - D. Found only in adults, not children

7. High stress and fear during a crime generally: - A. "Sear" the perpetrator's face into memory, improving accuracy - B. Have no effect on memory - C. Impair the encoding of details, including faces, while leaving the felt vividness intact - D. Improve memory for faces but not for objects

8. A simultaneous lineup (all members shown at once) tends to invite: - A. An absolute judgment (each face vs. the memory) - B. A relative judgment ("which one looks most like my memory?") - C. No judgment at all - D. A confession

9. A sequential lineup is designed to: - A. Show all members at once for speed - B. Present members one at a time to push toward an absolute (memory-based) judgment - C. Eliminate the need for fillers - D. Replace double-blind administration

10. The chapter's honest position on sequential vs. simultaneous lineups is: - A. Sequential is proven superior and should always replace simultaneous - B. Simultaneous is always better - C. The presentation order matters less than the other safeguards (blind administration, instructions, fair fillers, recorded confidence) - D. The choice is the single most important system variable

11. Double-blind administration means: - A. The witness is blindfolded - B. Neither the witness nor the administrator knows which member is the suspect - C. Two administrators run the lineup - D. The lineup is run twice

12. The proper pre-lineup instruction includes telling the witness that: - A. The police are confident they caught the perpetrator - B. The perpetrator may or may not be present, and the witness need not choose anyone - C. They should pick whoever looks closest - D. A choice is legally required

13. Confirming feedback ("good, that's our guy") after an identification tends to: - A. Have no effect - B. Decrease the witness's confidence - C. Inflate the witness's confidence and their later reports of how good a view they had - D. Improve the accuracy of the identification

14. The witness's confidence carries real information about accuracy: - A. At trial, most of all - B. Only at the first identification, under fair (uncontaminated) conditions, before any feedback - C. Never, under any circumstances - D. Whenever the witness says "I'm certain"

15. Courtroom (trial) confidence is largely worthless as a guide to accuracy because: - A. Witnesses always lie under oath - B. It has been shaped by feedback, repeated retrieval, and the case's history, while accuracy stays fixed at what the original memory permitted - C. Juries ignore it anyway - D. It is never recorded

16. A showup (single suspect, no fillers) is: - A. The most reliable identification procedure - B. Inherently suggestive and best limited to narrow circumstances - C. Required in all felony cases - D. The same as a double-blind lineup

17. Fillers in a lineup should be chosen to: - A. Make the suspect stand out so the witness can find them - B. Match the witness's description of the perpetrator so the suspect does not stand out - C. Be people the police have already cleared of all crimes - D. Resemble the witness

18. In the Cotton/Thompson case, the error was finally corrected by: - A. A recantation by the witness - B. A second eyewitness - C. DNA testing, which excluded Ronald Cotton and identified the true perpetrator - D. A confession at the original trial

19. The Cotton/Thompson case illustrates the book's evidentiary asymmetry because: - A. A confident identification included Cotton, but a DNA result excluded him — and exclusion is the stronger direction - B. The witness was lying - C. DNA and eyewitness evidence are equally reliable - D. Exclusion and inclusion are the same strength

20. On the validity spectrum, eyewitness identification's core claim ("this person, to the exclusion of others") is problematic because: - A. Human face memory is worthless - B. It asserts confident individualization without a measured basis for the confidence — like the confident pattern-comparison disciplines - C. It is quantified like DNA - D. It is never admitted in court

Short answer

21. In two sentences, explain why a witness's vivid, detailed, confident memory at trial is not proof that the original perception was good. (Reference encoding vs. retrieval.)

22. Name three estimator variables and, for each, state in one phrase how it degrades an identification.

23. A detective who knows the suspect runs a photo array and says "good choice." Name the two safeguards violated and the effect on the witness's later confidence.

24. State the two-sided honest summary of the confidence–accuracy relationship: why "confidence proves accuracy" is wrong, and why "confidence means nothing, ever" is also wrong.

25. In the cold case, the neighbor confidently reports "a tall stranger's truck" near the cabin at night from a quarter-mile away. Give the honest status of this lead and two reasons the witnessing conditions make it unreliable as identification evidence.

Answer key (click to expand) **Multiple choice:** 1-B · 2-B · 3-B · 4-C · 5-B · 6-B · 7-C · 8-B · 9-B · 10-C · 11-B · 12-B · 13-C · 14-B · 15-B · 16-B · 17-B · 18-C · 19-A · 20-B **Short answer (model points):** **21.** Memory is reconstructive: what is *retrieved* at trial is rebuilt from fragments and can incorporate post-event information, feedback, and the polish of repeated retelling. So a rich, confident trial account reflects the latest reconstruction — not the quality of the original *encoding*, which was fixed by the witnessing conditions at the moment of the crime and cannot be improved by later recall. **22.** Any three, e.g.: **lighting** — faces encode poorly in low light/glare; **distance** — beyond a limited range the witness sees a silhouette, not a face; **exposure duration** — brief views (seconds) encode little, and witnesses overestimate how long they looked; **stress/fear** — extreme arousal impairs encoding of the face while leaving felt vividness intact; **weapon focus** — attention fixates on the weapon, not the face; **cross-race** — people are worse at recognizing other-race faces; **retention interval** — longer gaps mean more decay and more opportunity for contamination. **23.** Violated: **double-blind administration** (a non-blind administrator can steer and give feedback) and the requirement of **no confirming feedback** (and the immediate, pre-feedback confidence statement is now contaminated). Effect: the **post-identification feedback effect** inflates the witness's confidence — and their later claims about how good a view they had — so that a tentative choice becomes, by trial, unshakable certainty that does not reflect any improvement in the memory. **24.** **Why "confidence proves accuracy" is wrong:** the confidence a jury hears (at trial) has been inflated by feedback and repeated retrieval and is nearly worthless as a guide to accuracy; confident-but-wrong identifications are common, especially under poor estimator variables. **Why "confidence means nothing, ever" is also wrong:** a *pristine* confidence statement taken immediately at the first identification, from a fair lineup, before any feedback, *does* carry real (if bounded) information about accuracy. **What reconciles them:** confidence and accuracy are linked at the moment of a clean first identification and are *decoupled* by every later contamination — so the first, clean number is informative and the courtroom number is not. **25.** **Status:** the lead is an eyewitness account that must be **discounted on witnessing-conditions grounds** — logged but down-weighted, not treated as reliable identification, and not used to include or exclude anyone. **Two reasons (any two):** it was *night* and the observation was from a *quarter-mile away* (distance + darkness yield a silhouette, not an identification); the view was *brief and in passing*; and the account is colored by *hindsight stress* (given after learning a neighbor died violently), which lends a fragment false vividness. "Tall" is an impression of a silhouette and "stranger" is merely the absence of recognition — so the report cannot reliably identify or exclude anyone.