Corrupt Chicago again

Suit sought access to report on witness ID methods -- a major source of wrongful convictions

A Cook County judge ruled Monday that the Chicago Police Department does not have to turn over the underlying data from a controversial study on eyewitness identification methods that critics and academics have called junk social science. Defense lawyers led by a group from Northwestern University Law School's Roderick MacArthur Justice Center sued the city and the Police Department to get the data from a 2006 study led by a Police Department lawyer.

The study purported to show that the traditional method of police lineups in which witnesses see all the subjects at once was more accurate than a method in which witnesses are shown subjects one at a time by an officer who does not know the identity of the suspect.

Although academics have dismissed the Chicago study as unscientific, several law enforcement agencies across the country have held it up as a bulwark against changing their own lineup procedures, said Scott Ehlers of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, a lobbying group that filed the suit.

Chicago police officials had argued in court papers that turning over raw files that included the names of witnesses could be dangerous and that taking the time to remove such information from the files would be too burdensome. ["Burdensome" for the poor little petals! How sad! It is pretty burdensome to be wrongfully convicted too]

The ruling pleased city officials, said Law Department spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle. In opposing the release of the underlying data, the city did not address the quality of the study but simply its desire to keep information from investigative files secret, she noted. The city believes that the information was not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, she said.

The ruling, by Circuit Judge Mary Ann Mason, was a major setback to refuting the study, Ehlers said. The lawyers plan to appeal. "We can't conduct a thorough, scientific review of this information without access to all of the data used to reach the conclusions set forth in this report," said Ehlers, state legislative director for the lawyers group.

The study was commissioned by the Illinois legislature in response to the wrongful conviction crisis that led then-Gov. George Ryan to place a moratorium on executions in Illinois and then clear Death Row in his final days in office in 2003. The traditional police lineup method of showing witnesses a group of people all at once is preferred by most large police departments across the country. But a growing body of research has suggested that the traditional method is more likely to produce false identifications.

To run the study, the Illinois State Police chose a Chicago Police Department insider, Sheri Mecklenburg, who at the time chief counsel to the police superintendent. The study involved social scientists and reviewed lineup data from 170 cases in the Chicago, Joliet and Evanston Police Departments. But Mecklenburg did not make the study available for academic peer review, which became a larger issue when the report contradicted most recent studies.

Original report here




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