(CHICAGO) On June 30, A Cook County Circuit Court ruled that controversial Chicago police line up data used for a public, taxpayer-funded report would remain hidden. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) was granted limited access to the data and other materials related to the Chicago Police Department’s controversial report that found that current eyewitness procedures—those that use traditional line ups where all suspects stand in a room together—are more effective than new procedures used in other American cities to reduce errors that can lead to wrongful convictions.
“The Court has dealt a blow to the public today. We will appeal the decision and continue to demand that the Chicago Police turn over all of the data and case files behind a report that contradicts vast amounts of research on lineup procedures,” said Scott Ehlers, state legislative director of NACDL, the plaintiff in the lawsuit. “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.”
The Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), first requested the data on which the taxpayer-funded report’s findings were based but that request was refused or ignored by the police departments involved—Chicago, Joliet, Evanston and the Illinois State Police. Evanston has since turned over their data, but Chicago continues to hold out.
“The fact that this data will continue to remain a secret is shameful,” said Locke Bowman, legal director of the Justice Center. “We will continue to do everything in our power to get access to this information.”
In Illinois alone, 54 innocent people have spent a total of 601 years behind bars because of erroneous eyewitness convictions, according to an analysis by the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Other cities have instituted procedures in which witnesses view one suspect at a time under the supervision of an officer who does not know who the suspect is in the line up.
In an effort to reduce wrongful convictions, experts have tested new methods for eyewitness identification that have proven to be more accurate. The Illinois report, released in 2006, finds that traditional lineups are more effective than these new methods and contradicts previous research on eyewitness identification, but many legal experts and professionals suspect the research is flawed.
