STATISTICAL-INFERENCE ON MEASURES OF LINEUP FAIRNESS

Psychological research on eyewitness testimony has made important cont ributions to the measurement of lineup fairness. The mock witness task , and measures of functional size, effective size, and diagnosticity h ave proved useful both in application to real-world problems and to on going research aimed at the optimization of criminal investigation tec hniques. However, these measures are typically used in the absence of any inferential statistical considerations. This is unfortunate, since the mock witness task relies on an implicit probability model. An att empt is made in this paper to identify a suitable formal probability m odel for the mock witness task and suggestions are made with respect t o how to reason inferentially about many of the lineup measures develo ped in psycholegal research. It is important to reason inferentially a bout these measures, and a failure to do so may mislead those to whom measures of lineup fairness are presented.