Facial Composite Production by Eyewitnesses

The creation of facial images by eyewitnesses using composite-production systems can be important for the investigation of crimes when the identity of the perpetrator is at issue. Despite technological advances, research indicates that composite-production systems produce poor likenesses of intended faces, even familiar faces. Furthermore, producing a composite appears to harm later recognition performance. Although morphing composites from multiple witnesses helps, likeness is still limited. The problem might stem from a mismatch between how faces are represented in memory (holistically) and how composite systems attempt to retrieve the memories (at the feature level). New methods of face recall involving judgments of whole faces hold greater promise. KEYWORDS—eyewitnesses; composites; face recall Kirk Bloodsworth, a U.S. military veteran living in Maryland, had never been in trouble with the law. Nevertheless, he was convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl and was sentenced to die in Maryland’s gas chamber. Bloodsworth became a suspect in the murder because an anonymous person called police to say Bloodsworth looked like a composite face that police had released to the media. Lacking a compelling alibi for the time of the crime, police placed his photo in a photo lineup and eyewitnesses identified him. After 9 years in prison, DNA evidence vindicated Bloodsworth and also implicated the actual murderer, Kimberly Ruffner (Junkin, 2004). Ruffner did not look much like the composite, but Bloodsworth did, and Bloodsworth was the only one in the photo lineup with hair that matched the composite. The Bloodsworth case illustrates some key points in this article. First, laboratory research shows that a face composite by an eyewitness is generally a poor representation of the original face. Hence, a composite has the potential to lead crime investigators away from the real perpetrator and toward an innocent person. Also, a composite can bias the eyewitness away from identifying the original face and toward a face that resembles the composite. We review research on face composites, explore the question of why people are not better at building them, examine a new approach to face recall, and underscore the need for psychological science to help address this important problem in the justice system. COMPOSITE-PRODUCTION SYSTEMS The objective of many criminal investigations is to establish the identity of the perpetrator. When there is a suspect, eyewitnesses can help establish identity by viewing a lineup that contains that suspect. When there is no suspect in the case, however, investigators often rely on eyewitnesses to help produce a likeness of the perpetrator’s face. The first method for having eyewitnesses produce a face from memory was the sketch artist. Today, however, U.S. law enforcement agencies use mechanized systems and are over twice as likely to use computerized versions than noncomputerized ones (McQuiston-Surrett, Topp, & Malpass, in press). Studies comparing sketch artists to mechanized systems are rare, perhaps because sketch artists vary widely in their skills and, hence, it would take a large sample of sketch artists randomly sampled from an ill-defined population to make conclusions. Accordingly, we restrict our review and discussion to composite-production systems such as the Identi-Kit, Photo-Fit, E-Fit, Mac-a-Mug, and FACES. The first two are early, noncomputerized collections of facial features (e.g., noses, eyes, mouths, head shapes, hair styles) that can be superimposed to create a face. The latter three are examples of modern, computerized versions of the same idea but include more possible facial features and more realistic visual results. FACES, for example, includes 361 hair selections, 63 head shapes, 42 forehead lines, 410 eyebrows, 514 eyes, 593 noses, 561 lips, 416 jaw shapes, 145 moustaches, 152 beards, 33 goatees, 127 eyeglasses, 70 eye lines, 147 smile lines, 50 mouth lines, and 40 chin lines. Figure 1 C D I R 4 6 5 B Dispatch: 31.1.07 Journal: CDIR CE: Blackwell Journal Name Manuscript No. Author Received: No. of pages: 5 Saravan A/Anand Kumar Address correspondence to Gary L. Wells, Psychology Department, West 112 Lago, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50021; e-mail: [email protected]. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 6 Volume 16—Number 1 Copyright r 2007 Association for Psychological Science CDIR 465 (B W U S C D IR 4 65 .P D F 31 -J an -0 7 15 :5 9 90 78 58 B yt es 5 P A G E S n op er at or = M .V .A na nt ha )