New Study Documents Lack of Lineup Polices in Texas Law Enforcement Agencies

The Justice Project released today a new report documenting that only 12% of Texas law enforcement agencies have any written policies or guidelines for the conduct of photo or live lineup procedures.  In addition, the few existing written procedures are often vague and incomplete.  Overall, most jurisdictions in Texas fail to implement widely endorsed best practices that have been proven to increase the reliability of eyewitness evidence. 

Eighty-two percent of Texas’s 38 wrongful convictions exposed by DNA testing were based largely or exclusively on incorrect eyewitness identifications. Texas currently has no statutory requirements for the conduct of eyewitness identification procedures.

Read full report here.

Read press release here.

The Justice Projects works to increase the fairness and accuracy of the American criminal justice system. We develop, coordinate, and implement integrated national and state-based campaigns involving public education, litigation and legislation to reform the criminal justice system, with particular focus on capital punishment.

The Problem: A Broken System

The American criminal justice system is broken. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the 1970s, 130 people have been exonerated from death row in 26 states - roughly one for every nine executed. The most comprehensive study of capital trials ever conducted found that nearly seven of every 10 death sentences handed down by state courts from 1973 to 1995 were overturned due to “serious, reversible error,” including egregiously incompetent defense counsel, suppression of exculpatory evidence, eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, snitch and accomplice testimony, and unreliable forensic science. Read more

The Solution: National Agenda for Reform

To promote solutions to the problem of wrongful convictions and enhance protections for innocent people accused of crimes, The Justice Project has constructed a national program of eight specific reform initiatives designed to increase the fairness and accuracy of the criminal justice system.
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From prosecutors to victims’ rights groups, from defense lawyers to judges to law enforcement, reasonable people agree that our system of justice must protect the innocent and punish the guilty - not the other way around.