Murder Case Photographs: #9

Murder Case Photographs: #9

1953

The live lineup is the standard, and fairest, way of ensuring an accurate identification of a subject by a stranger. There are six people in the lineup, now as then, the suspect and five others. The fillers are other inmates who for many years were bribed to participate with cigarettes. Now second-hand smoke laws have resulted in a burger and soft drink from Wendy's being the lure. For safety purposes, the lineup today is conducted in a special video-equipped room with a wall separating the witness from the lineup participants.

The key to the fairness of the lineup is matching the physical characteristics of the fillers with those of the subject: race and gender obviously, but age, height, hair style, etc. That's easy to do today in a big city jail with it's large inmate population. It wasn't so easy in 1953. Here you have six people of obviously different pysical characteristics. Number two is a bean pole, a full head taller than number three. Number one looks like he's eighteen, number six like he's thirty-eight. And then there's the James Caan looking character in the plaid shirt. He's not a member of the lineup. Who knows what he's doing there.

As with other photographs in this series this one personifies some human reactions. Look at the face of number five. That is Guilt. Callow number one--in for drinking in public maybe--looks on gape-jawed. "You did a murder?!"

Significant also here is that an African-American woman makes the identification of a white man. She's dressed proudly, she points to the culprit and looks at the camera with a face that says "That's him, there's no doubt."


-Benjamin Harris