Speaker 1: I battle between what I remember and this narrative that
Speaker 1: I developed over the time with the police. How did
Speaker 1: it go from Melissa saying Bill was a perpetrator to
Speaker 1: Rodney Lincoln being arrested and eventually convicted. And I know
Speaker 1: on some level how it happened, and that I wasn't
Speaker 1: solely responsible. The city was out for blood. I'm Leah Rothman.
Speaker 1: This is the Real Killer Episode ten. Memories and misidentifications.
Speaker 1: You know what I did ask myself many times? Why
Speaker 1: I said Bill? Could it happened? I was a little
Speaker 1: kid misheard or this was the name I knew the
Speaker 1: man by. I don't know how it got to be
Speaker 1: from one person to the other. I can't explain the
Speaker 1: moment it happened, but I think it was an evolution.
Speaker 1: Maybe my recollections and memories were not as good as theirs.
Speaker 1: I didn't trust myself anymore because Melissa's memory is really
Speaker 1: the lynchpin of the whole case. I want to understand
Speaker 1: more about it. Where did her early memories of the
Speaker 1: perpetrator come from? And why did those memories change? Somewhere
Speaker 1: along the way things pivoted away from Bill and to Rodney.
Speaker 1: Why and how? And what part the detectives play in
Speaker 1: all of it. I started with reaching out to Gary Wells.
Speaker 1: He's a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University.
Speaker 1: He's a giant in the field of social psychology, cognitive psychology,
Speaker 1: and its intersection with the law. He's also done extensive
Speaker 1: research on lineup procedures and the accuracy of eyewitness identification,
Speaker 1: dating back to n He's authored over three hundred articles.
Speaker 1: His findings have been included into psychology and law textbooks,
Speaker 1: and he's worked with the Justice Department to write the
Speaker 1: training manual on eyewitness identification evidence. We've got a reliability
Speaker 1: problem in eyewitnessification because most of the DNA generations about
Speaker 1: involved cases of mistaken identification in the Midwest. Innocence Project
Speaker 1: reached out to Gary Wells asking him to review and
Speaker 1: advise them on Rodney's case. This was before Melissa's recantation.
Speaker 1: If it's okay, let's first talk about Melissa. The first
Speaker 1: thing she says is Bill did it. From there in
Speaker 1: the hospital she starts from and bring other things about Bill.
Speaker 1: She remembers that Bill drove a yellow car, then it
Speaker 1: turns into a taxi, and then a white Volkswagon. She
Speaker 1: remembers spending the night at his house. There was a
Speaker 1: park across from the house. What do you make of
Speaker 1: the first responses that come from her, Well, I think
Speaker 1: the first responses are you know. She could say I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but she didn't.
Speaker 1: In general, the spontaneous mentioning of this person Bill is
Speaker 1: big lead. I mean, it should be followed up on.
Speaker 1: That's a meaningful statement, and especially if you have nothing
Speaker 1: else to to really contradict that. I don't want to
Speaker 1: attribute bad motives to the to the case investigator here,
Speaker 1: but throughout this process it just looks very chaotic. I mean,
Speaker 1: early in this process, she's been being shown people who
Speaker 1: don't fit their description. They don't look at all like
Speaker 1: each other. The only thing they seem to have in
Speaker 1: common is most of them were named Bill or William
Speaker 1: or Billy or Willie. And so that whole strategy was
Speaker 1: to put a bunch of bills in front of her. Right,
Speaker 1: that was a bad idea. That's a fishing expedition with
Speaker 1: Melissa unable to ide any of those men in time.
Speaker 1: The composite sketches drawn, Remember they start with a photo
Speaker 1: of a family friend named Dennis Smith. Allegedly, Melissa had
Speaker 1: said he kind of looked like the killer. For the
Speaker 1: sketch artists to have a picture of the person, she says,
Speaker 1: he looks like as another like, what is the what
Speaker 1: is the point of that? Did he even need her
Speaker 1: at that point? Is she adding anything? I doubt it.
Speaker 1: We We have done experiments to produce composites. What we
Speaker 1: find is that in general, they tend not to look
Speaker 1: very much like the perpetrator, like the person they saw,
Speaker 1: because it's just so difficult. We can't pick out the
Speaker 1: nose and the eyes, and then you know, we don't
Speaker 1: have those things separately, uh, in memory. So here's the
Speaker 1: big problem though, When you produce a composite and the
Speaker 1: composite may or may not resemble the real perp or
Speaker 1: very much, but you use that to find a suspect.
Speaker 1: Guess what, You put the composite out to lots of people, right, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course it always looks like somebody, which is exactly
Speaker 1: what happened in this case. The sketch is released to
Speaker 1: the public. Joanne's family sees it and says the man
Speaker 1: looks familiar and after going through Joanne's diary with police,
Speaker 1: they land on raw me. So then they decide that
Speaker 1: Rodney is their suspect, and they go to Melissa with
Speaker 1: two photos. One is of a family, remember, a cousin,
Speaker 1: of her half sister, her older half sister, and the
Speaker 1: other and that's a color polaroid and the other is
Speaker 1: a black and white mug shot of Rodney Lincoln. Sort
Speaker 1: of just talk me through that, okay, So if you
Speaker 1: if you just come in at that point where they
Speaker 1: decide that they're going to try to do an identification
Speaker 1: with Rodney Lincoln, they would have needed to understand and
Speaker 1: appreciate the fact that, well, we suspected Lincoln only because
Speaker 1: he was the closest match to the composite. Right. What
Speaker 1: they needed to do then was create a proper identification procedure,
Speaker 1: which would be at least six photos. And in those
Speaker 1: six photos, they need to pick other people who also
Speaker 1: have some similarities to the composite and use those. It
Speaker 1: can't just be too So she picks Rodney. Burgoon said
Speaker 1: his name is not Bill, and Burgoon said, Melissa replied,
Speaker 1: it's that's him, that's him, and he's like, but his
Speaker 1: name is not Bill, and she said that's him. She
Speaker 1: had seen Rodney before, and so when she says that's him,
Speaker 1: is that what she's what she's doing, is she's recognizing
Speaker 1: someone that her mother did have a relationship with at
Speaker 1: some point, and that this is what we call a
Speaker 1: source monitoring error, which is a particular problem that flicks everyone,
Speaker 1: but it's stronger with children and stronger with the elderly.
Speaker 1: And that is you remember, in this case, the face,
Speaker 1: but you've confused the context. So yeah, it's a familiar
Speaker 1: it's a it is a familiar face. You have been
Speaker 1: in the same room with that person. Right by that point,
Speaker 1: that memory maybe of the perpetrator may start to almost
Speaker 1: be blending with this person. And I say that because
Speaker 1: she was right about some things about it turned out
Speaker 1: about Rodney, not about Bill, right, that he lived with
Speaker 1: his mom, and that there was a park right park
Speaker 1: across the street. So so it's quite possible that what
Speaker 1: is augmenting this identification is the fact that now you're
Speaker 1: showing her someone she has seen before and and and
Speaker 1: and seen in the context of an interaction with her mother.
Speaker 1: She picks Rodney right, and then within two hours she
Speaker 1: is viewing a live lineup right so the live lineup.
Speaker 1: I mean, once you get an identification of somebody from photos,
Speaker 1: turning around and doing a live lineup in which he's
Speaker 1: the only person in common between um, the photos and
Speaker 1: the live lineup, it's pretty much guaranteed the witness is
Speaker 1: just gonna turn around and pick the same person. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if the child are an adult, Right,
Speaker 1: they're gonna pick the same person out of the live
Speaker 1: lineup that they that you just led them to pick
Speaker 1: out of photos. Besides this, there are other issues with
Speaker 1: lineups that need to be considered. So the big problem
Speaker 1: with I win a cientification is that witnesses tend to
Speaker 1: pick the person from the lineup who looks most like
Speaker 1: the perpetrator relative to the other members of the lineup. Right,
Speaker 1: That makes sense, comes very natural, two people. It's just
Speaker 1: kind of baked into our psychology is to make relative judgments.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know the actual size of this,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. I can't tell you in in
Speaker 1: millimeters or whatever, but I can see that this is
Speaker 1: bigger than that, right, So this is how we make
Speaker 1: most of our judgments, right, in terms of them being
Speaker 1: relative to something else. And so it is the case
Speaker 1: with a line up to the natural tendency. The natural
Speaker 1: propensity is to look at a lineup quickly home in
Speaker 1: on who best matches my memory relative to the others.
Speaker 1: This is the best person, and then there's a tendency
Speaker 1: to run with that and pick that person. The problem
Speaker 1: with that is that what if the perpetrator is not
Speaker 1: in the line up, there still is somebody who better
Speaker 1: matches your memory than somebody else. So an absolutely critical
Speaker 1: and essential type of instruction is keeping mind the person
Speaker 1: who committed this crime, person you saw might not be
Speaker 1: in here, and so maybe maybe the correct answer is
Speaker 1: none of these. That's a very important instruction. It takes
Speaker 1: pressure off the witness. So then they're at this live lineup.
Speaker 1: I know you've seen it, and these gentlemen are and
Speaker 1: eighteen years old, shaggier, longer hair, inches taller than Rodney
Speaker 1: Rodney's thirty seven, shorter dark hair um and also just shorter.
Speaker 1: And in terms of fillers, how did metro p D
Speaker 1: do with the fillers in this live lineup? On the
Speaker 1: live lineup? I mean, not only is Melissa coming into
Speaker 1: it having already only two hours earlier picked Rodney Lincoln
Speaker 1: from two choice alternative but in addition, for three other
Speaker 1: people in the live lineup are very poorly selected fillers.
Speaker 1: They don't fit the description. Rodney is the only one
Speaker 1: who who fits the description. If by that point we
Speaker 1: consider the description to be this uh composite. When you
Speaker 1: select good fillers, they should all have that same characteristic,
Speaker 1: so that if he's innocent, he shouldn't stand out. So
Speaker 1: I I interviewed Detective Burgoon recently and I asked him
Speaker 1: about the live lineup, and he basically said that it
Speaker 1: was a Saturday, and there weren't too many people there,
Speaker 1: and they only had twenty hours in Missouri at the time.
Speaker 1: They only had twenty hours to apply for a warrant.
Speaker 1: You know, we basically had twenty hours to put together
Speaker 1: this live lineup. I would think that twenty would be
Speaker 1: enough time to round up people. You don't have to
Speaker 1: get them from jail cells. I mean you can, you
Speaker 1: can get them off the street. Personally, I don't think
Speaker 1: that's a good excuse. And the fact that Lead Detective
Speaker 1: Joe Burgoon, a man that Melissa came to love, is
Speaker 1: part of the lineup at all, is a problem. Talk
Speaker 1: to me about double blind lineups. The idea of the
Speaker 1: double blind lineup, which I came up with in the
Speaker 1: late eighties and started pressing pretty hard on into the
Speaker 1: ninety nineties, was that began discovering oftentimes, Um, the person
Speaker 1: doing the line up, the detective who knows that his
Speaker 1: suspect is in position three, is inadvertently unintentionally We're not
Speaker 1: saying it's intentional queuing the witness towards number three. Consider
Speaker 1: what you would do, I mean, perfectly natural. Nobody thinks
Speaker 1: they're they're doing something inappropriate. So let's say your case, detective,
Speaker 1: you think that you know, you put together a lineup.
Speaker 1: You think that number three, You know number three is
Speaker 1: your suspect. You know that numbers one to four or five, six,
Speaker 1: those are just fillers. Right. You show it to the witness,
Speaker 1: and the witness says, um, number two. Now take your time.
Speaker 1: Are you sure you look at all of them? Right?
Speaker 1: But if the witness says, um, number three, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: tell me about number three. So it's just human nature
Speaker 1: on the part of in this case, the lineup administrator
Speaker 1: to sort of leak or inadvertently steer. And so the
Speaker 1: double blind lineup is a pretty simple idea. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just borrowed it from what we already know in
Speaker 1: scientific testing, namely that well, the person who administers this
Speaker 1: photo lineup and any buddy who's in that room should
Speaker 1: not know which person is the person who is the
Speaker 1: suspect and which ones are fillers. Then they cannot inadvertently,
Speaker 1: unintentionally or whatever, steer the witness around or influence how
Speaker 1: the witness feels about their choice. So you know how
Speaker 1: the rest goes. Melissa picks Rodney. Then two trials later,
Speaker 1: he's convicted. Fast forward three decades. So Melissa in two
Speaker 1: thousand and fifteen says Rodney didn't do it, he was
Speaker 1: never there that day. And then she also says, I
Speaker 1: believe tommylind Cells did it. So what do you make
Speaker 1: of that new memory? Well, I think that Melissa's showing
Speaker 1: great bravery here and saying that she now believes that
Speaker 1: it was not Rodney Lincoln because that requires her to
Speaker 1: like sort of rewrite a significant part of her life history.
Speaker 1: That's that's huge. Now. I do think that what she's
Speaker 1: doing is she's weighing. Maybe she's weighing the evidence a
Speaker 1: little bit better. I mean, she's coming to grips with
Speaker 1: things that she didn't know at the time. I mean
Speaker 1: as an adult, she's now processing his name. Isn't Bill right?
Speaker 1: He does have an ali by in the words, she's
Speaker 1: taking into consideration, Uh, this other evidence at the same time,
Speaker 1: why is she saying that it's this other person? It
Speaker 1: seems very unlikely that she's able to recover that original
Speaker 1: memory and based it on that. Because too much time
Speaker 1: is passed. It seems unlikely she would be able to
Speaker 1: cast her mind back and recover that original memory. I
Speaker 1: think that's long gone. It wasn't that good in the beginning.
Speaker 1: There's too much water under the bridge. She's already made
Speaker 1: this mistaken identification and believe that it was somebody else
Speaker 1: All along. These things make that original memory largely untraceable.
Speaker 1: The legal system tend not to buy recantations, sort of like,
Speaker 1: well then you must have if you were wrong before,
Speaker 1: why wouldn't you be wrong now? You know? Does memory
Speaker 1: get better? With your memories better now? I have a
Speaker 1: lot of questions about memories. I mean, how exactly do
Speaker 1: memories even work and what causes them not to I
Speaker 1: asked three memory experts to share their years of knowledge
Speaker 1: and research with me. They agreed to talk about the
Speaker 1: case as a high pathetical. I've heard people compare memory
Speaker 1: to a video recorder. Is that reasonable? I mean, the
Speaker 1: fast answer is straightforward yes and no. That's Daniel Reiesberg.
Speaker 1: He's an emeritus professor and a cognitive psychologist whose research
Speaker 1: focuses on how people remember emotional events in their lives.
Speaker 1: For the last twenty years, he's been called to testify
Speaker 1: as an expert witness in i D cases, confession cases,
Speaker 1: and cases involving children's and adults memories. Like a video recorder,
Speaker 1: memory has an input side, akin to what happens when
Speaker 1: you hit the record button on your phone or a player.
Speaker 1: Memory has a storage time when the information is just
Speaker 1: sitting there waiting for some eventual playback, and memory also
Speaker 1: has a playback function. But the moment you start looking
Speaker 1: at the comparison in any sort of serious way, the
Speaker 1: comparison just collapses. And I would put at the top
Speaker 1: of the list two crucial points. One of them is
Speaker 1: that the input to memory is selective. And there is,
Speaker 1: in many occasions a lot of information arriving at your ears,
Speaker 1: or a lot of information out in front of your eyes,
Speaker 1: and if you're not paying attention to it, it does
Speaker 1: not get recorded. Into memory. But the other I think
Speaker 1: even more important distinction is that one's information is recorded
Speaker 1: on your phone. It's it's their dormant and in that way,
Speaker 1: what you eventually get in playback really is a high
Speaker 1: quality rendition of exactly what went in in the first place.
Speaker 1: And memory is massively different because our memories are dynamic
Speaker 1: and information that's in storage is constantly getting updated and
Speaker 1: elaborated and merged together with other sources of information. I
Speaker 1: agree with you, that's the way memory works. It's a
Speaker 1: wonder for wonderful system, UM, but it's um. It's a
Speaker 1: system that was not not developed for the courtroom. That's
Speaker 1: Iris blend On Gitlin. She's a professor of psychology at
Speaker 1: California State University, Fullerton. Her research focuses on memory in
Speaker 1: the forensic context, memory as it relates to identification of
Speaker 1: people and events, and detecting deception as it relates to
Speaker 1: interviewing and interrogation. She also works as an expert witness,
Speaker 1: primarily in criminal cases. Within the courtroom, a lot of
Speaker 1: time needs to be accurate and complete. That's not what
Speaker 1: it evolves to be. So it's there's a conflict between
Speaker 1: what the legal system meets, you know, in order to
Speaker 1: self crimes um and what human humans can give from
Speaker 1: their memory, which is it's wonderful for every day, for
Speaker 1: all of our experiences, but not for the courtroom. The
Speaker 1: only other piece that I would add to that is
Speaker 1: people don't necessarily have a good sense of when their
Speaker 1: memory fails, and that's how they're Clydeer off it. She's
Speaker 1: a research professor at Georgia State University. Her work focuses
Speaker 1: on memory errors, with an emphasis on courtroom applications. Her
Speaker 1: work also looks at face recognition and eyewitness identification. Most recently,
Speaker 1: she's been looking at how people remember information that's been
Speaker 1: imagined versus actually experienced and the confusion that comes with it.
Speaker 1: Like Dan and Iris, for the last ten years, how
Speaker 1: There has also been working as an expert witness. People
Speaker 1: can feel um because they remember something with a lot
Speaker 1: of vividness or a lot of detail. Then they can
Speaker 1: come to believe that it's highly accurate and become very
Speaker 1: confident in that. And again, to add to what Irish said,
Speaker 1: that isn't necessarily the case that works in the courtroom
Speaker 1: because memory fades over time, over time, and right off
Speaker 1: the bat, here's Dan again, memories fade, All memories fade.
Speaker 1: The fade begins immediately. Um, you know, there's no honeymoon
Speaker 1: period in which the memory is, you know, resting before
Speaker 1: the fade starts. That's just not the way it works.
Speaker 1: One of the claims of that memory I commonly encounter
Speaker 1: is that some events are immune to forgetting, and people say,
Speaker 1: I will remember that till the day I die. I'll
Speaker 1: never forget it. I remember it as though it were yesterday.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's a kernel of reality there because
Speaker 1: some events are memorable. But at the same time, no
Speaker 1: event is immune to forgetting. To what Dance saying, it's
Speaker 1: not that you're necessarily going to forget that the thing happened.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to forget I was in a car accident,
Speaker 1: but the details surrounding that event are going to update
Speaker 1: and change. So you know, it's not that people completely
Speaker 1: forget something happened. I can remember all the details of it.
Speaker 1: And it turns out event memories are very different than
Speaker 1: facial ones. Here's iris again, the event is likely to
Speaker 1: be replay rehearsed. Right as people give the account of
Speaker 1: an event and they talk about it and trying to reconcile,
Speaker 1: they think about it, and so potentially there's a stronger
Speaker 1: memory for the details of the event, of parts of
Speaker 1: that event, and there is not the image of a
Speaker 1: perpetrator because that doesn't get rehearsed. And trauma has a
Speaker 1: surprising effect on memory, actually a contradictory one. Here's Dan.
Speaker 1: One of the things that trauma does, you know, in
Speaker 1: you know, lots of field studies, lots of laboratory studies,
Speaker 1: is sharpen your focus. The things that they do focus
Speaker 1: on during the trauma tend to be longer lasting compared
Speaker 1: to memory for some you know, mundane, everyday occurrence. And
Speaker 1: part of the complication here is that it's often difficult
Speaker 1: from the outside to figure out exactly what the person
Speaker 1: is going to focus on. And so, you know, two
Speaker 1: people going through what seemed to be similar events may
Speaker 1: end up focusing on different things, and therefore they're going
Speaker 1: to have very different memories. And the opposite can also
Speaker 1: be true, like when someone experiences a lot of stress
Speaker 1: and arousal, something called catastrophic memory loss can occur. So
Speaker 1: in regards to Melissa, we don't know which one happened.
Speaker 1: Did she have some very sharp memories based on where
Speaker 1: she put her focus or was she so stressed that
Speaker 1: like the perpetrator's face just became a blur. We'll never know.
Speaker 1: But what about exposure time. It seems the man was
Speaker 1: in the apartment for a long time. Melissa said she
Speaker 1: got a good look at him. At times his face
Speaker 1: was a foot away. Here's iris we know of cases
Speaker 1: and also from research that even if you have long
Speaker 1: exposure time to a phase, I mean the famous case
Speaker 1: of the Ronald Cotton a case. You know, the rapist
Speaker 1: was in the room for a long period of time
Speaker 1: with Jennifer the victim, right, And so she even said
Speaker 1: that she studied his face. She wanted to be able
Speaker 1: to remember him right, to be able to you know,
Speaker 1: make sure that they got to him. And she still
Speaker 1: made a mistake. And when she came across the real
Speaker 1: real rapists years later in another trial, um, she actually
Speaker 1: came in front and saw him and she could not
Speaker 1: nothing trigger, nothing trigger in her mind. And that was
Speaker 1: a real rapist, proven by d n A right. And
Speaker 1: so you know from these cases, but also from the
Speaker 1: empirical research, that is possible to also misremember or forget
Speaker 1: a face even if you had long exposure time and again,
Speaker 1: where was Melissa's focus? Was it on the man's face
Speaker 1: or the knife he was stabbing her with? What about age?
Speaker 1: Does a child's memory work the same as an adults?
Speaker 1: The answer is basically yes, with a few exceptions, one
Speaker 1: of the biggest being suggestibility. Here's iris again. I think
Speaker 1: in a suggestive environment where you have suggestive kinds of
Speaker 1: interviewing and and lots of adults with an interest of
Speaker 1: trying to get more information, and also with authority figures,
Speaker 1: all of that kind of environment would definitely potentially influence
Speaker 1: that person's memory. I would add just quickly, is that
Speaker 1: I don't want to leave the feeling that you know,
Speaker 1: children's memory cannot be relied upon. You know it can
Speaker 1: given the right circumstances. They're right set of protocols, and
Speaker 1: we know that from their research is very clear children
Speaker 1: can't give reliable, truthful information and complete information in the
Speaker 1: right condition. So basically, memories fade almost immediately. They're malleable,
Speaker 1: and both adults and children can make errors when I
Speaker 1: ding someone. It seems like the burdens on law enforcement
Speaker 1: to conduct interviews and lineups in ways that produce good,
Speaker 1: reliable information without contaminating the original memory, which brings us
Speaker 1: back to Gary Wells and what should have happened in
Speaker 1: Rodney's case. I think this whole thing all along needed
Speaker 1: to be solved with if at all possible, with harder evidence.
Speaker 1: A seven year old You can't be shown her fifty
Speaker 1: photos over several days and of all kinds of different
Speaker 1: people and then giving her really biased final test of
Speaker 1: only two photos. Once you did that, you sort of
Speaker 1: trampled on the evidence. You know, I've been pushing this analogy,
Speaker 1: um that I think that you know, I witness evidence
Speaker 1: should be treated as a form of trace evidence. You know,
Speaker 1: trace evidence we usually think of as fingerprints and blood
Speaker 1: or semen or hair fibers that a perpetrator left behind
Speaker 1: at the scene of the crime that can help establish
Speaker 1: the identity of the perpetrator. Well, that's also true of
Speaker 1: eye witness evidence. What happened here was the perpetrator left
Speaker 1: a trace behind, except that trace was in the head
Speaker 1: of Melissa. It's the same as going into a crime
Speaker 1: scene and just trampling all over the place. Oh well,
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't matter if I pick up this object,
Speaker 1: if I step over here, or I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: move the gun, you know, like you would never consider
Speaker 1: doing those things when investigating a crime. Well, there should
Speaker 1: be a lot of things you don't consider tampering with,
Speaker 1: like to witnesses memory when invested getting a crime as well.
Speaker 1: Should the detectives. Should they have known better back in
Speaker 1: It's hard to put ourselves back into you know. I
Speaker 1: don't want to be one who says that this was
Speaker 1: not good faith at the time. I can't really make
Speaker 1: that judgment. What I can do now, though, is say that, UM,
Speaker 1: given this path of these events as they were created
Speaker 1: and unfolded, the result in the end of Melissa picking
Speaker 1: Rodney from that one of two photos and then turning
Speaker 1: around and picking him from the lineup is of no
Speaker 1: real probitive value. It's not desp positive of guilt. It's
Speaker 1: not really something that even can qualify as evidence. If
Speaker 1: by evidence we mean that it's that somehow we're at
Speaker 1: least getting beyond more likely than not, it's just not there.
Speaker 1: Gary's work, like his pre lineup instructions, choosing fillers, double
Speaker 1: blind lineups, videotaping, the identification and better interviewing of witnesses
Speaker 1: are procedures that have been implemented in almost thirty states,
Speaker 1: covering about of the population. There's still a long way
Speaker 1: to go, but we're in a much better position today
Speaker 1: than we were certainly so, of course I had to ask.
Speaker 1: It's Missouri one of the states that has adopted these reforms.
Speaker 1: They have not. Next time on The Real Killer, imagine
Speaker 1: you take this job and you're told and you don't
Speaker 1: have the right to correct monthal conviction, a system seemingly
Speaker 1: built to fail, not just Rodney Lincoln, but many others.
Speaker 1: Lamar keeps me up at night, Son of a bitch.
Speaker 1: I could. I could talk like a sailor for five
Speaker 1: minutes talking about how mother fucking pissed I am that
Speaker 1: Lamar is still sitting in prison makes me the puke.
Speaker 1: The Real Killer is a production of a y R
Speaker 1: Media and I Heart Radio, hosted by me Leah Rothman.
Speaker 1: Executive producers Leah Rothman and Eliza Rosen for a y
Speaker 1: R Media You. Written by me Leah Rothman, Senior Associate
Speaker 1: producer Eric Newman, Editing and sound design by Cameron Taggy,
Speaker 1: mixed and mastered by Cameron Taggi, Audio engineering by Jesus C.
Speaker 1: Mario Studio engineering by Tom Weir and Kelly McGrew, legal
Speaker 1: counsel for a y R Media, Gianni Douglas, executive producer
Speaker 1: for I Heart Radio, Chandler Mayze. If you're enjoying The
Speaker 1: Real Killer, tell your friends about it and leave us
Speaker 1: a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.