Suspect race affects defense attorney evaluations of preidentification evidence

When an officer places a suspect in an identification procedure and the witness identifies the suspect, it falls on attorneys to make decisions that reflect the strength of that identification. The factor that most affects the strength of identification evidence is the likelihood that the suspect is guilty before being subjected to the procedure, which scholars refer to as the prior probability of guilt. Given large racial disparities in exonerations based on eyewitness misidentifications, the current work examined whether defense attorneys are less sensitive to prior evidence of guilt when the defendant is Black as opposed to White.

We predicted that when the defendant's race was described as White rather than Black, attorneys' judgments would be more sensitive to variations in the evidence that would influence the base rate of guilt. We also predicted that attorneys would rate the case as stronger when the victim's race was described as White rather than Black.

We gave 316 defense attorneys case files (modeled after the New York Police Department's style) that varied the strength of the preidentification evidence (strong vs. weak), the race of the defendant (Black vs. White), and the race of the victim (Black vs. White).

Attorneys made judgments that were sensitive to the base rate of guilt, but self-report measures demonstrated that they did not understand the extent to which the base rate of guilt influences the reliability of eyewitness evidence. Participants also rated the strength of the preidentification evidence as stronger for Black than for White defendants.

Although attorneys are intuitively sensitive to the strength of preidentification evidence, they lack conscious awareness of how a suspect's prior probability of guilt affects likelihood of a mistaken identification, which may have implications for their ability to make race-neutral evaluations of preidentification evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).