Initial lineup rejections evolving into confident identifications at trial: The role of jury instructions in keeping...

Witnesses can confidently identify a defendant in court despite having rejected the defendant in a photo lineup during the initial police investigation. Even when informed of the witness's prior inconsistent statement, jurors often disregard it and convict based on the confident courtroom identification. We investigated this phenomenon and a strategy for minimizing it.

We predicted that laypeople hold the false belief that heightened emotional arousal can temporally block face-recognition memory, leading them to vote guilty despite the witness's initial lineup rejection. We also expected that a revised version of the recently introduced reflector variable instructions would help jurors understand an initial lineup rejection and reduce wrongful convictions.

Using mock-trial transcripts, Study 1 (N = 45, Prolific) asked mock jurors how they would explain the witness's inconsistent statements. Study 2 (N = 289, Prolific) manipulated the witness's initial identification outcome (immediate high-confidence identification vs. lineup rejection) and the type of jury instruction (reflector variable vs. control) to examine whether reflector variable instructions help mock jurors better discriminate between evidence of guilt and evidence of innocence.

In Study 1, participants tended to attribute testimonial inconsistencies to stress, suggesting that laypeople are generally unaware that memory contamination may cause these inconsistencies. In Study 2, the interaction between instruction type and initial identification outcome was significant (OR = 3.73, 95% CI [1.29, 10.78]). Under reflector variable instructions, mock jurors were more likely to render a guilty verdict following an immediate high-confidence identification than after a lineup rejection (OR = 3.89, p < .001), whereas no such difference emerged under control instructions (OR = 1.04, p = .91).

Witnesses cannot correctly explain their inconsistent memory decisions, and jurors cannot correctly interpret them. The new instructions emphasizing the importance of the initial memory test may be a useful starting point. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).