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Her lineup pick replaced her memory
What she saw
In the Ronald Cotton case, the woman had a long interaction with her attacker, not a quick glance. During the attack she resolved that if she survived, she would remember his face so she could identify him later. It is the kind of situation in which memory should be sharp.
Her identification was cross-race, which is known to be less reliable than identifying someone of your own race. At the lineup she took her time and thought of it as a multiple-choice test she had studied hard for. Leading questions and the way the lineup was run may also have played a part.
The wrong face
She picked Cotton, believing he was the man who had been inches from her throat. His alibi didn't stand up, and he was found guilty. Decades later, DNA evidence exonerated him. Once she had identified his face, that face was what she remembered, so each replay of the memory used the man she had picked instead of the man she had actually seen.
She felt terrible about it. The two eventually met, and she was able to apologize to him.
Why are cross-race identifications less reliable?
Researchers have documented an own-race bias in face recognition for decades, and reviews of lineup studies find people are noticeably worse at recognizing faces of another race than their own. A leading explanation is that people get far more practice with faces from their own group, so their perception is tuned to the features that tell those faces apart. The bias shows up in lab studies where nobody is under stress, which suggests it comes from perception rather than fear. The Innocence Project reports that eyewitness misidentification played a role in a majority of the DNA exonerations it has tracked.
How can picking a face overwrite the original memory?
Memories are not stored like recordings. Each time one is recalled, it is rebuilt and saved again, and new information can slip in during the rebuilding. A face seen in a lineup is exactly that kind of new information, because it arrives while the witness is searching memory for the attacker. In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed that changing one verb in a question about a car crash changed how fast people remembered the cars going.
How can lineup procedure sway a witness?
If the officer running a lineup knows which person is the suspect, small cues can nudge the witness toward that person without anyone intending it. Feedback such as telling a witness they picked the right man afterward also inflates how confident they feel later. Because of this, researchers recommend double-blind lineups, where the person running the lineup does not know who the suspect is. A 2014 report from the National Academy of Sciences endorsed that approach.
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