Lineup Filler Selection

Lineup fillers prevent unreliable witnesses from guessing the identity of the police suspect and should allow for a fair recognition test for those witnesses who do remember the culprit. The primary strategies for selecting fillers for criminal identification lineups are presented in this entry. The suspect-matched and perpetrator-description-matched strategies are two methods of constructing lineups that have been compared by researchers. Additionally, care should be taken to ensure that the structure of the lineup is uniform across members. To assess the fairness of a lineup, several indices that measure lineup bias and lineup size have been developed.