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Miramar police wanted Camille Hamilton to be as sure as they were that the man who shot her in the face and left her for dead was on the other side of the two-way mirror.
Detectives had no doubt that Kevin Pratt was their man. They say Pratt left his DNA behind when he used duct tape to bind the four victims he shot for $80 during a robbery on Encino Street in August 2009. Watching the sole surviving victim pick the suspect out of a police lineup merely gave Detective Steve Toyota an additional bit of reassurance that he had the right guy.
Hamilton cried. It was Pratt, she told detectives. She was certain.
These days, live lineups are more familiar to movie and TV audiences than they are to real crime victims in South Florida. While the practice never became extinct in the region, it has diminished considerably since the 1970s and 1980s, officials and legal experts said.
Today's victims are far more likely to point to a picture than a person.
In Palm Beach County, live lineups are used "very, very rarely," said State Attorney's Office spokeswoman Sarah Alsofrom.
One key South Florida law enforcement official is looking to dust off the seldom-used practice.
Lt. Bob O'Neil, a supervisor in the Broward Sheriff's Office Criminal Investigations Division, said live lineups have advantages that can't be matched by their two-dimensional counterparts.
"During any investigation, when the opportunity exists, detectives should do it," said O'Neil, who argues that live lineups are more reliable and play better to judges and juries.
But reinvigorating the practice is no easy task, O'Neil said. It's not as though there was a specific decision to drop live lineups; a number of factors — cost, convenience and legal issues among them — worked together to make them less practical than photo arrays, he said.
"It's difficult to do a live lineup unless the guy's already in custody," he said. "By that time, you've usually already made the identification, usually with photos."
With a suspect in custody, Broward deputies walk through the jail, usually accompanied by the suspect's lawyer. "It's a strategic move to enhance the credibility of the lineup," O'Neil said of bringing the defense lawyers along. "They can't claim we picked people who looked so different that it made their clients stand out."
Photo lineups can work in one of two ways, police and defense lawyers said.
In a photo array, the suspect's picture is included among six shown to a victim or witness at the same time. The second method is to show the photos one at a time, reducing the likelihood that the victim will merely choose the photo that looks most like the perpetrator. Often, the detective showing the photos is not a part of the investigation, making it impossible for him or her to influence the outcome.
"When I started as a detective, we used Polaroids," O'Neil said. The pictures were often grainy, and details like skin tone were easily distorted by lighting. Use of photographs increased over the years as the quality of photographs improved.
"We have easier access to photos than we do to live bodies," said Lt. Norris Redding, spokesman for the Hollywood Police Department. "If I've got a suspect who's a 55-year-old man of a certain race and a certain weight and a certain build, finding five people who match those features is not easy, and it is time-consuming. Finding five pictures from the Broward jail or the Florida Department of Corrections is much easier."
Defense lawyers are sometimes just as likely as investigators to request a live lineup, but for different reasons. It's a boost to the defense if the victim fails to pick a suspect out of a lineup. And even if the victim does pick the right suspect, lawyers are already geared to challenge the identification.
"Humans are inherently flawed," said Gordon Weekes, an assistant Public Defender in Broward. "Victims want finality and closure. Psychologically, they want to pick someone because they want it to be over."
In most cases, investigators are likely to use photos early in the investigation, before a suspect has been named or arrested. While it's possible to get a suspect in a live lineup before he's arrested, it's no small feat.
"I wouldn't even know how to do one if the suspect was not in custody," said Toyota, the Miramar detective who brought the shooting victim to an upstate jail to identify Pratt.
The use of photo lineups tends to cripple live lineups, said O'Neil. Once a victim has seen a suspect's photo, any lineup that takes place afterward is tainted – the victim may now choose the live suspect who most closely matches his memory of the photograph rather than his memory of the actual crime.
The Pratt investigation was an exception to that. According to court documents, the surviving victim failed to pick Pratt out of a photo lineup, possibly because he had a full beard in the photo that was used. That was a year before the live lineup in which she positively identified Pratt.
Pratt's lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Bruce Raticoff, said he will challenge the lineup. "A poorly designed lineup procedure increases the likelihood of an irreparable misidentification, which results in a greater likelihood of a wrongful conviction and a miscarriage of justice."
