New Indiana Law Reforms Eyewitness Identification Process
Law introduces key protections to ensure more reliable identifications
A new Indiana state law, set to take effect in July 2025, will require police departments across the state to change the way they do identification lineups. The aim of the legislation, Senate Bill 141, is to prevent people from being wrongfully accused or convicted of crimes. There have been over 3,600 wrongful convictions across the country since 1989. Fifty-one of them have been in Indiana, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Starting July 1, the new law requires police to do three new things during the eyewitness identification police lineup process:
- Police must give proper instructions to the witness
- People shown in a lineup must have similar features, so they can't look vastly different than the alleged suspect.
- The witness will be required to sign a statement saying they have identified the person with confidence.
"We started working with the Indiana Public Defenders Counsel actually last year and during the last Indiana session on this bill," Notre Dame Law professor Jimmy Gurule said. Gurule is the founder of the Exoneration Justice Clinic, and helped to draft SB 141, which was authored by State Senators Liz Brown (R-District 15), Susan Glick (R-District 13) and Mike Bohacek (R-District 8).
Indianapolis business owner Aronta Bridges spent the last two years working to rebuild his hauling business and provide for his family, after he said he was wrongfully accused of a crime in March 2023, and faced a potential 17 1/2 years in jail for identity theft and auto theft of a U-Haul truck.
"It has been a very challenging for me to get everything back together again," Bridges said, and expressed hopes his case can shed light on the impact of a wrong identification can have on everyday people. "It can't just be, 'We made a mistake' or 'We're sorry,'" Bridges said. "You know, that's not going to work when someone has lost something in that situation."
Read more about the new law "Indiana Passes First Eyewitness Identification Reform Bill, Tackling a Leading Cause of Wrongful Convictions" at the Innocence Project website.
