Lege committee told model eyewitness ID policy mostly well received

The House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee held a hearing this week on the implementation of its eyewitness identification legislation and invited just one witness: Rita Watkins from Sam Houston State University - whose team at the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas drafted the model policy mandated under HB 215, a bill authored by the outgoing chairman of the committee, Pete Gallego, who is leaving the Lege after 22 years to run for Congress.

Surprisingly, there was really only one question (with a few variants) posed to Watkins: They wanted her to respond to the letter from McAllen police chief Victor Rodriguez, discussed in this Grits post. Watkins told me later the committee hadn't communicated to her to prepare for that line of questioning, but she answered well, perhaps in part because LEMIT had already prepared a extensive FAQ (pdf) responding to the Chief's unfortunately ill-informed concerns. Plus, she's been through a long process which included convening a "working group" prior to writing the model policy that included both Chief Rodriguez and your correspondent (in my role at my day job working for the Innocence Project of Texas). Then they held a public hearing at the capitol before finalizing it. At this point, Rita and her staff have been all the way around the block on this subject, and from my observation she's handled her critics - myself included, at some points in the process - with admirable aplomb.

Bottom line: The Chief wishes the bill had not passed and does not understand it, falsely believing (or at least portraying) that his department is required by law to adopt the "model policy." They're not. It's just a recommendation. If he doesn't like it, he can adopt something else. LEMIT did what the Legislature told them to do: Write a "detailed written policy" with specific "procedures" for a number of different aspects of eyewitness identifications based on scientific research and established best practices. The committee seemed satisfied with Watkins' answers and didn't appear to give much credence to the McAllen chief's oddball letter once she explained his various misconceptions.

Anyway, it sounds like there's not a major groundswell out there among law enforcement in opposition to the model policy, at least so far. Watkins said she'd been surprised to receive just eight phone calls from police chiefs about the model policy after it was published. Five of them were congratulatory, she said, and the other three were from Chief Rodriguez. Though LEMIT dubbed its response to Rodriguez an "FAQ," apparently as a practical matter those weren't questions being asked all that frequently.