Study On The Institution Of Line-up In Criminal Procedure

Line-up is a kind of investigative measures, which is usually used in investigative process by the officers. It is said by some experienced investigative officers that the line-up is used in about 90% criminal investigative processes both in China's context and in the foreign countries. So line-up plays a very important role in judicial practice, indeed.Because the line-up is depended upon subject's physical and mental instance, the accuracy of line-up conclusion is due to the abilities of subject's seeing and hearing, memory, recollection, and so on. Once the line-up conclusion is wrong, the judgment of the criminal case is possibly wrong too. Accordingly, line-up is considered as a crucial joint of criminal judicial process. Meanwhile, in China's context, because line-up is not stipulated in the criminal procedural code, the criminal investigative officers generally enforce the line-up process according to their departmental rules rather than the legal rules in judicial practice and the line-up conclusion also lacks of legal competence in criminal trial process, which results in so many trial errors in the reality. In this mean, how to reform the line-up process is a very important topic for the coming Amendment of criminal procedural law.