Abstract
The criminal investigation must be efficient in the task of identifying criminal offenders and providing elements for the prosecution, without, however, violating the rights of those suspects. The police procedures currently adopted in police investigations are oversimplified, especially in investigations related to street crime, which usually focused on obtaining confessions of suspects and witness statements. Failures of police procedure are endorsed by the criminal prosecutor and produce their most dramatic effects with a judicial decision, mainly in the cases in which the victim of the crime is invited to a formal identification of the suspect. This framework motivated, in Brazil, the Superior Court of Justice to overrule an old precedent, in order to, from then on, demand the faithful fulfillment of the rules of the Criminal Procedure Code. The following steps in correcting such errors depend, however, on a transformation of the police procedures, on prosecutors overseeing this police work, and on the adoption of exclusionary rules by the judges. Furthermore, they must rely on scientific knowledge of the dynamics of mistaken identifications.
Keywords
Criminal investigation; failures; formal identification of suspects; jurisprudence overruling; Superior Court of Justice; new procedures by police officers; presumption of innocence; prosecutor; judiciary