I'd never heard of this before, but scent lineups are pretty much what they sound like. Instead of asking a victim to identify a suspect from a lineup, police use a K9 to sniff a piece of evidence and then pick the suspect from a group of people, USA Today reports. One practitioner -- Keith Pikett, a lawman from Texas -- has worked hundreds of cases with his dogs.
He's also involved in a pair of federal lawsuits arguing the scent lineups don't work. Defense lawyers have found a couple of cases where the suspects were singled out by the dogs, but later cleared by other methods.
Here's a piece on scent lineups from forensic-evidence.com ...
An older piece from Fortune, which says that K9s are wrong 30 to 40 percent of the time ...
A post from the awesomely named "Grits For Breakfast" blog about the case ...
