ABSTRACT
Scent lineups have been used in European countries since the beginning of the 20th century and are a common part of police practice in the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Russia, and other Eastern European countries. In the United States, scent lineups as formal procedures have been used by some law enforcement agencies since the 1970s,1 but U.S. courts have largely seen scent lineups as an extension of tracking cases, and lineups probably began in the United States from station identi cations that occurred after a tracking dog’s eld assignment was completed. Although dogs in modern scent lineups may be “scented to” an item from a crime scene in the same way as tracking and trailing dogs are scented before they begin following a path, scent identi cation dogs do not follow footsteps or a plume, but rather are presented with (usually) ve to seven objects that individuals including a suspect have handled and must choose the object that has a similar scent on it, or some of the same components to the scent, as the item taken from the crime scene.
