Applying Eyewitness Identification Research to the Legal System: A Glance at Where We Have Been and Where We Could Go

Psychologists have made attempts to apply psychological knowledge on eyewitness issues to the legal system for over a century. But it was not until the 1990s that an organization of psychological researchers (the American Psychology-Law Society) made concrete recommendations in a white paper concerning eyewitness identification. These recommendations, along with the discovery of wrongful convictions from mistaken identification, have shaped policies and practices in many jurisdictions across the U.S. We discuss the white paper recommendations and how those recommendations have held up over time. Then, we discuss a more recent idea concerning the need for a reasonable-suspicion requirement before subjecting an individual to the inherent risk of an identification procedure.