Implementing the Lessons from Wrongful Convictions: An Empirical Analysis of Eyewitness Identification Reform Strategies

Using eyewitness misidentification – one of the leading contributors to wrongful convictions and the most thoroughly and scientifically studied of those contributors – as the focus, this Article begins to fill that void by empirically analyzing a variety of approaches to eyewitness identification reform that have been attempted. This Article establishes a taxonomy of reform efforts that includes top-down, command-and-control legislation; entirely bottom-up, essentially laissez-faire approaches to identification practices; and a hybrid that builds on emerging notions of democratic experimentalism – a form of “new governance” – to foster bottom-up experimentation by imposing obligations on police while giving them the freedom to develop their own locally tailored responses to the problem of eyewitness error