Lineup construction, administration and evaluation are more than just common sense. Let legal psychologists do their job

Eyewitnesses can be mistaken. This is not always due to unfavorable witnessing conditions or witness factors. In this article, we present three cases in which expert witnesses advised the court against the use of existing identification testimony as evidence. The reasons were deficits in the lineup construction or administration, errors in the interaction with the witnesses, and errors in the interpretation of the lineup outcome. Based on the analogy of lineups and psychological experiments, we argue that lineup construction, administration, and evaluation belong in the hands of legal psychologists. This is the only way to prevent that eyewitness testimony is compromised by procedural errors, and to avoid wrongful convictions as a consequence of erroneous identifications. As long as this is not the case, we advise criminal defense lawyers that it is in the best interest of their clients to submit lineups to scrutiny by expert witnesses with a background in experimental legal psychology.