New Jersey is a leader in addressing problems with eyewitness testimony

Those guidelines say that an administrator not involved in the case should conduct the lineup and that individual photos of suspects should be shown sequentially, instead of as part of an array of photos shown all at once.

The guidelines also say that witnesses should be told the perpetrator might not even be among the suspects in a photo array or lineup.

Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has no statewide guidelines on lineups.

Pennsylvania also is one of only two states that have barred expert testimony on the evolving science of memory and identification, said Rago, who said Tennessee and a federal appeals court in the West also prohibit such testimony.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said in a 1954 case that jurors can view an eyewitness with caution if the witness did not have a good view or had equivocated on the identification. But the court had not broached issues such as cross-racial identification.

Veteran criminal-defense lawyer Jules Epstein, a law professor at Widener University, examined the issue of mistaken identification in a research paper comparing how Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware have dealt with the problem.

He concluded that, except in New Jersey, too little has been done to prevent miscarriages of justice.

But, he noted, the problem is nothing new.

Epstein, among the experts called to testify in New Jersey, dug up a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case from 1896.

In that case, the court called identification "one of the least reliable" kinds of evidence and one of the "more difficult subjects" for the justice system.