The Oregon Supreme Court in a unanimous decision last week upended how eyewitness identification is to be used in criminal trials. The landmark ruling shifts the burden of proof to prosecutors to show that such identification is sufficiently reliable to be admissible as evidence at trial. Misidentification is the country’s leading cause of wrongful convictions. By altering the legal standard, Oregon has set an example that other states and the federal courts would be wise to follow.

Under the previous approach, trial courts had to assume eyewitness identifications were admissible unless defendants could show that they were unreliable; trial courts also relied heavily on the eyewitnesses’ reports of their own reliability even though that was at issue.

In ruling that such evidence should be subject to stricter standards, the court took into account three decades of scientific research showing that memory and perception can be highly unreliable. “Because of the alterations to memory that suggestiveness can cause,” the court said, “it is incumbent on courts and law enforcement personnel to treat eyewitness memory just as carefully as they would other forms of trace evidence, like DNA, bloodstains, or fingerprints, the evidentiary value of which can be impaired or destroyed by contamination.”

The justices further ruled that, even if the state proves that an identification is likely to be well-founded, a judge can still bar its use if the defendant establishes that it might be the result of “suggestive police procedures.”