It’s a staple of just about every crime drama: a victim or witness walks into a dark room, where they are prompted by a police officer to identify the perpetrator of a horrible crime out of a lineup of similar-looking scofflaws. Criminal identified, case closed.

If only it were that simple. According to the Innocence Project, mistaken eyewitness identifications played a role in at least 75 percent of the 301 wrongful convictions nationwide overturned based on DNA evidence. D.C. hasn’t escaped the reality of this problem: in 2010, a 14-year-old arrested and mistakenly identified by a police officer was hit with 41 charges related to a mass shooting on South Capitol Street that left five people dead. Additionally, at least three people in D.C. have been released from prison after their convictions—secured on the bases of mistaken identifications—were overturned.

Now the D.C. Council wants to do something about it. Yesterday Council Chairman Phil Mendelson introduced legislation that would require the Metropolitan Police Department to adopt best practices for lineups, including mandating that no police officer in the room at the time of an identification know which of the people in the lineup is the true suspect. (This is known as a “double-blind” test.)

The bill would also require that lineup fillers—the non-suspects—have similar features to the suspect, that they all perform a specific action (like speaking) if one is asked to do so and that investigators not attempt to influence a witness’ identification of a person in a lineup. Additionally, lineups will be limited to six people, while photographic lineups will be capped at eight. If any of the rules are violated, mandates the bill, the identification could not be used in court.

In 2007 D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier signed a 16-page General Order outlining steps that officers should take to ensure accurate eyewitness identification, including mandating that officers not in any way prompt a witness or tell them if they picked correctly or not. But civil libertarians say that the order—the first in three decades on the issue—failed to mandate that double-blind conditions be observed.

This won’t be the first time that the council wades into the issue: similar legislation was introduced in 2004, 2008 and 2009, though none of the bills ever received a full vote.