Criminal Procedure
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Consider the following cases:
A gunman robbed a bank. No one saw him before he entered or after the left. The police soon arrived and canvassed the area. A witness, who lived behind the bank at the time, told police he saw a car that resembled the defendant's. The witness said the car looked like it needed a new muffler, and her saw it race through the alley. Thw witness also desribed the car as having a colored licence plate tag advertising a car store. through the distinctive tag, the police wre able to trace the ownership to the defendant. Based on the witness's subsequent identification of the car, the police arrested the defendant later that afternoon. The following morning, as one of the officers assembled a photo lineup, a teller from the bank telephoned and stated she had seen a report of the defendant's arrest on television the previous night, and she believed he was the robber. The officer drove to the bank and took the teller's statement. While there, another teller identified the defendant from a photo in a newspaper article about his arrest. She also gave the officer a written statement. A temporary worker at the bank also indentified the defendant as the robber and gave her statement to the police. After these identification, the officer never completed the lineup preparation because the police decided it would be futile. A few days later, the officer returned to the bank and showed one of the tellers a photograph of the defendant which she said depicted the robber.
SHOULD THE IN-COURT IDENTIFICATIONS OF THESE THREE TELLERS BE SUPRESSED? WHY?
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Solution Summary
Criminal Procedure is expressed through a scenario.
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My personal feeling is that the identifications should be suppressed. However that may not be the law. Here is how Pennsylvania handles it, check your own jurisdiction for differences.
Here are the grounds:
Identification of Persons/Defendants:
To be sure, a pretrial procedure in which a witness views a photograph of the accused in an effort to "elicit identification evidence is peculiarly riddled with innumerable dangers and variable factors which might seriously, even crucially, derogate from a fair trial." United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218, 228, 87 S.Ct. 1926, 18 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1967); see also Simmons v. United States, 390 U.S. 377, 88 S.Ct. 967, 19 L.Ed.2d 1247 (1968); Gilbert v. California, 388 U.S. 263, 272, 87 S.Ct. 1951, 18 L.Ed.2d 1178 (1967). If such an identification procedure of the accused is "so unnecessarily suggestive and conducive to irreparable mistaken identification, [the accused] is denied due process of law." Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, 302, 87 S.Ct. 1967, 18 L.Ed.2d 1199 (1967). It is clear, then, that photographic identification of a person is unduly suggestive if, under the totality of the circumstances, the ...
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