Title: The People v. Noel Marte

State: new-york

Issuer: New York Appellate Court

Document:

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This opinion is uncorrected and subject to revision before
publication in the New York Reports.
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No. 96  
The People &c., 
            Respondent, 
        v. 
Noel Marte, 
            Appellant.
Paul Skip Laisure, for appellant.
Camille O'Hara Gillespie, for respondent.
SMITH, J.:
We held in People v Adams (53 NY2d 241 [1981]) that
evidence of an unnecessarily suggestive police-arranged
identification of a criminal suspect must be suppressed as a
matter of State constitutional law.  We hold today that no
similar per se rule applies to an identification in which the
police are not involved.  While suggestiveness originating with
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private citizens can create a risk of misidentification, that
risk does not justify an automatic, constitutional rule of
exclusion.  
I
The victim, whom we will call Peter L., was robbed and
shot in the chest near his home.  In the months following the
robbery, he looked at hundreds of photographs shown him by the
police, not including defendant's.  He did not identify any of
the men pictured as his attacker, and eventually he gave up the
effort, telling a police officer that he did not think he would
be able to pick anyone out.
Peter's 14-year-old sister, whom we will call Margaret,
had known defendant in junior high school.  Some six months after
the crime, defendant and Margaret met again at Margaret's home,
and defendant told her, "I actually shot someone on this block." 
Margaret, who had been violating family rules by meeting
defendant, kept silent for some weeks, but then (according to her
testimony) told Peter that she thought she knew who shot him, and
showed him defendant's picture.  Peter first rejected the
suggestion, then reconsidered, took the picture from Margaret,
and decided that the person pictured was his attacker.  Margaret
reinforced this idea in a letter to her brother, quoting
defendant's admission and describing defendant as "[t]he kid that
everyone thinks shot you."  
At this point, Peter and Margaret went to the police,
who arranged a lineup, from which Peter selected defendant.  At
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trial, Peter again identified defendant as his attacker. 
Defendant's pre-trial motion to suppress identification testimony
was denied, and defendant was convicted of robbery and assault. 
The Appellate Division affirmed, and a Judge of this Court
granted leave to appeal.  We now affirm.
II
In United States v Wade (388 US 218, 236-237 [1967]),
the United States Supreme Court held that a post-indictment
lineup is "a critical stage of the prosecution," at which a
defendant is entitled to counsel.  In so holding, the Court
remarked that "[a] major factor contributing to the high
incidence of miscarriage of justice from mistaken identification
has been the degree of suggestion inherent in the manner in which
the prosecution presents the suspect to witnesses for pretrial
identification" (id. at 228).  The Supreme Court later declined
to hold, however, that the federal Due Process Clause compels the
exclusion of all pretrial identification evidence resulting from
an unnecessarily suggestive police-arranged procedure (Manson v
Brathwaite, 432 US 98 [1977]).  The Court concluded that the
admissibility of such evidence should depend on its reliability,
judged according to "the totality of the circumstances" (id. at
110, 114).  
We have interpreted the Due Process Clause of the New
York Constitution differently.  In Adams, we adopted a "rule
excluding improper showups and evidence derived therefrom," while
allowing in-court identifications "based on an independent
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source" (53 NY2d at 250-251).  Adams, like most other cases
imposing constitutional limits on identification procedures,
involved suggestiveness originating with law enforcement
officers; Adams refers specifically to "suggestive identification
procedures employed by the police" (53 NY2d at 251).  Defendant
here argues, however, that the rule of Adams should apply even
where the source of suggestion is a private citizen.
Defendant says that this broadening of Adams is
justified because the exclusionary rule applicable to suggestive
identifications -- unlike the rule applicable to coerced
confessions, or evidence obtained in an unlawful search -- is
designed not just to deter police misconduct, but to advance the
search for truth -- "to reduce the risk," as we said in Adams
"that the wrong person will be convicted" (53 NY2d at 251). 
Since a private citizen's suggestion can have the same tendency
to produce wrongful convictions as a police officer's, defendant
argues that the resulting evidence should be suppressed in both
cases.
We reject this argument.  It is true that the rule of
Adams is designed to enhance the truth finding process, and to
prevent wrongful convictions.  It does so, however, largely
through its effect on police procedures: the knowledge that
evidence resulting from unnecessarily suggestive identifications
will be suppressed leads the police to avoid such suggestiveness,
and to conduct careful and fair lineups whenever they can.  As we
said in People v Logan (25 NY2d 184 [1969]), "The exclusionary
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rules were fashioned to deter improper conduct on the part of law
enforcement officials which might lead to mistaken
identifications" (id. at 193 [citation omitted]).  While the New
York rule is different from the one adopted by the Supreme Court
in Manson v Brathwaite, the rules have an important purpose in
common: to assure that "[t]he police will guard against
unnecessarily suggestive procedures ... for fear that their
actions will lead to the exclusion of identifications as
unreliable" (432 US at 112 [footnote omitted]).
In other words, the primary goal of Adams is not to
keep evidence of flawed identifications from the factfinder, but
to assure, to the extent possible, that the identifications are
not flawed in the first place.  This goal cannot be advanced by
extending the rule of Adams to cases like this one.  The family,
friends and acquaintances of crime victims, unlike police
officers, are highly unlikely to regulate their conduct according
to rules laid down by courts for the suppression of evidence.  No
imaginable rule of law could have discouraged Margaret from
showing Peter defendant's photograph, or from telling him her
reason for doing so.  A per se rule prohibiting the use of
evidence that results from such private communications would deny
much valuable information to the factfinder, without any
corresponding gain in the fairness of the means used to identify
alleged criminals.
No authority in our Court, and none in the United
States Supreme Court, gives any support to defendant's theory
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that rules authorizing suppression of eyewitness evidence tainted
by suggestion should be applied when the suggestion did not come
from law enforcement.  Defendants rely, however, on several
federal Court of Appeals cases: Raheem v Kelly (257 F3d 122 [2d
Cir 2001]), Dunnigan v Keane (137 F3d 117 [2d Cir 1998]), United
States v Bouthot (878 F2d 1506 [1st Cir 1989]), Thigpen v Cory
(804 F2d 893 [6th Cir 1986]) and Green v Loggins (614 F2d 219
[9th Cir 1980]).  We are not bound by these decisions, and need
not decide whether we think them correct; none of them goes as
far as defendant would have us go here.
In all these cases except Dunnigan, the suggestive
identifications were the result of the actions of police or
prosecutors.  The suggestiveness was not the fault of the law
enforcement officials, but the courts held that that did not
immunize the identifications from scrutiny under the federal
"totality of the circumstances" rule.  (In Bouthot, the court
emphasized the flexibility of the federal rule -- in contrast to
a "per se rule" like the rule of Adams -- in justifying its
holding [878 F2d at 1516].)  In Dunnigan, the source of the
suggestion was a private citizen, but he was a bank security
official conducting an investigation.  Thus it could not be said
in Dunnigan, as it can here, that suppression of evidence would
serve no deterrent purpose.
Defendant also cites cases from other states, including
State v Chen (402 NJ Super 62, 952 A2d 1094 [App Div 2008]),
State v Hibl (290 Wis 2d 595, 714 NW 2d 194 [2006]) and
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Commonwealth v Jones (423 Mass 99, 666 NE 2d 994 [1996]).  Again,
we need not express agreement or disagreement with these cases;
none of them adopts the rule of constitutional law that defendant
urges here -- indeed, two of them reject it.  Chen held that the
defendant was not entitled to a Wade hearing where she had been
identified as the result of a suggestive procedure originating
with the victim's husband; the court went on to decide that a
preliminary hearing on reliability should have been held, in
discharge of the trial court's "gate-keeping function" under the
New Jersey Rules of Evidence (402 NJ Super at 81, 952 A2d at
1105).  Hibl, similarly, rejected the defendant's due process
argument but required the lower court to consider whether the
probative value of the identification evidence was substantially
outweighed by the danger of prejudice and confusion (290 Wis 2d
at 615, 714 NW 2d at 204).  Jones did not decide any
constitutional issue, but held that "[c]ommon law principles of
fairness dictate that an unreliable identification arising from
the especially suggestive circumstances of this case should not
be admitted" (423 Mass at 109, 666 NE 2d at 1001).
Here, by contrast, the only issue before us is a
constitutional issue.  Defendant has not argued, and could not
persuasively argue on this record, that the evidence he
challenges should be excluded as more prejudicial than probative
under common law rules of evidence (see People v Scarola, 71 NY2d
769, 777 [1988] ["Even where technically relevant evidence is
admissible, it may still be excluded by the trial court in the
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exercise of its discretion if its probative value is
substantially outweighed by the danger that it will unfairly
prejudice the other side or mislead the jury"] [citations
omitted]).  Like the courts in Chen and Hibl, we decline to
extend a per se constitutional rule of exclusion to cases where
an identification results from a suggestive communication by a
private citizen (see also State v Pailon, 590 A2d 858 [RI 1991]
[finding no state action, and thus no constitutional violation,
where the source of suggestion was a private citizen]; State v
Holliman, 214 Conn 38, 570 Ad 680 [1990] [finding no
constitutional violation, but examining identification for
reliability on non-constitutional grounds]).
We acknowledge, as many courts have, the real
possibility that suggestiveness that is not of police origin can
contribute to misidentifications.  But suggestiveness is only one
of the possible sources of such mistakes.  A witness to whom no
one has made any suggestion can be mistaken for any one or more
of many reasons -- an inadequate opportunity to observe, bias,
panic, racial stereotyping, difficulty in focusing on an
attacker's features, or simple bad memory, among others.  Where
no one in law enforcement is the source of the problem, nothing
justifies the per se rule defendant seeks.
Ordinarily, where the need to regulate police conduct
does not justify an exclusionary rule, our system relies on
juries to assess the reliability of eyewitnesses, aided by cross-
examination, by the arguments of counsel, and by whatever other
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evidence supports or contradicts the witnesses' testimony (see
State v Pailon, 590 A2d at 863 ["the best guarantee of due
process ... would be the opportunity for cross-examination"];
United States v Zeiler, 470 F2d 717, 720 [3d Cir 1972] ["When ...
there is no evidence law enforcement officials encouraged or
assisted in impermissive identification procedures, the proper
means of testing eyewitness testimony is through cross-
examination"] [footnote omitted]).  We have recently recognized,
however, that where a case depends wholly or largely on
eyewitness identification, the risk of error may be unacceptably
large, and we have held that, in a proper case, expert evidence
may be introduced about whether eyewitnesses are likely to err
(People v LeGrand, 8 NY3d 449 [2007]).  Perhaps other safeguards
would be appropriate in particular cases, and we do not rule out
the possibility that a court, in balancing probative value
against prejudicial effect, may find some testimony so unreliable
that it is inadmissible.  The eyewitness testimony in this case
was not of that description.  
Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Division should
be affirmed.
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Order affirmed.  Opinion by Judge Smith.  Chief Judge Lippman and
Judges Ciparick, Graffeo, Read, Pigott and Jones concur.
Decided June 11, 2009