There Grace identified Shiguan Brown, a codefendant, as the man who smashed the bottle over his head and identified the defendant as the accomplice who had demanded his wallet. Those identifications occurred about one-half hour after the attack. Several days later, Grace received a summons to the Somerville District Court containing the names of the accused defendants. The name Herve Jean-Jaques caught Grace's attention and caused Grace to question the certainty of his identification. Denial of instruction on cross-racial identification.
Grace is white and the defendant is black.
The defendant requested, and the judge denied, an instruction to the effect that the jurors might consider that it is more difficult to identify a member of another race than a member of one's own. There have been laboratory studies tending to demonstrate that persons are better at observing identification markers in their own race. Our cases have left to the discretion of the trial judge whether to give juries a cross-racial identification instruction. In those cases the judges declined to give such an instruction. See Commonwealth v. Hyatt, supra at 818.