After Defendant was escorted from the courtroom, the trial judge denied defense counsel's motion for a mistrial and retired the jury. After deliberating for approximately four hours, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on each of the four charges. Appellate review of a trial court's denial of a motion to suppress is limited to a determination of whether the evidence is sufficient to support the trial court's findings. The facts and reasonable inferences are viewed in favor of the challenged ruling. Identification testimony will only be excluded when the pretrial identification procedure was so suggestive that it gave rise to a very substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification.
Reliability is assessed under the totality of the circumstances.
In the instant case, Defendant contends that the identification procedure was impermissibly suggestive for several reasons. Defendant first argues that the authorities' revelation to Wilson that they had a suspect in custody and had recovered a sheathed knife created the unmistakable inference that one of the men in the photographic array was the suspect. In this case, the record reveals that the authorities never informed Wilson that any of the men in the photographic array was the suspect. Further, the record does not provide any evidence that Wilson inferred from the authorities' revelation that any one of the men was the suspect. Even if such an inference was gained, it has been held that when an individual is shown a photographic array it is implicit that within those photographs is a person suspected by the authorities to be the perpetrator of the crime.