Opinion ID: 674597
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Identification of Lan Tran by Elizabeth Lim

Text: 130 At the time of the robbery of San Wa Fine Jewelry in Georgia in the fall of 1990, Elizabeth Lim, daughter of the owners, was 6 1/2 years old. She testified at trial that she had been in the store playing Nintendo when seven boys entered the store, and began to rob it. In June 1991, she was shown a photo array and was asked if she recognized any of the robbers. Elizabeth testified that she looked through the book and picked out five names. She testified that she was asked to go through the book twice more, and each time she picked out the same five photos. 131 Detective Oldham, who conducted the array, testified somewhat differently. He testified that he had shown Elizabeth the array and that the first time through she selected one photo, numbered 40; she then was asked to look through the array a second time and picked out photos 8, 15, and 29; she was then asked to look through the array a third time and picked photo 24, which was the picture of Lan Tran. Oldham testified that in later appearing before the grand jury, Elizabeth selected the same five photos, i.e., those numbered 8, 15, 24, 29, and 40. Both Detective Oldham and Elizabeth testified that at no time had the officers presenting the array told Elizabeth which photos to select or otherwise tried to influence her selections. 132 Lan Tran moved to suppress the photo identification as unreliable, on the grounds that Elizabeth was not a competent or reliable witness and that the identification resulted from a suggestive procedure. The court denied the motion. As to competence, the court stated that Elizabeth struck me as a very intelligent child, a bright child who understood the process and knew what this was about, so I find her--to the extent that that is even an issue, I find her competent to testify. (Tr. 3251.) As to suggestiveness, the court noted first that the procedure as described by Elizabeth was unobjectionable. The court noted further that, even as described by Detective Oldham,I still don't find that there was anything that was impermissibly suggestive about the procedure ... [because] there were a number of participants in the robbery, and there were a number of photographs, so she was called upon to look once, picked out people, asked to look again, picked out someone else and asked to look a third time. 133 It wasn't as if anything about this procedure narrowed her attention to the defendant [Lan] Tran himself ... [.] [I]n light of the large number of photographs, I don't think it was [an] impermissibly suggestive procedure. 134 (Tr. 3252-53.) 135 Given the district court's unique ability to observe the witnesses, we see no basis on which to disturb either its finding that Elizabeth Lim, despite her youth, was competent to testify at trial and to attempt identification of the robbers or the conclusion that the pretrial identification procedures had not been suggestive. Although repeatedly asking a witness who has selected a certain photo to look again at the array might be troubling in some circumstances, for example if there were a small number of photos and only one perpetrator, the procedure described here, given the large number of photos in the array and the large number of robbers, was not impermissible. 136 At trial, Elizabeth selected photos 15, 36, 40, and 51 from the array. The government was then permitted to introduce her grand jury testimony in which she had selected photos 8, 15, 24, 29, and 40. We reject Lan Tran's suggestion that Elizabeth's inability to select the same five photos at trial was a ground for excluding her pretrial identification. The different identification at trial goes to the weight of the evidence and is properly a basis for argument to the jury, not a ground for the exclusion of a pretrial identification that was otherwise permissible. 137