Opinion ID: 2390875
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the motion to suppress the in-court identification

Text: The defendant argues that the eyewitness-identification testimony of Sharon Voller should not have been admitted into evidence because it was tainted not by any police or prosecutorial action but as a result of the suggestions made by Derek Anderson and the photograph he displayed to Voller after the robbery. It is important to note that the trial justice specifically found during the course of a preliminary hearing that a lineup conducted by the Newport police on June 4, 1987, was the fairest lineup in terms of the similarity of appearance of all persons included therein that the judge had seen in his fifteen years on the bench. The trial justice also found that Voller's in-court identification of defendant was reliable and based upon her recollection of her encounter with defendant completely independent of the pre-trial procedures including both the photograph presented by Anderson and the lineup conducted by the Newport police on June 4, 1987. This finding would insulate the identification testimony from any exclusionary rule promulgated by the Supreme Court of the United States, even if a pre-trial procedure was unnecessarily suggestive as in Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 97 S.Ct. 2243, 53 L.Ed.2d 140 (1977); State v. Camirand, 572 A.2d 290 (R.I. 1990); State v. Taylor, 562 A.2d 445 (R.I. 1989); State v. Nicoletti, 471 A.2d 613 (R.I. 1984). Nevertheless, since this case presents an issue of first impression in this jurisdiction, we believe that some analysis of the question of suggestive procedures by private persons and their effect upon admissibility of otherwise relevant evidence should be undertaken. This analysis will require a review of the formation and application by the Supreme Court of exclusionary rules that have been fashioned to protect constitutional interests. There seems little doubt that the Court's exclusionary rule relating to evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment was directed entirely at the deterrence of illegal police procedures, whether the evidence illegally obtained was reliable or unreliable. See, e.g., Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987); United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984); Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976). Because the exclusionary rule in respect to Fourth Amendment violations is based upon the deterrence of illegal police or prosecutorial actions, it is not triggered by the actions of private persons however egregious they may be. United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 104 S.Ct. 1652, 80 L.Ed.2d 85 (1984); Walter v. United States, 447 U.S. 649, 100 S.Ct. 2395, 65 L.Ed.2d 410 (1980); Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971); Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U.S. 465, 41 S.Ct. 574, 65 L.Ed. 1048 (1921). Such activities would withstand not only Fourth Amendment but due-process analysis as well. See Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U.S. 157, 166, 107 S.Ct. 515, 521, 93 L.Ed.2d 473, 483 (1986). A similar prophylactic rule was fashioned by the Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), designed to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination from dilution or erosion as a result of in-custodial interrogation by the police or law-enforcement authorities. This prophylatic rule was determined by the Court, after a due-process analysis, to be inapplicable in a situation in which, without any prosecutorial or police intervention, a defendant who suffered from chronic schizophrenia confessed to a murder because of prompting by the voice of God. Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U.S. at 166, 107 S.Ct. at 518, 93 L.Ed.2d at 480. In that case Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for a majority of the Court, enunciated the principle that in the Fifth Amendment area, as made applicable to the states by the conduit of the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the exclusionary rule should not apply absent police conduct causally related to the confession. The Chief Justice's comment on this issue is instructive: Our `involuntary confession' jurisprudence is entirely consistent with the settled law requiring some sort of `state action' to support a claim of violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Colorado trial court, of course, found that the police committed no wrongful acts, and that finding has been neither challenged by respondent nor disturbed by the Supreme Court of Colorado. The latter court, however, concluded that sufficient state action was present by virtue of the admission of the confession into evidence in a court of the State. 702 P.2d [722], at 728-729. The difficulty with the approach of the Supreme Court of Colorado is that it fails to recognize the essential link between coercive activity of the State, on the one hand, and a resulting confession by a defendant, on the other. The flaw in respondent's constitutional argument is that it would expand our previous line of `voluntariness' cases into a far-ranging requirement that courts must divine a defendant's motivation for speaking or acting as he did even though there be no claim that governmental conduct coerced his decision. 479 U.S. at 165-66, 107 S.Ct. at 521, 93 L.Ed.2d at 483. The foregoing comment strongly supports the proposition that a violation of due process can occur only if state action is involved. This state action cannot be supplied simply by admitting the alleged involuntary confession into evidence. We regard this principle as being applicable and, indeed, dispositive of the issue before us. Nevertheless, before we conclude our analysis, let us consider the history of the exclusionary rule devised by the Supreme Court of the United States in respect to identification procedures. The first such exclusionary rule was created in the cases of United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218, 87 S.Ct. 1926, 18 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1967), and Gilbert v. California, 388 U.S. 263, 87 S.Ct. 1951, 18 L.Ed.2d 1178 (1967). These two cases were written as part of a trilogy of cases authored by Justice Brennan in conjunction with a third case, Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, 87 S.Ct. 1967, 18 L.Ed.2d 1199 (1967). In Stovall, Justice Brennan described these exclusionary rules in the following manner.  Wade and Gilbert fashion exclusionary rules to deter law enforcement authorities from exhibiting an accused to witnesses before trial for identification purposes without notice to and in the absence of counsel. Id. at 297, 87 S.Ct. at 1970, 18 L.Ed.2d at 1203-04. Essentially Wade and Gilbert prohibited the introduction of eyewitness-identification testimony that had been tainted by official pretrial procedures without notice to counsel or the opportunity to obtain counsel to be present at the lineup in respect to post-indictment procedures. This rule was designed not only to deter unfairness at such identification procedures but also to protect the Sixth Amendment right to counsel at a critical stage of the prosecutorial effort. Although Justice Brennan's language was broad enough to apply to any pretrial confrontation, the court retreated from this perceived position in the case of Kirby v. Illinois, 406 U.S. 682, 92 S.Ct. 1877, 32 L.Ed.2d 411 (1972), when a plurality held (over Justice Brennan's dissent) that this Sixth Amendment right to counsel and its accompanying exclusionary rule would be applicable only after the commencement of adversarial judicial proceedings. The Court held in Kirby that a showup conducted immediately after arrest was not subject to the right to counsel enunciated in Wade and Gilbert because adversarial judicial proceedings had not commenced and, therefore, the right to counsel had not attached. A parallel doctrine based upon due process was also enunciated in Stovall, wherein the Court decided that the Wade and Gilbert exclusionary rules would not be retroactive but that a confrontation for identification (a one-person showup to a hospitalized victim) would be subject to attack if the confrontation was so unnecessarily suggestive and conducive to irreparable mistaken identification that [the suspect] was denied due process of law. 388 U.S. at 302, 87 S.Ct. at 1972, 18 L.Ed.2d at 1206. The Court held in Stovall that the presentation of Stovall to the wounded victim, though suggestive, was a necessary and imperative requirement because of the totality of circumstances including the possibility that the victim might expire at any moment. This same type of analysis was suggested for photographic arrays in Simmons v. United States, 390 U.S. 377, 88 S.Ct. 967, 19 L.Ed.2d 1247 (1968), wherein the right to counsel was not applicable and a photographic display was under consideration. The due-process analysis was again utilized in the lineup case of Foster v. California, 394 U.S. 440, 89 S.Ct. 1127, 22 L.Ed.2d 402 (1969). This case involved a pre- Wade lineup in which, under the totality of circumstances, the Court, through Justice Fortas following the Stovall principle, held that the suggestive elements in a three-man lineup conducted by law-enforcement officers made it all but inevitable that the victim would identify the suspect whether or not he was in fact the perpetrator. The Court held that this procedure so undermined the reliability of the eyewitness identification as to violate due process. It should be noted that in all the foregoing cases the offending conduct, whether violative of the right to counsel or due process, was carried out by governmental rather than private action. The Supreme Court of the United States has never had occasion to consider the effect of private action upon due process in an identification context. However, we are of the opinion that the analysis given by Chief Justice Rehnquist in Colorado v. Connelly, supra , considering the admissibility of a confession but applying due-process principles, would be so analogous as to be dispositive of this issue. In respect to the nonprosecutorial-influenced confession, the Chief Justice rejected a challenge based upon lack of voluntariness and, in doing so, observed that suppressing the defendant's statements would serve absolutely no purpose in enforcing constitutional guarantees and said further that to exclude such evidence would require the establishment of a brand new constitutional right. In commenting upon the wisdom of the establishment of such a right, the Chief Justice gave the following admonition: We have previously cautioned against expanding `currently applicable exclusionary rules by erecting additional barriers to placing truthful and probative evidence before state juries   .' Lego v. Twomey, 404 U.S. 477, 488-489 (1972). We abide by that counsel now. `[T]he central purpose of a criminal trial is to decide the factual question of the defendant's guilt or innocence,' Delaware v. Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. 673 (1986), and while we have previously held that exclusion of evidence may be necessary to protect constitutional guarantees, both the necessity for the collateral inquiry and the exclusion of evidence deflect a criminal trial from its basic purpose. Respondent would now have us require sweeping inquiries into the state of mind of a criminal defendant who has confessed, inquiries quite divorced from any coercion brought to bear on the defendant by the State. We think the Constitution rightly leaves this sort of inquiry to be resolved by state laws governing the admission of evidence and erects no standard of its own in this area. A statement rendered by one in the condition of respondent might be proved to be quite unreliable, but this is a matter to be governed by the evidentiary laws of the forum, see, e.g., Fed.Rule Evid. 601, and not by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. `The aim of the requirement of due process is not to exclude presumptively false evidence, but to prevent fundamental unfairness in the use of evidence, whether true or false.' Lisenba v. California, 314 U.S. 219, 236 (1941). We hold that coercive police activity is a necessary predicate to the finding that a confession is not `voluntary' within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We also conclude that the taking of respondent's statements, and their admission into evidence, constitute no violation of that Clause. Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U.S. at 166-67, 107 S.Ct. at 521-22, 93 L.Ed.2d at 484. Applying these principles to the case at bar, we conclude that absent state action, no constitutional violation that would give rise to the creation of an exclusionary rule has been committed. This does not mean, of course, that the trial justice was incorrect in conducting a preliminary hearing that was within the exercise of his discretion, see People v. Blackman, 110 A.D.2d 596, 488 N.Y.S.2d 395 (1985), even though such private action might not have required such a preliminary hearing. It is conceivable that identification evidence might become so unreliable as to fall below the threshold of competence. R.I.R.Evid. 601. This indeed would be a rare occurrence and would involve the question of lack of personal knowledge as set forth in Rule 602. Probably the best guarantee of due process in such a situation as that presented by the case at bar would be the opportunity for cross-examination in order to expose a witness's lack of credibility. This opportunity is further buttressed and enforced by the requirement that the state prove every element of the crime, including the identity of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt. The guarantee is also supported not only by the requirement of a unanimous jury verdict but also by the power of the trial justice to review the evidence, including credibility, on a motion for new trial. Thus, the due-process rights of defendant in this case, as in all criminal cases, are adequately protected from violations of due process without the fashioning of additional exclusionary rules, whether pursuant to the Federal or the Rhode Island Constitution. Consequently the trial justice did not err in declining to suppress the eyewitness identification of Sharon Voller.