Opinion ID: 610877
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: instruction on identification

Text: 41 Appellant Hutchinson also challenges the District Court's refusal to give his requested instruction on identification. At the close of evidence, Hutchinson requested an instruction on identification, asserting that it is the theory of the defense that the police arrested the wrong individual. The government argued that there was no evidence, or even an implication, of misidentification in this case. The District Court agreed, adding that giving the instruction sought would confuse the jury. 42 As a general rule, the refusal to give an instruction requested by a defendant is reversible error only if the instruction (1) is substantively correct; (2) was not substantially covered in the charge actually delivered to the jury; and (3) concerns an important point in the trial so that the failure to give it seriously impaired the defendant's ability to effectively present a given defense. United States v. Grissom, 645 F.2d 461, 464 (5th Cir.1981); see also United States v. De La Vega, 913 F.2d 861, 872 (11th Cir.1990), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 2011, 114 L.Ed.2d 99 (1991); United States v. Gibson, 726 F.2d 869, 874 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, 466 U.S. 960, 104 S.Ct. 2174, 80 L.Ed.2d 557 (1984). 43 More to the point, we have held that a District Court's refusal to give an identification instruction is not erroneous in the absence [302 U.S.App.D.C. 357] of special difficulties in the identification of the defendant. See United States v. Boney, 977 F.2d 624, 632 (D.C.Cir.1992). In Boney, we upheld a refusal to give an instruction on identification in circumstances very similar to those in this case. The appellant in Boney executed a single transaction face-to-face with a police officer in an area lit by street lights; the officer radioed a description of appellant to his team; and shortly thereafter the officer identified appellant at the scene of the arrest. Id. 44 Predictably, Hutchinson attempts to distinguish his case from Boney. Here, the officer who observed Hutchinson was not face-to-face with him, but was in an observation post; the observed transactions in this case involved six different people; and the officer had been involved in over two hundred arrests over the past three years, ninety percent of which were drug-related. Hutchinson cites as controlling Salley v. United States, 353 F.2d 897 (D.C.Cir.1965), where we required an identification instruction in a narcotics case in which the undercover officer had been involved in as many as one hundred cases, because [t]he possibility of error due to mistake and the fallibility of human memory is obvious. Id. at 898-99. He urges that the facts in this case are much more like the facts in Salley than in Boney. 45 We hold that Boney governs this case. Although in Salley we stated that a requested instruction specifically bringing this defense of mistaken identity to the jury's attention in a narcotics case must be given, id. at 899, in Boney we described that holding as restricted to fact patterns that reveal[ ] some special difficulty in the identification. Boney, 977 F.2d at 632. There were no special difficulties in identification in this case calling for a special instruction on identification. The officer who identified Hutchinson had a clear view of him engaging in narcotics transactions; there was no delay between identification and arrest; and the officer identified Hutchinson at the scene of the arrest. We reiterate that an instruction on identification is compelled only when there are special difficulties in the identification of a suspect and identification is a major issue in the case. Such was not the case here.