Opinion ID: 6217980
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Post-illegal arrest. Following the arrest,

Text: appellant was taken to the police station. The officer had further opportunity to observe appellant at close range at the police station as she tried to get him to go to the hospital for medical attention. 26 The majority concludes that the officer’s in-court identification of appellant as the man she observed and subsequently arrested was untainted by the illegality of his detention because it had an independent source in the officer’s observations before the officer unconstitutionally seized appellant on the bus and later at the police station. I cannot agree that these two periods of observation provide an independent source for the in-court identification that can be plucked from the totality of the officer’s engagement with appellant and deemed constitutionally separable from and untainted by the much longer period that the officer held appellant illegally. In addition to its short duration, the officer’s pre-seizure observation was from a distance and while both the officer and appellant were in motion on a busy downtown street and then, even more briefly, on the bus. In contrast, while the officer had appellant in her illegal custody, she was able to observe him up-close for a much longer period and obtained incriminating information that would have fixed his identity in her mind as the perpetrator. There was no temporal separation at all between the short pre-seizure period and the much longer period of illegal detention. The record is not clear as to the exact timing of the officer’s interaction with appellant at the police station, but it appears to have taken place in short order and lasted approximately five minutes. In any event, the officer’s observation of 27 appellant at the police station cannot be relied upon as an independent source because it followed from the illegal seizure and arrest and involved the same officer who engaged in the illegality. 1 The issue in this case is not whether the trial court should have suppressed the fact that appellant was arrested. See People v. Young, 434 N.E. 2d 1068, 1071 (N.Y. 1982) (“An illegal arrest, without more, has never been envisioned as a bar to prosecution or as a defense to a valid conviction.”) citing Crews, 445 U.S. at 474. That a defendant at trial was arrested is a given and no one doubted the chain of custody of appellant’s person from the time of arrest to trial. The relevant question 1 The interaction at the police station was not “remote” nor an administrative “intervening circumstance” unrelated to the illegal detention, as when fingerprints are taken in the normal course. The fact that the same officer who made the illegal detention was involved throughout links the interactions in a way that is relevant to the constitutional inquiry here: whether the officer had an independent basis to remember appellant when she identified him in court as the person she observed and was arrested twenty months earlier. This is not a bare “but for” argument, see ante n.9, and a far cry from the situation in United States v. Crews, 445 U.S. 463 (1980). In Crews the Supreme Court made clear that the in-court identification by the victim was not tainted by the officer’s illegal detention of the defendant because neither the victim’s presence at trial nor her identification was linked to the illegality. The victim had called the police right after the robbery and cooperated with the investigation; she had not been sought out by the police following the illegal detention, Id. at 471-72. The Court concluded that the in-court identification was admissible because “the police’s knowledge of respondent’s identity and the victim’s independent recollections of him both antedated the unlawful arrest and were thus untainted by the constitutional violation.” Id. at 477. The opposite is true in this case. 28 under the Fourth Amendment is whether the officer’s recollection at trial that the “same person” that she followed and was arrested in 2015 was “sitting here in court today” in 2017 should have been suppressed. If there had been no illegal seizure, the officer’s in-court identification would have been admissible subject to the usual cross examination and left to the jury’s determination of the officer’s credibility and reliability. But because there was an illegal seizure, the government had the burden to establish, by clear and convincing evidence, that the officer’s ability to identify appellant when the trial was held twenty months later had an independent source untainted by the illegal seizure. Wade, 388 U.S. at 240. The government has not met that burden because a holistic view of the length and conditions under which the officer observed appellant before and after the illegal seizure does not support that the officer’s recollection was free of the taint of illegality. The trial court did not address this head-on in ruling that the in-court identification was admissible, a ruling the trial court seemed to tie to the ruling that the officer could testify about the fact that appellant was arrested. On this record, it is difficult to conceive that an in-court identification so many months later was based solely on a shorter period of observation under poorer conditions before the illegal seizure and was not influenced by the much longer and closer interactions with appellant under better viewing conditions during the illegal detention at the bus stop and at the police station. Certainly, the government cannot be said to have proved so by clear and convincing 29 evidence. Cf. United States v. Crews, 445 U.S. 463, 473 & n.18 (1980) (permitting in-court identification by victim who “viewed her assailant at close range for a period of 5-10 minutes under excellent lighting conditions and with no distractions,” the defendant “closely matched the description given by the victim immediately after the robbery,” and the victim twice selected the defendant from “non-suggestive pretrial identification procedures,” with the first being one week after her observation of the assailant). Other items of evidence that were more probative of appellant’s guilt came to the government’s attention as a result of the illegal detention and were not introduced at trial: appellant’s incriminating statements caught on body-cam that someone who looked like him had committed the assault, an injury to appellant’s head that could have been caused by being hit by Mrs. Manolache’s cane, that appellant was wearing a black tank top (like the perpetrator had worn) under his white shirt, and the contents of Mr. Manolache’s wallet found in the transport vehicle to the police station. The officer’s recollection that she recognized the defendant in court as the same man she had followed and arrested on K Street was similarly tainted by the illegal seizure and likewise should not have been admitted. 30 Even though the officer’s in-court identification of appellant as the same man she followed and arrested should have been suppressed, its erroneous admission does not require reversal of appellant’s convictions. The officer’s testimony in court was fairly limited and not particularly incriminating. She testified about her (pre-illegal seizure) observation of a man who partially fit the description of the perpetrator in that he was a bald Black man, wearing long dark shorts with a stripe down the side, a black tank top and something white on his head. 2 As the trial court noted in ruling the seizure was unlawful, it was a fairly generic description that could have applied to any number of Black men in the District during an early summer month. Moreover, her observation of the man was two hours after the assault and took place in downtown 16th and K Streets, NW, a ways removed from where the assault took place by Rock Creek Park at 23rd and O Streets. Appellant does not challenge admission of the officer’s narrative of how he came to be seized. The disputed identification came when the officer testified that the man she had followed and was arrested was seated with his defense counsel. This was hardly a significant revelation. 2 When the officer detained appellant, the officer had seen neither a black tank top nor anything white on his head. At trial the officer added details about the height, weight and build of the man she observed and arrested but none of these details had been conveyed to her before the seizure. 31 The government presented much more compelling evidence of appellant’s guilt. There were several eyewitness descriptions of the robbery and the perpetrator (although none identified appellant and one failed to pick his picture from a photo array, pointing to another picture instead). There was also a video the jurors saw of a man with long striped shorts in the lobby of a building from where he was seen leaving close in time and in the direction of the assault and robbery. Although the officer testified she identified appellant from still photographs from the video, the jurors could do so for themselves and compare the man in the video with the defendant in court before them — as the prosecutor urged them to do at closing. The analysis of DNA found on the cane Mrs. Manolache used to fend off the attacker further incriminated appellant as the perpetrator. The government’s expert testified that appellant was included as a possible donor and that the probability a person would be a donor was “one in 100 million in the African-American population.” The defense relied on a “transfer theory” as an innocent explanation for the presence of appellant’s DNA on the cane, arguing the genetic material could have found its way to the cane if, for example, it had come in contact with the pavement where he had spit or close to where he had sneezed. 3 This argument was highly speculative, 3 The government did not conduct serological tests on the DNA so it was unknown whether it came from blood (which would have corroborated that appellant was the attacker Mrs. Manolache hit with her cane), saliva, or some other source. 32 however, and it was a double-edged sword as such an explanation would place the bald appellant, who wore the incriminating long shorts, close to the victims. Taken together the government’s evidence — the eyewitness descriptions, the video and the DNA — presented an overwhelming case that appellant was the perpetrator. That substantive evidence of guilt greatly overshadowed the officer’s in-court identification of appellant as the person she had observed for a few minutes and had subsequently been arrested, facts that were uncontested and did little to point to appellant’s guilt. On this record, I conclude that the verdict “was surely unattributable” to the officer’s in-court identification and its erroneous admission was therefore harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Ellis v. United States, 941 A.2d 1042, 1049 (D.C. 2008) (quoting Sullivan v. Lousiana, 508 U.S. 275, 279 (1993) (“[T]he inquiry [under Chapman] . . . is not whether, in a trial that occurred without the error, a guilty verdict would surely have been rendered, but whether the guilty verdict actually rendered in this trial was surely unattributable to the error.”) (emphasis in original). 4 4 The majority contends that appellant cannot complain on appeal that he was prejudiced by the officer’s in-court identification because at trial the defense used the officer’s description of appellant to highlight that an eyewitness was unable to identify him from a photo array. This is an argument the government has not made. Even if it were appropriate for the Court to raise this argument sua sponte, I am not sure the general principle the majority invokes is fairly applied in this case. The defense sought to suppress the officer’s in-court identification of appellant because it was the fruit of an illegal seizure, not on the grounds that she could not make a reliable identification in court. That, in fact, is the crux of the argument that the officer’s in-court testimony was tainted by the officer’s ability to observe appellant at close range and for a long period of time during the illegal detention. See supra n.2.