Opinion ID: 1241922
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Pre-Trial Confrontation Between Daddis and the Defendant

Text: At the suppression hearing, defense counsel argued that the pre-trial confrontation between Daddis and the defendant which occurred immediately prior to the latter's arrest was so unnecessarily suggestive and conducive to irreparable mistaken identification as to constitute a violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment as applied to the states through the Fourteen Amendment. See Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, 302, 87 S.Ct. 1967, 1972, 18 L.Ed.2d 1199, 1206 (1967). The trial court suppressed both Daddis' testimony about the pre-trial confrontation and his in-court identification of the defendant based on that confrontation. [4] We conclude that the trial court erred in suppressing Daddis' testimony and in-court identification. It is true that one-on-one confrontations for the purpose of pre-trial identification of criminal suspects are not favored, but they are not per se violative of due process. Roper v. Beto, 454 F.2d 499 (5th Cir. 1971); People v. Williams, 183 Colo. 241, 516 P.2d 114 (1973). In this case, our review of the totality of the circumstances surrounding the arrest of the defendant and the police conduct which led to his identification by Daddis indicates that the defendant's due process rights have not been denied. The victim assisted the police throughout their investigation. It was the victim who first identified the defendant prior to the arrest, and there is no indication that the police suggested to him that they harbored independent suspicions as to the defendant's involvement in the robbery. Only a short time period elapsed between the crime and the identification of the defendant. At the outset of the investigation, the victim described the defendant to the police and stated that he had recognized him as a patron of the Jolly Feast restaurant. In these circumstances, we find the one-on-one pre-trial confrontation to have been fully justified, and any suggestiveness in the confrontation countervailed, by the necessity for the police swiftly to determine whether they were on the right track, so that they could properly deploy their forces, by the interest in sparing innocent suspects the ignominy of arrest by allowing eyewitnesses to exonerate them, and by the slight probability of misidentification of the defendant by Daddis. Simmons v. United States, 390 U.S. 377, 384-385, 88 S.Ct. 967, 971-972, 19 L.Ed.2d 1247, 1253-1254 (1968). See also Stovall v. Denno, supra ; United States v. Jones, 517 F.2d 176 (D.C.Cir.1975); United States v. Perry, 449 F.2d 1026 (D.C.Cir.1971); People v. Williams, supra . The district court's order granting the defendant's suppression motion is reversed.