Opinion ID: 444351
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: the in-court identification of ellis

Text: Ellis contends that the government witness' in-court identification of him as a participant in the first smuggle should have been suppressed because it was the product of an impermissibly suggestive procedure. Most of the evidence of Ellis' participation in the first smuggle was presented by an immunized government's witness who had previously testified in a grand jury hearing in Florida that Eddie the cop had been involved. Sometime before this trial, he had recalled that the trooper's name was Arnie, not Eddie. At trial the witness identified Ellis as the trooper who had participated in the conspiracy. The witness also testified that he had seen Ellis on a number of occasions in 1977 with various other conspirators at the Howard Johnson's, at DeFeo's salvage yard, and at Boston Harbor. In March 1982, seven months before trial, while bail proceedings pertaining to Ellis were being held, the government witness was shown five photographs and asked if he could identify the locations of the resorts depicted therein. The pictures had been seized in Ellis' apartment and the questions were alleged to be efforts to ascertain whether Ellis was likely to flee if he were set free on bail. Two of the pictures shown to the witness prominently featured Ellis. In one picture, he and two other people are shown standing in a swimming pool with their arms folded over the side on the deck. In the other, Ellis is standing with his arm over the shoulder of another man in front of the pool. In both pictures, Ellis is wearing a T-shirt and hat with the words Massachusetts State Trooper printed in large letters on them. In the picture in which Ellis is in the pool, the writing on the T-shirt and hat are hidden by Ellis' arms and the shadows. In the other picture the state police insignia on Ellis' T-shirt is the main attraction, it is directly in the center of the picture, it is printed in large letters on the larger of two people in the photograph, and the photograph contains no other printing or visually arresting features. The two pictures of Ellis do not appear to be especially conducive to location identification. The other three photographs shown to the witness contain unusual landmarks or place names; the Ellis pictures show little more than Ellis, a motel swimming pool, cement deck, and several palm trees. Moreover, the government witness was not pictured in any of the photographs and there was no evidence that he had ever been to any of the locations. After viewing the photographs, the witness wrote on the back of the Ellis pictures, Arnie the state trooper with hat on on one and Arnie State Trooper the taller on the left on the back of the other. Neither picture was identified by location. The court's voir dire revealed that other photographs without defendants which were more conducive to location identification had been available but not shown to the witness. The DEA agent who caused the pictures to be shown to the witness testified in voir dire that he had not told the prosecutors that he had sent the pictures to be identified. Although the government purports to argue that the pictures shown to the government witness did not constitute a suggestive identification procedure, we think such contention strains credulity. Therefore, the central question is whether, under the totality of the circumstances, the identification was reliable even though the confrontation procedure was suggestive. Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 107, 97 S.Ct. 2243, 2249, 53 L.Ed.2d 140 (1977); Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188, 201, 93 S.Ct. 375, 383, 34 L.Ed.2d 401 (1972). The factors to be considered in evaluating the likelihood of misidentification include: (1) the opportunity of the witness to view the criminal at the time of the crime; (2) the witness' degree of attention; (3) the accuracy of the witness' prior description of the criminal; (4) the level of certainty demonstrated by the witness at the confrontation; and (5) the length of time between the crime and the confrontation. Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. at 199-200, 93 S.Ct. at 382-383. In applying the Biggers test, we find that the government witness testified that he had been in the presence of Ellis at least half a dozen times in the course of May and June of 1977. On these occasions the witness had ample opportunity to observe Ellis in adequate light from a variety of distances. As a fellow conspirator in the smuggle, the government witness certainly had the opportunity and incentive to accurately identify Ellis. Presumably, the presence of a state trooper in a drug smuggling conspiracy is relatively rare and it behooved the witness to be able to recognize the correct trooper while acting in furtherance of the conspiracy. The witness exhibited no uncertainty in his identification of Ellis at trial seven months after making the photograph identification, although he did admit to testifying in another proceeding that the policeman involved was named Eddie, not Arnie or Ellis. Weighing against an untainted identification is the fact that the witness had apparently never given a physical description of Ellis before viewing the pictures and that nearly five years had elapsed between the smuggling transactions and the photographic identification. We recognize that a five-year gap between the crime and the photographic identification is very much greater than would ordinarily be permissible to find an in-court identification reliable. Here, however, unlike most cases involving suggestive identification challenges, the witness was not identifying an assailant or potential assailant he viewed only once under stressful circumstances. See, e.g., Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188, 93 S.Ct. 375, 34 L.Ed.2d 401 (1972) (rape victim viewed assailant fifteen minutes to one-half hour); Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 97 S.Ct. 2243, 53 L.Ed.2d 140 (1977) (undercover police officer viewed drug dealer five to seven minutes); Simmons v. United States, 390 U.S. 377, 88 S.Ct. 967, 19 L.Ed.2d 1247 (1968) (bank employees viewed bank robber five minutes or less); Velez v. Schmer, 724 F.2d 249 (1st Cir.1984) (friends of victim viewed murderer a minute or more). The in-court identification was made by a coconspirator with whom Ellis had spent considerable time in nonstressful circumstances. Although we find the utterly superfluous photographic display of the Ellis photographs came perilously close to tainting the in-court identification, on balance we do not feel that the government witness' identification of Ellis denied him a fair trial. There can be no doubt that the eye witness testimony linking Ellis to the second smuggle was admissible.