Opinion ID: 2316663
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: picard identification

Text: The defendant argues that Picard should not have been allowed to testify in-court that defendant had the same upper lip as the assailant, since Picard did not have personal knowledge of the assailant's identity. [6] It is undisputed that the most that Picard could identify was the assailant's upper lip, the area from beneath the nose to the top of the assailant's lip. Picard never claimed to be able to identify the assailant's whole face. Again, the poor lighting contributed to this poor identification. Picard said on several occasions that he saw the upper lip for one to two seconds; another time he said anywhere from ten to sixty seconds. The trial justice ruled that Picard had an insufficient opportunity to view the assailant and thus he did not allow Picard to make an identification of Ranieri. Yet the trial justice did believe that Picard had an opportunity to view the assailant's upper lip and so he allowed Picard to testify that defendant's upper lip was the same as the assailant's. The defendant argues that Picard made his original out-of-court full-face photo-array identification about two weeks after defendant's picture appeared in the Jornal (which would make it about three weeks after the date of the crime). Picard admits he cut out and saved defendant's picture from the Journal before he saw the crime array. The defendant argues, therefore, that Picard's testimony is unreliable since Picard is testifying about what he saw in the Journal, not what he saw at the crime scene. The defendant also claims that the dark conditions, Picard's admittedly short viewing time, and the fact that Picard only saw the lip portion of the assailant's face all warrant a finding that Picard never had the opportunity to view the assailant. Given the fact that Picard could only identify the upper-lip area of the assailant and that other men in the photo array admittedly had similar upper lips, we do not see how Picard could possibly make his identifications uninfluenced by the Journal picture. We are mindful that at Picard's original photo-array identification at the police station, he was not asked to pick out the assailant's upper lip but, rather, he was asked to pick out the assailant's face. He was not shown pictures of just upper lips. He was shown complete faces. To make matters worse, Picard testified that all the faces in the array had similar upper lips. Given that an upper lip in and of itself is rarely a characteristic by which one can uniquely identify one individual from another, we do not see how Picard could identify the assailant's face just from knowing his upper lip. The best that Picard could have and should have been allowed to testify to is that defendant has an upper lip similar to the assailant's, not that the defendant's upper lip is the assailant's upper lip. In the instant case, Picard testified that Ranieri's upper lip was the same as the assailant's upper lip. To the jury, saying that Ranieri's and the assailant's upper lips are the same is tantamount to saying that Ranieri's and the assailant's faces are the same. But we emphasize that even if Picard was restricted to testifying that Ranieri's upper lip was similar to the assailant's, such testimony would be unduly prejudicial because there is nothing particularly distinctive about the assailant's upper lip in this case. The weakness of using a nondistinctive body part for identification purposes is demonstrated by this case in particular because Picard testified that he was only 70 percent sure of his original full-face identification since he only saw the upper lip. We find that Picard's upper-lip identification must have been tainted by the Journal photos because we believe any witness would be unable to identify any defendant when the sole element of personal knowledge is the viewing of a nondistinctive upper lip. Picard admitted that the other members of the the full-faced photo array had similar nondistinctive upper lips. However, he admittedly had no personal knowledge of the overall facial characteristics of the assailant. Accordingly, his testimony should have been suppressed under Rule 602 of the Rhode Island Rules of Evidence for lack of personal knowledge.