Court Opinion

ID: 9740328
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:32:29.737798+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:17.499165
License: Public Domain

T. E. Brennan, J.
(concurring). We granted leave in this casé to review the validity of the procedures of photographic identification employed by the police.
My Brother’s opinion concludes:
"Because of this evidence of the victim’s knowledge before the suggestion took place viewed in combination with her previous acquaintance with defendant, we are satisfied that her in-court identification was accurate in *221spite of the employment of grossly suggestive procedures calculated (albeit unintentionally) to prompt an identification of whatever Indian was pictured.”
Despite careful study, I can see no difference between that conclusion and the conclusion reached by the learned judge of the Court of Appeals:
"An examination of the record in the present case discloses that while the procedures followed in the photographic display were suggestive, they were not impermissibly so in light of complainant’s prior opportunities to view defendant.”
This, then, is the rule of law in the case, both in the Court of Appeals and in this Court.
Where the victim was acquainted with her assailant, and described him to the police, and was in critical condition in the hospital, it was not error to permit an in-court identification of the defendant to be made, despite evidence that the defendant was the only Indian among six persons whose photographs were shown to the victim at the hospital.
The balance of my Brother’s opinion, though scholarly and exhaustive, neither adds nor detracts from the rule of law in the case.
If a Court is to avoid burdening the profession with confusing seriatim opinions, it is necessary for the Justices to ingest much unpalatable dicta. Accordingly, I have signed niy Brother’s opinion. But, if our opinions are to be of any value as precedent, they should be limited to the enunciation of those rules of law which are decisional, related to the facts in the case before us, and supportive of the result arrived at.
Levin and M. S. Coleman, JJ., did not sit in this case.