Court Opinion

ID: 9673607
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:15:03.830162+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:23.035697
License: Public Domain

ON REHEARING.
ALMON, Judge.
Since original deliverance of this cause the United States Supreme Court in Kirby v. Illinois, 406 U.S. 682, 92 S.Ct. 1877, 32 L.Ed.2d 411, decided June 7, 1972, has apparently restricted its view of the right to counsel so as to not now require the presence of counsel at confrontations for identification purposes prior to “the initiation of judicial criminal proceedings.” It is unclear from the holding in Kirby just when a person becomes the subject of a “criminal prosecution.”
On that question Mr. Justice Stewart wrote as follows:
“The initiation of judicial criminal proceedings is far from a mere formalism. It is the starting point of our whole system of adversary criminal justice. For it is only then that the Government has committed itself to prosecute, and only then that the adverse positions of Government and defendant have solidified. It is then that a defendant finds himself faced with the prosecutorial forces of organized society, and immersed in the intricacies of substantive and procedural criminal law. It is this point, therefore, that marks the commencement of the ‘criminal prosecutions’ to which alone the explicit guarantees of the Sixth Amendment are applicable.
*338It should be pointed out however that the portion of the opinion from Kirby above quoted was not concurred in by a majority of the Supreme Court.
In the instant case we are of the opinion that the right to counsel did not attach at the time the lineup was- conducted in view of the holding in Kirby even though the defendant was being held under some sort of “vagrancy” charge. We pretermit at this time consideration, of the question of whether counsel must be present at identification confrontations held after a- person has been charged by affidavit and warrant with the specific offense in question but before indictment.
We are of the opinion that the lineup -conducted by -the police in the instant case was not so unnecessarily suggestive and conducive to mistaken identification as to be a denial of -due process of law. Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, 87 S.Ct. 1967, 18 L.Ed.2d 1199.
We, therefore grant the State’s application for rehearing and affirm the judgment of conviction.
Application granted; opinion extended.
Affirmed.
CATES, P. J., and TYSON arid HARRIS, JJ., concur.