Court Opinion

ID: 9466897
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:31:57.491713+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:02.016296
License: Public Domain

SCHROEDER, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree with the majority that two of the identifications should not have been admitted and that the judgment must be reversed. With regard to the third, Jacobson, identification, I cannot agree that further proceedings on its admissibility, more than eighteen months after the robbery, are warranted. I would hold that Jacobson’s identification should have been excluded as well.
Jacobson may well have had the opportunity to view the robber with great attentiveness, but the opportunity lasted only one minute and she was not wearing her glasses. The inconsistency between her post robbery description and her identification of the defendant weeks later, coupled with her lack of certainty, strongly indicate that the appearance of the robber never registered sufficiently to enable her to make any reliable identification. These facts must also be viewed in the light of impermissibly suggestive circumstances: the witness was present when an F.B.I. agent identified photographs of the defendant as the suspect; she saw the defendant handcuffed prior to trial. Her first positive identification of the defendant occurred, not coincidentally in my view, at trial.
I would therefore hold that all three identifications are inadmissible. Such a result would be fully in accord with Manson v. *873Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 97 S.Ct. 2243, 53 L.Ed.2d 140 (1977), as well as the most recent holdings of this Court analyzing various factors influencing reliability: Green v. Loggins, 614 F.2d 219 (9th Cir. 1980); Mata v. Sumner, 611 F.2d 754 (9th Cir. 1979); Washington v. Cupp, 586 F.2d 134 (9th Cir. 1978), cert. denied, 441 U.S. 909, 99 S.Ct. 2003, 60 L.Ed.2d 379 (1979); United States v. Crawford, 576 F.2d 794 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 851, 99 S.Ct. 157, 58 L.Ed.2d 155 (1978); United States v. Barron, 575 F.2d 752 (9th Cir. 1978).