Court Opinion

ID: 9461359
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:12:27.069743+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:01.192256
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I am of the opinion that bank manager Joseph Dente’s admission at trial that he read the newspaper account of the robbery and saw Boston’s picture in the paper after his arrest, when taken together with Dente’s further admission that he, to use the majority’s words, “could not, independent of the impressions made by the photo arrays, remember the image of the bank robber whom he had identified as Boston,” gave rise to such a substantial likelihood of misiden-tification that Dente’s in-court identification should not have been admitted. The photograph of Boston furnished by law enforcement authorities to the press for publication with the story of his arrest was impermissibly suggestive. The subsequent photo displays to Dente served to cement that suggestiveness, so as to render his identification testimony inherently suspect.1 Nevertheless, in light of the other evidence against Boston — the bait money, the testimony of the bank guard and Boston’s own confession- — I believe the error regarding the admission of the bank manager’s testimony to have been harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967); United States v. Counts, 471 F.2d 422, cert. denied, 411 U.S. 935, 93 S.Ct. 1909, 36 L.Ed.2d 395 (1973). See N. Sobel, Eye-Witness Identification 159-61 (1972).

. The Government maintains that since Dente had “experienced previous bank robberies,” he knew the importance of eyewitness identification, and that his “intense” concentration on the robbers evidenced an independent basis for his in-court identification. Dente’s own testimony (that independent of the photo arrays he could not remember the robber’s image) undercuts this argument. His previous experience, moreover, might indeed have made him less psychologically capable of clear observation and recall, particularly since it too was a subject of litigation. See United States v. Harrison, 460 F.2d 270, cert. denied, 409 U.S. 862, 93 S.Ct. 152, 34 L.Ed.2d 110 (1972). We simply do not yet know enough empirically, much less from the record in this case, to speak authoritatively about the effect of emotional and motivational states of mind upon perception or recall. See Levine & Tapp, The Psychology of Criminal Identification: The Gap from Wade to Kirby, 121 U.Penn.L.Rev. 1079, 1103-08 (1973).