Court Opinion

ID: 9678099
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 06:11:43.341963+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:54:51.206208
License: Public Domain

OPINION
The appellant was convicted in the trial court, after separate jury trials, of committing the offenses of possession of methamphetamine, trial court Cause No. 291,321, for which punishment was assessed by the trial court at three and one-half (3 1/2) years *Page 423 
confinement in the Texas Department of Corrections, and aggravated robbery, trial court Cause No. 291,302, for which punishment was assessed by the trial court at eighteen (18) years confinement in the penitentiary.
Although there was an order entered to consolidate the above-styled causes, through administrative error, trial court Cause No. 291,321 was not retained by this Court, but was instead transferred to the Corpus Christi Court of Appeals.
On June 30, 1982, the Corpus Christi Court reversed the conviction in 291,321 and remanded it for a new trial. Neither the State nor the appellant petitioned this Court for discretionary review, and the decision in that cause became final. The opinion of the Corpus Christi Court, however, does not implicate nor affect the appellant's conviction for aggravated robbery.
Thus the appeal that appellant brings to this Court is from his conviction for aggravated robbery in trial court Cause No. 291,302. Appellant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to support the conviction, and in two grounds of error, alleges that the trial court erred in admitting into evidence certain lineup and in-court identification testimony of the victim and two police officers, in violation of appellant's rights under the state and federal constitutions. We disagree and affirm.
Viewed in a light most favorable to the verdict, the record reflects that the victim Barbara Kramen, on the morning of January 12, 1979, was walking across the parking lot of her apartment complex when she noticed the appellant sitting on some steps. Ms. Kramen testified that the appellant appeared to have been drunk or hungover and she walked right past him. The victim stated that, as she was putting things into her Corvette automobile, the appellant suddenly came up by her side and told her to "Drop everything, Babe, and give me the keys." She testified that the appellant had his left hand in his pocket and his right hand contained a black revolver, which to her appeared to be a .38 caliber weapon. She gave the appellant her keys and testified that he climbed into her car, backed out of her parking space and left the apartment complex.
The victim further testified that she immediately contacted the police, gave them a detailed description of her assailant, and "pressed charges." She testified that approximately ten days to two weeks after the robbery, she was asked to view a lineup conducted at the downtown police station. She stated that she was immediately able to identify the person who had robbed her, and she testified she was also able to identify a picture of the appellant as the person who took her car.
A neighbor of the victim, a Mr. Robert Ferris, testified that he saw a man getting into the victim's car on the morning of the robbery, and although he could not identify the assailant, the description that he gave to the police matched the description given by the victim. The evidence to support the jury's finding of guilt is clearly sufficient. Appellant's ground of error number three is therefore overruled.
Appellant's grounds of error number one and two may be grouped together, and the issue, reduced to its elemental form, is set out thusly: Can a defendant's face be tainted and suppressed in a criminal case, in the same way that inanimate evidence, say the product of an unreasonable search, such as a weapon or contraband, be tainted and suppressed?
The facts presented in United States v. Crews,445 U.S. 463, 100 S.Ct. 1244, 63 L.Ed.2d 537 (1980) are virtually indistinguishable from the facts in the instant case.
In Crews, after she had been accosted and robbed at gunpoint by a young man in the women's rest room on the grounds of the Washington Monument, the victim reported the incident to the police. Several days later, after two other incidents of robbery and assault in the rest room had occurred, United States Park Police, who were aware of the rest room incidents and the similar descriptions of the robber which *Page 424 
all three victims of the rest room incidents had given to the police, questioned a young man whom they observed in the area of the rest rooms at the Washington Monument, and, after learning the young man's name, his age, and that he was not in school because he had just "walked away," the officers allowed him to leave, but shortly thereafter detained him when a tour guide, in response to a request by one of the officers, identified the man as one he had seen hanging around the area of the Monument on the date of the first robbery. The officers then summoned a detective who was investigating the rest room robberies.
Upon arriving at the scene the detective attempted to take a photograph of the man which could be displayed to the victims of the robberies, but weather conditions thwarted his efforts. Thereafter, the man was taken into custody, ostensibly because he was a suspected truant, and transported to police headquarters, where the police briefly questioned him, obtained a photograph of him, telephoned his school, and then released him, without ever charging him with an offense during his detention of approximately one hour. The following day, the victim of the first robbery identified the photograph of the man as being the one whom had robbed her, and thereafter, at a lineup, the woman again positively identified Crews as the robber.
Prior to trial for armed robbery, Crews moved to suppress all identification testimony, contending that his detention on the truancy charges had been merely a pretext to allow the police to obtain evidence for the robbery investigation. The trial court ruled that the detention constituted an arrest without probable cause, and, held that the products of such arrest, namely the photographic and lineup identifications, could not be introduced at trial, but with respect to the victim's ability to identify the defendant in court, the trial court ruled that an in-court identification (emphasis added) of the defendant by the victim at trial would be admissible. Crews was then convicted of armed robbery on this victim's testimony. On appeal, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed the conviction, holding that the in-court identification testimony should have been excluded as a product of a violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court then granted certiorari on the government's petition.
Justice Brennan, writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, found the application of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine by the Court of Appeals to be misplaced. Justice Brennan observed:
 "A victim's in-court identification of the accused has three distinct elements. First, the victim is present at trial to testify as to what transpired between her and the offender, and to identify the defendant as the culprit. Second, the victim possesses knowledge of and the ability to reconstruct the prior criminal occurrence and to identify the defendant from her observations of him at the time of the crime. And third, the defendant is also physically present in the courtroom, so that the victim can observe him and compare his appearance to that of the offender. In the present case, it is our conclusion that none of these three elements `has been come at by exploitation' of the violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. [citation omitted.]
 "In this case, the robbery victim's presence in the courtroom at respondent's trial was surely not the product of any police misconduct. She had notified the authorities immediately after the attack and had given them a full description of her assailant. The very next day, she went to the police station to view photographs of possible suspects, and she voluntarily assisted the police in their investigation at all times. Thus this is not a case in which the witness' identity was discovered or her cooperation secured only as a result of an unlawful search or arrest of the accused. Here the victim's identity was known long before there was any official misconduct, and her presence in court is thus not traceable to any Fourth Amendment violation. (emphasis added.) *Page 425
 "Nor did the illegal arrest infect the victim's ability to give accurate identification testimony. Based upon her observations at the time of the robbery, the victim constructed a mental image of her assailant. At trial, she retrieved this mnemonic representation, compared it to the figure of the defendant, and positively identified him as the robber. No part of this process was affected by respondent's illegal arrest. In the language of the `time-worn metaphor' of the poisonous tree, Harrison v. United States, 392 U.S. 219, 222, 88 S.Ct. 2008 [2010], 20 L.Ed. 1047 (1968), the toxin in this case was injected only after the evidentiary bud had blossomed; the fruit served at trial was not poisoned."
In the case at bar, the victim was robbed some eight days prior to the appellant being detained andillegally1 (emphasis added) arrested on unrelated charges. The victim immediately notified police of the robbery and gave them a highly-detailed description of the perpetrator. Additionally, the victim testified at trial that her encounter with the appellant lasted a full five minutes, and she testified she would "never forget" his face. Corroborating and buttressing the testimony of the victim was her neighbor, who, although unable to identify the appellant, gave a detailed description of the assailant that matched the description given by the victim. Given these facts, it is indeed difficult to distinguish the instant case from United States v.Crews, supra, and its holding.
It is of particular interest to note that the same District of Columbia Court of Appeals, albeit with a different composition, that reversed Crews' conviction, made the following observation twenty years ago in another case with regard to the suppression of eyewitness testimony:
 "Courts have gone a long way in suppressing evidence but no case as yet has held that a jury should be denied the testimony of any eyewitness to a crime because of the circumstances in which his existence and identity were learned . . . .
 "Here no confessions or utterances of the appellants were used against them; tangible evidence obtained from appellants, such as the victim's watch, was suppressed along with the confessions. But a witness is not an inanimate object which, like contraband narcotics, a pistol or stolen goods, `speak for themselves.' The proffer of a living witness is not to be mechanically equated with the proffer of inanimate evidentiary objects illegally seized. The fact that the name of a potential witness is disclosed to police is of no evidentiary significance per se, since the living witness is an individual human personality whose attributes of will, perception, memory and volition interact to determine what testimony he will give." Smith and Bowden v. United States, 324 F.2d 879 at 881. (D.C. Cir. 1963.)
Decided shortly after Smith and Bowden, supra, was, of course, the Supreme Court case of Wong Sun v. UnitedStates, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963).Wong Sun, supra, articulated the guiding principle for determining whether evidence derivatively obtained from a violation of the Fourth Amendment is admissible against the accused at trial:
 "The exclusionary prohibition extends as well to the indirect as the direct products of such invasions." 371 U.S. at 484 [83 S.Ct. at 416].
This premise is recognized by Justice Brennan inCrews, when he observes:
 "This is not to say that the intervening photographic and lineup identifications — both of which are conceded to be suppressible fruits of the Fourth Amendment violation — could not under some circumstances affect the reliability of the in-court identification and render it inadmissible as well." 445 U.S. at 472, 100 S.Ct. at 1250. *Page 426
Significant to the disposition of the instant case, however, Justice Brennan continues to expound within the very same paragraph in Crews as enumerated ante:
 "But in the present case the trial court expressly found that the witness' courtroom identification rested on an independent recollection of her initial encounter with the assailant, uninfluenced by the pretrial identifications, and this determination finds ample support in the record. In short, the victim's capacity to identify her assailant in court neither resulted from nor was biased by the unlawful conduct committed after she had developed that capacity." 445 U.S. at 473, 100 S.Ct. at 1251.
In the case sub judice, although the trial court did not make express findings as in Crews, the judge held an exhaustive pretrial hearing, and then, although concluding that appellant had been arrested without probable cause, overruled appellant's precisely worded motion to suppress the identification. Additionally, the record very graphically supports the conclusion that the victim's in-court identification of the appellant was untainted by any police misconduct.
The concurring opinions filed by Justices Powell and White inCrews — opinions joined respectively by Justice Blackmun and by Justice Rehnquist and Chief Justice Burger, bring us closer to a resolution of appellant's first two grounds of error and to a resolution of the query posed at pg. 423 ante, viz:
 "We held in Frisbie v. Collins [citation omitted], `that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court's jurisdiction' unlawfully. A holding that a defendant's face can be considered evidence suppressible for no reason other than that the defendant's presence in the courtroom is the fruit of an illegal arrest would be tantamount to holding that an illegal arrest effectively insulates one from conviction for any crime where an in-court identification is essential. Such a holding would be inconsistent with the underlying rationale of Frisbie from which we have not retreated." [citations omitted] 445 U.S. at 478, 100 S.Ct. at 1253.
We find the instant case is settled by Justice Brennan's majority opinion in Crews, and perforce the victim's in-court identification of the appellant had no causal relationship to the illegal arrest, nor was there any primary taint under Wong Sun, supra. We further specifically adopt Justice White's reasoning in Crews, and hold that a defendant's face cannot be a suppressible fruit of an illegal arrest. Appellant's first two grounds of error are overruled.
The Judgment of the trial court in Cause No. 291,302 is affirmed.
CLINTON, J., dissents.
1 For a more detailed discussion of the facts surrounding appellant's arrest and interrogation, see Judge Teague's dissenting opinion.