Court Opinion

ID: 9482544
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:53:48.741714+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:03.776284
License: Public Domain

JON O. NEWMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the result:
In this habeas corpus challenge to a state court conviction, the District Judge sensibly avoided deciding the constitutional question of whether a witness’s identification of clothing was tainted by an imper-missibly suggestive viewing of the suspect and ruled that any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Because I consider the constitutional issue far more troubling than do my colleagues and because the harmless error ruling made by Judge Stanton is so plainly correct, I concur in the judgment on the ground decided by the District Court.
The issue is not whether constitutional error occurs whenever a witness is shown one item of clothing and asked if he can *182identify it as having been worn by the perpetrator of a crime. I agree with Chief Judge Oakes that identification of clothing is not a procedure so inherently conducive to irreparable mistaken identification as to create the basis for a claimed denial of due process. The issue here concerns the significance of taint. The state trial court ruled that the viewing of the suspect by the witness Gloria Salinas in a one-person show-up was impermissibly suggestive. That Court suppressed Salinas’s identification of the defendant. The defendant contends that the vice of focusing a witness’s eye upon just one suspect and thereby unduly influencing the witness to identify the suspect carries over when, immediately after a one-person show-up, the witness is shown one article of clothing and, not surprisingly, identifies it as clothing worn by the perpetrator during the crime.
The fact that Johnson has no precise precedent for his claim of taint does not defeat the claim. The prosecutor is equally lacking in a precedent rejecting the claim of taint. The one reported decision bearing on the issue, Sanchell v. Parratt, 530 F.2d 286 (8th Cir.1976), lends some support to Johnson’s position, though it is distinguishable. In Sanchell, a voice identification was suppressed on the ground that it was tainted by an unduly suggestive show-up of the suspect that immediately preceded the voice identification. It may well be that the risk of misidentifying a voice is greater than the risk of misidentifying clothing in many instances, although I would suppose that where the voice is distinctive and the clothing is not, the risks are reversed. However the risks are assessed, Sanchell indicates that the taint from an unduly suggestive show-up is cause for some concern.
Moreover, Johnson’s claim raises two issues of taint. In addition to the risk that Salinas was unduly influenced to identify the clothing by the suggestiveness of the immediately preceding one-person show-up, there is also the concern that the clothing identification, regardless of its reliability, was tainted simply by the fact that it was the result of police misconduct. In some circumstances, evidence is deemed tainted by prior police misconduct even if the reliability of the subsequent evidence is not challenged. See Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721, 89 S.Ct. 1394, 22 L.Ed.2d 676 (1969) (fingerprints obtained during unlawful arrest). Evidence is suppressed if it was obtained by exploitation of “the primary taint,” see Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 486, 83 S.Ct. 407, 416-17, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963) (statements obtained during unlawful arrest). Whether the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine applies to evidence obtained as a result of an unduly suggestive show-up is a substantial issue.
Since the evidence of Johnson’s guilt is so overwhelmingly established without any weight at all placed on the clothing identification, I would not reach any aspect of Johnson’s taint claim and would affirm solely on the ground that any error as to the clothing was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.