Court Opinion

ID: 9758078
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:10:15.425139+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:58:34.886646
License: Public Domain

BECK, Judge,
concurring:
The majority finds that it is able to decide that a photographic identification was not impermissibly suggestive although the Commonwealth produced for review only nineteen of approximately 700 photographs which were shown to the victim who identified appellant as the perpetrator. While I concur in that result in this particular case, I write separately out of a concern that this Court does not thereby inadvertently enunciate a rule which affords too much flexibility to the police in conducting photo identifications.
The ultimate standard by which all identification evidence is to be assessed is one of reliability. Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 97 S.Ct. 2243, 53 L.Ed.2d 140 (1977). Photographic identification evidence should be suppressed if *574the identification procedure “is so impermissibly suggestive as to give rise to a very substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification.” Simmons v. United States, 390 U.S. 377, 384, 88 S.Ct. 967, 971, 19 L.Ed.2d 1247 (1968).
In Commonwealth v. Jackson, 227 Pa.Super. 1, 323 A.2d 799 (1974), we held that the Commonwealth’s failure to produce the photo array at the suppression hearing violated the defendant’s rights to due process of law, because it deprived the defendant of the opportunity to challenge the identification procedure effectively.
More recently, this Court in Commonwealth v. Flynn, 314 Pa.Super. 162, 460 A.2d 816 (1983), held that Jackson did not compel the suppression of a photographic identification where the Commonwealth produced at the hearing only a portion of the photo array shown to the victim, especially considering that the victim in Flynn had a much better opportunity to observe at the scene of the crime than , the victim in Jackson.
I agree with the majority that the instant case is closer to Flynn than to Jackson. However, I caution that Flynn should not be read as a holding that it always sufficient for the Commonwealth to produce some selected portion of the photo array at the suppression hearing. Rather, the inquiry should be whether sufficient evidence has been made available to defense counsel and to the court by which to evaluate the identification procedure. Facilitating a fair evaluation of the identification procedure is, after all, the underlying rationale for the requirement to produce any photographs. See Jackson.
In the instant case, the Commonwealth produced at the hearing only nineteen out of the several hundred photographs shown to the witness. The Commonwealth argues that it has complied with the spirit of Jackson, and that the court is entitled to conclude the identification procedure was proper, regardless of the nature of the several hundred other photos, because the victim “still had to pass over eighteen non-suggestive photographs before identifying defendant’s photograph” (Commonwealth’s Brief at 8). I *575believe we must state clearly that this is not the case. The pertinent question is whether the array as a whole was unduly suggestive, not whether certain photographs were suggestive.
In the instant case, the suppression court had available for review only a tiny fraction of the several hundred photos which were originally displayed in forty-three separate folders. In this situation, the nature of the missing photographs and the patterns and sequences in which they were displayed are crucial. Appellant’s photograph could have been conspicuously placed in a prominent position among a group of very dissimilar pictures, while the eighteen “non-suggestive photographs” were tucked away elsewhere in the array. Under such circumstances, the identification procedure could be suspect.
In Flynn, on the other hand, the police produced sixteen of the twenty-five photos shown to the victim. Twenty-five photos is a small enough number to be spread out on a table and viewed as a single array. In Flynn the court was safe in concluding that the sixteen-photo array was not suggestive, and that the production of nine additional photos was highly unlikely to make the twenty-five-photo array as a whole impermissibly suggestive.
I do not suggest that the Court can or should state a mathematical rule providing that a certain minimum fraction of the photo array be produced at the suppression hearing. Rather, I suggest that when the photo array is only partially reproduced in the courtroom, the possibility exists that the portion reproduced is not representative of the array as a whole, and that that possibility increases as the relative number of photographs produced decreases.
When only a small portion of the array is produced, the requirements of Jackson and Flynn are satisfied only if there is adequate evidence presented to the suppression court that the sample is in fact reasonably representative of the array as a whole. This evidence will most commonly consist of testimony by the identifying witness and the police officers involved that the missing photographs were *576similar in character to those produced at the suppression hearing.
In the instant case, there is sufficient evidence in the record for the suppression court to conclude that the nineteen photographs produced are adequately representative of the array as a whole. I therefore agree with the majority that Mrs. Frazier’s photographic identification of appellant was properly admitted, noting further that Mrs. Frazier, like the victim in Flynn, had an excellent opportunity to view appellant under good conditions at close range. I agree with the majority’s disposition of the other issues raised by appellant, and I therefore join the majority’s excellent opinion in all other respects.