Court Opinion

ID: 9461990
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:29:23.793907+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:21.111900
License: Public Domain

COFFIN, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I share the court’s view that witness Lund’s “uncontrolled confrontation” with appellant in the hallway and the recognition inquiry put to her by the assistant U. S. Attorney were regrettable. But, assuming good faith on the part of the prosecutor, I cannot say that this is any more prejudicial than identification in the preliminary hearing itself, where appellant’s sitting next to his counsel would be equally suggestive. Yet the cases have not gone so far as to proscribe such identification.
More disturbing, because so unnecessary, is the failure here of the govern*585ment to have arranged a proper and prompt line-up for the two witnesses. Instead, it let pass two months before asking Lund to identify at the preliminary hearing and six months before resorting to a photographic spread in a distant city for Jurenas. As behavioral scientists have often demonstrated, the passage of time is an unreliable editor of remembered perception. See Buckhout, Eyewitness Testimony, 231 Scientific Amer. No. 6, at 23 (December 1974).
While the use of a “less reliable procedure where a more reliable one may be available”, Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188, 199, 93 S.Ct. 375, 382, 34 L.Ed.2d 401 (1972), is not fatal to the government’s efforts to elicit a later in-court identification, I think it implicit in Neil, and in Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, 302, 87 S.Ct. 1967, 18 L.Ed.2d 1199 (1967), that the necessity for a suggestive procedure is a factor to consider in reviewing “the totality of the circumstances”. 388 U.S. at 302, 87 S.Ct. 1967. United States v. Jackson, 448 F.2d 963, 966 (9th Cir. 1971).