Court Opinion

ID: 9427019
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:28.174385+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:04.536377
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
concurring in the result.
I concur in the result, and I join the Court in remanding the case for a determination as to whether the adjudged error was *234harmless. On the record of this case, the conclusion that it was harmless seems to me to be almost inevitable; that, however, is for the courts below to decide in the first instance.
I feel, furthermore, that the Court in its opinion has made more out of this case than its facts warrant. As the Court points out, ante, at 228, the State of Illinois has conceded, Brief for Respondent 8, and n. 1; Tr. of Oral Arg. 32, 34, that the so-called preliminary hearing on December 21, 1967, at which the victim testified, was the initiation of adversary judicial criminal proceedings against petitioner. At trial, the victim testified that at that hearing she had identified petitioner as her assailant. This being so, the ban of Gilbert v. California, 388 U. S. 263 (1967), applies in full force and in itself would require the remand the Court orders. With the State’s concession, I see no need to wrestle with the issue whether what took place on December 21 marked the initiation of formal proceedings against petitioner in the sense of Kirby v. Illinois, 406 U. S. 682 (1972), and thereby possibly to become entangled with the ghost, unmentioned by the Court, of the holding in Coleman v. Alabama, 399 U. S. 1 (1970), determined not to be retroactive in Adams v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 278 (1972).
One last word: I disassociate myself from the implication— twice appearing in the Court’s opinion, ante, at 222 and at 229 — that there is something insignificant or unreliable about a rape victim’s observation during the crime of the facial features of her assailant when that observation lasts “only 10 to 15 seconds.” Time, of course, is always a comparative matter. Fifteen seconds perhaps would mean little in the identification of scores of separate individuals participating in an illegal riot. But 10 to 15 seconds of observation of the face of a rapist at midday by his female victim during the commission of the crime by no means is insufficient to leave an accurate and indelible impression on the victim. One need only observe another person’s face for 10 seconds by the clock to know this. *235To the resisting woman, the 10 to 15 seconds would seem endless. No female victim of a rape, given that period of daylight observation, will ever believe otherwise. I therefore cannot be a party to the Court’s degradation, and almost literal dismissal, of so vital an observation.