Court Opinion

ID: 9476876
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:07:55.604745+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:33.600630
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the result:
Although the habeas corpus rules apparently preclude me from disagreeing with the result, I certainly do not share the confidence with which the majority seems to reach its conclusion, for this case presents one of the most marginal identification scenarios I yet have encountered.
The majority asserts that the findings of the Indiana Supreme Court are fairly supported by the record. Yet the report of Officer Lorraine Loney, who investigated the crime, stated in her report made on the night of the attack that during the brief time the light was on the rape victim “was unable to get a good look at [her assailant].” In her pretrial deposition, the victim claimed she had only “a few seconds” in the light of her dining room to view the perpetrator from a distance of four feet. The term “a few seconds” was clarified by the victim at trial almost two years later to mean “ten seconds.”
Quite mysteriously, two out of five justices of the Indiana Supreme Court dissented from the affirmance of the conviction on direct appeal in considerable measure because the victim was allegedly unable to identify Dooley at a first line-up prior to the stipulated suggestive second line-up. The majority here says — apparently correctly — that the “first” line-up involved a different victim and another alleged rape. Yet the Indiana Supreme Court never responded to the version of events upon which the dissenters based their view.
Under the rules we are required to follow in habeas corpus cases, I cannot say the facts that majority relies on are clearly wrong. The evidence here, however, is anything but “clear and convincing” and the outcome — our approval of a conviction *451and resulting twenty-year sentence based on such an unreliable identification — is certainly troubling.