Court Opinion

ID: 9427840
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:22:04.836838+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:18:08.069101
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice White,
with whom The Chief Justice and Me. Justice Rehnquist join, concurring in the result.
The Court today holds that an in-court identification of the accused by the victim of a crime should not be suppressed as the fruit of the defendant’s unlawful arrest. Although we are unanimous in reaching this result, Mr. Justice Brennan’s opinion reserves the question whether a defendant’s face can ever be considered evidence suppressible as the “fruit” of an *478illegal arrest. Because I consider this question to be controlled by the rationale of Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U. S. 519 (1952), I write separately.
Respondent Crews was convicted after an in-court identification by the victim whose own presence at trial, recollection, and identification the Court holds were untainted by prior illegal conduct by the police. Under these circumstances the manner in which the defendant’s presence at trial was obtained is irrelevant to the admissibility of the in-court identification. We held in Frisbie v. Collins, supra, at 522, “that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court’s jurisdiction” unlawfully. A holding that a defendant’s face can be considered evidence suppressible for no reason other than that the defendant’s presence in the courtroom is the fruit of an illegal arrest would be tantamount to holding that an illegal arrest effectively insulates one from conviction for any crime where an in-court identification is essential. Such a holding would be inconsistent with the underlying rationale of Frisbie from which we have not retreated. Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465, 485 (1976); Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U. S. 103, 119 (1975).
Although the presence of Crews in the courtroom would not have occurred but for his arrest without probable cause, the in-court identification is held admissible. As I understand Part II-D of Mr. Justice Brennan’s opinion, however, the in-court identification might have been inadmissible had there not been some reason to suspect Crews of the offense at the time of his illegal arrest. Such a rule excluding an otherwise untainted, in-court identification is wholly unsupported by our previous decisions. Nor do I perceive a constitutional basis for dispensing with probable cause but requiring reasonable suspicion.
Assume that a person is arrested for crime X and that answers to questions put to him without Miranda warnings implicate him in crime Y for which he is later tried. The *479victim of crime Y identifies him in the courtroom; the identification has an independent, untainted basis. I would not suppress such an identification on the grounds that the police had no reason to suspect the defendant of crime Y prior to their illegal questioning and that it is only because of that questioning that he is present in the courtroom for trial. I would reach the same result whether or not his arrest for crime X was without probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
I agree that this case is very different from Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721 (1969), but not for the reason given in my Brother Brennan’s opinion. In Davis we held that fingerprints obtained from a defendant during an illegal detention had to be suppressed because they were the direct product of the unlawful arrest. Here, however, the evidence ordered suppressed was eyewitness testimony of the victim which was not the product of respondent’s arrest. The fact that respondent was present at trial and therefore capable of being identified by the victim is merely the inevitable result of the trial being held, which is permissible under Frisbie, despite respondent’s unlawful arrest. Suppression would be required in the Davis situation, but not here, regardless of whether the respective arrests were made without any reasonable suspicion or with something just short of probable cause.
Because Mr. Justice Brennan leaves open the question whether a defendant’s face can be considered a suppressible fruit of an illegal arrest, a question I think has already been sufficiently answered in Frisbie, I cannot join his opinion, although I concur in the result.* I note that a majority of the Court agrees that the rationale of Frisbie forecloses the claim that respondent’s face can be suppressible as a fruit of the unlawful arrest.

For the same reason I cannot join the analysis at the beginning of Part II of the Court’s opinion because it implies that a courtroom identification would be inadmissible if the defendant’s physical presence had resulted from exploitation of a violation of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights.