Court Opinion

ID: 9745024
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 22:28:55.960879+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:54.825144
License: Public Domain

Mr. JUSTICE HAYES, concurring in part and dissenting in part: I concur in the result and in what is said in Parts I, III, and IV of the opinion of the court. I dissent from what is said in Part II of the opinion for the following reasons: In my opinion, defendant did make an adequate prima facie showing of no probable cause for his arrest. His testimony by stipulation was that he went to the police station in response to a telephone call from a police officer requesting that he do so. When he got there, he was arrested, put in a lineup, and identified by Daniel Voight but not by Joy Voight. His failure specifically to state that his arrest had been without a warrant is of no consequence here because the stipulated circumstances make it obvious that the police had no warrant for his arrest. The stipulated circumstances also make it obvious that he was doing nothing unusual at the time of his arrest. Again in my opinion, when the burden on the issue of probable cause for his arrest shifted to the State, the State did not produce adequate testimony of probable cause because there is no testimony whatever as to how the police determined that “a man named Jerry” was Jerry Evans.. I conclude that the lineup identification of defendant by Daniel Voight should have been suppressed. Again in my opinion, we need not decide whether the preliminary hearing and in-court identifications of defendant by Daniel Voight should also have been suppressed as impermissibly tainted by the lineup identification, because the failure to suppress the lineup identification, while error, was harmless error which was not prejudicial to defendant for the reason that Daniel Voight’s preliminary hearing and in-court identifications had a prior independent origin, namely, his on-the-scene observations of the unmasked intruders into his home for a period of 30 to 60 minutes with all the home lights burning. The positive identifications of Daniel Voight based on that prior independent origin are sufficient to enable the trier of fact to find defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, as the opinion of the court concludes in Part IV of the opinion. Further, the suggestion that the preliminary hearing and in-court identifications of defendant by Joy Voight were based in some manner on Daniel Voight’s lineup identification is merely speculative, in view of the same prior independent origin for those identifications by Joy Voight.