State v. McLaurin

Citations

• 216 Conn. App. 449

Syllabus

Convicted of several crimes in connection with his role in the robbery of a restaurant, the defendant appealed to this court, claiming that the trial court improperly denied his motion to suppress evidence of his identification by B, an employee of the restaurant, during a one-on- one showup procedure arranged by the police. The defendant and an accomplice, F, had forced the restaurant's employees at gunpoint to give them money from the restaurant's safe and cash registers before fleeing on foot across a heavily trafficked road. Within ten minutes after receiving the call regarding the armed robbery, the police apprehended F and detained him in the parking lot of a car dealership about 800 feet from the crime scene, where they had set up a staging area. While the police continued to search for the defendant, an officer drove B from the restaurant to the car dealership, which was well lighted, for a one- on-one showup identification during which she promptly identified F as one of the robbers. After the police apprehended the defendant a short time later, they drove B from the restaurant back to the staging area where, without hesitation, she identified the defendant less than ninety minutes after the robbery. Held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying the defendant's motion to suppress the evidence of B's identification of him, as the one-on-one showup identification procedure the police conducted was not unnecessarily suggestive in light of the exigencies of the situation: the police, who had found a gun in the restaurant, had no way of knowing whether other weapons were involved in the robbery, it was reasonable for the police to believe that the suspects remained armed and dangerous, which justified the need to act quickly, and the officers' belief that the safety of the public was at risk was confirmed when they apprehended F with an eight to nine inch knife on his person while the defendant was still at large; moreover, the showup identif