State v. Rohena

Syllabus

Convicted of murder and criminal possession of a firearm in connection with the shooting death of the victim, the defendant appealed to this court. An eyewitness to the shooting, C, identified the defendant as the shooter from a photographic array that was shown to him by the police. Before trial, the trial court granted the defendant's motion to suppress C's out-of-court identification of the defendant on the ground that the procedure employed by the police to elicit that identification was conducted in an unnecessarily suggestive manner such that it was likely to lead to misidentification. At trial, however, the trial court granted the state's motion to allow C to make an in-court identification of the defendant. Thereafter, C testified before the jury and identified the defendant as the person who had shot the victim. On appeal, the defendant claimed that the trial court had violated his federal and state constitutional rights to due process by admitting C's in-court identification after suppressing C's out-of-court identification. Held: The trial court did not violate the defendant's federal due process rights by allowing C to make an in-court identification of the defendant as the person who had shot the victim. The record established by clear and convincing evidence that C had an inde- pendent basis for identifying the defendant that was untainted by the unnec- essarily suggestive out-of-court identification procedure. Specifically, C was personally familiar with the defendant, C had ample opportunity to view the defendant at and around the time of the murder and had a heightened degree of attention during the events at issue, which enabled C to recognize the defendant's face and voice and to recount some of the items of clothing the defendant had been wearing, and C expressed 100 percent certainty that the defendant was the person who had shot the victim. Moreover, the foregoing factors were not outweighed by the corruptive effect of the suppressed out-of-cou