Perry v. New Hampshire

2012-01-11

Headline: Court limits pretrial exclusion of eyewitness identifications, ruling judges need not screen reliability when suggestive circumstances were not arranged by police, affecting criminal defendants and trial procedures nationwide.

Holding: The Due Process Clause does not require a preliminary judicial reliability inquiry for eyewitness identifications unless law enforcement arranged the suggestive circumstances, so nonpolice suggestive IDs are judged by ordinary trial safeguards and the jury.

Real World Impact:

Limits when judges must exclude eyewitness IDs not arranged by police.
Leaves most reliability disputes to jury, lawyers, and ordinary evidence rules.
May reduce pretrial hearings over accidental or spontaneous identifications.

Topics: eyewitness identification, police procedures, criminal trials, due process

Summary

Background

A man charged with theft was spotted by a neighbor from her apartment window, then pointed out at the scene while he stood next to a police officer. The eyewitness later could not pick him out of a photo array. The man was tried, convicted of theft, and appealed after New Hampshire courts declined to require a judge to hold a preliminary reliability hearing because the suggestive circumstances were not arranged by police.

Reasoning

The Court explained that its prior decisions requiring pretrial screening concerned situations where law enforcement had arranged suggestive lineups, showups, or photo arrays. Those cases aimed to deter police manipulation and to guard against identifications so tainted by police action that they posed a very substantial risk of misidentification. When police did not create the suggestive circumstances, the Court held, existing trial safeguards—lawyers’ cross-examination, the right to counsel at postindictment police lineups, rules of evidence, jury instructions, and the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt—are ordinarily adequate to test reliability. The Court thus affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Real world impact

After this decision, judges are not required by the Due Process Clause to conduct a pretrial judicial reliability check for identifications that arose from suggestive circumstances not arranged by police. Instead, questions about trustworthiness will usually be decided during trial by juries, attorneys, and ordinary evidence rules. States and defense teams can still use evidentiary rules and expert testimony to challenge identification evidence.

Dissents or concurrances

Justice Sotomayor dissented, arguing that suggestion—intentional or not—can corrupt reliability and should trigger review; Justice Thomas concurred but would narrow the precedents further.