Angiulo: Mass. Courts Leading National Effort To Use Reliable Eyewitness Testimony

Monday, December 29, 2014

Leonardo Angiulo, GoLocalWorcester Legal Contributor

The witness looks across the courtroom, raises their hand and points squarely at the defendant. They describe an article of clothing the accused is wearing and, most typically in the movies, says something like “that's the man I saw that night.” When it comes to trial testimony an eyewitness identification is one of the focal points of any prosecutor's case. Simply because it is so compelling, it has been the subject of intense scholarship throughout the country during the last several years. Two recent cases from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court prove that the Commonwealth is matching the tone of other leading states: eyewitness identifications must be done correctly in order to be admissible at trial.

While the rest of us were finalizing our Christmas shopping, the SJC was publishing the opinions of Commonwealth v. Crayton and Commonwealth v. Collins. While the criminal offenses underlying these cases are very different the questions of fact at both trials were the same. According to the opinions, the defense attorneys at trial did not focus on whether the crimes had happened. Instead, the defenses turned on whether these defendants were the perpetrators of the crimes. In addition, in both cases the investigating officers were unable to secure pretrial identifications from witnesses.

For those who don't already know, pretrial identifications can take many forms. One of the most common forms is what is known as a photo array. When a photo array is conducted, a witness will be given the opportunity to review a group of photographs and is asked to pick out the person they saw do a thing, if possible. In the Crayton and Collins cases, the eyewitnesses had not picked out the defendants before trial. This created an issue on appeal because during both of those trials the prosecutors had those eyewitnesses point to the defendants and identify them as the ones who committed the crimes.

In approaching these cases, the Supreme Judicial Court built on evolving research into the importance, and fragility, of eyewitness testimony. Case law from Oregon and New Jersey from the past several years have also dealt with the topic and informed the policy positions of the Massachusetts Court. In 2013, the SJC released their own study on eyewitness identification procedures and affirmed many of the existing practices used by our state law enforcement. What they also did for Massachusetts, however, is highlight the importance of using standardized methods to ensure the protection of individual rights. In both of these cases, the SJC ultimately concluded that the presented eyewitness testimony was not admissible at trial.

At a most basic level, the moral of the decisions in Crayton and Collins is that if a witness who was present at the time of an offense did not identify the defendant as the perpetrator before they get to the courtroom they won't be allowed to at trial. While there are important differences between the facts of these cases for practitioners, everyone can appreciate that the court was trying to encourage fairness in the criminal justice system.

Leonardo Angiulo is an Attorney with the firm of Glickman, Sugarman, Kneeland & Gribouski in Worcester handling legal matters across the Commonwealth. He can be reached by email at [email protected].