Manson v. Brathwaite, the Government Prosecuted Respondent

¶ … Manson v. Brathwaite, the government prosecuted respondent and he was convicted of possession and sale of heroin. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the dismissal of respondent's petition for habeas corpus relief, with orders to issue the writ unless the government gave notice to retry respondent and the new trial took place within a reasonable time. The government sought certiorari review.

Respondent, on a claim for habeas relief, proposed a per se rule of barring that he claimed was dictated by the demands of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process. The Court used the entirety of the conditions test and concluded that the criteria appropriate in determining the acceptability of evidence offered by the prosecution in relation to identification were suitably met and complied with in respondent's case.

The Court reasoned that the factors that had to be measured included the occasion of the witness to see respondent at the time of the crime, the witness' level of attention, the accurateness of his previous account of the criminal, the level of confidence confirmed at the confrontation, and the time between the crime and the confrontation. Against these factors was weighed the corrupting result of the suggestive identification itself.

The Court determined that it could not say that, under all the conditions of respondent's case, there was very considerable probability of irreparable misidentification. The judgment reversing the denial of respondent's motion for habeas corpus relief was reversed. After the purchase of narcotics by an undercover police officer, the officer, who throughout the sale had directly witnessed the narcotics vendor at close range, gave an account of the vendor to another police officer, who, in turn, got a photograph of the defendant and left it at the undercover officer's office.

The undercover officer recognized the person in the photograph as being the narcotics vendor. The defendant was convicted of narcotics charges in a Connecticut trial at which the photograph was admitted into evidence and at which the undercover officer identified the defendant as being the person in the picture and made an in-court identification of the defendant.

After the defendant's conviction had been acknowledged by the Connecticut Supreme Court, the defendant filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, alleging that the admission of the identification testimony deprived him of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The District Court dismissed the petition, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed on the grounds that the evidence was untrustworthy, and, apart from that, evidence as to the photograph should have been barred since the examination of the single photograph was needless and suggestive (527 F2d 363). On certiorari, the United States Supreme Court reversed. In an opinion by Blackmun, J., joined by Burger, Ch.

J., and Stewart, White, Powell, Rehnquist, and Stevens, JJ., it was held that due process did not compel the barring of pretrial identification evidence obtained by a suggestive and unnecessary police identification procedure so.