Greene v. State , 469 Md. 156 ( 2020 )

Daniel Joseph Greene v. State of Maryland, No. 7, September Term, 2019
CRIMINAL LAW — CONSTITUTIONAL IDENTIFICATION LAW— NON-EYE-
WITNESS IDENTIFICATION — CONFIRMATORY IDENTIFICATION
The Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals. That court
held that the identification by a non-eyewitness who knew the suspect is not governed by
constitutional identification law, but rather was a “confirmatory identification.” Conse-
quently, the circuit court erred as a matter of law in applying the due process analysis of
Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188 (1972), and Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977), which
governs eyewitness identifications.
Circuit Court for Baltimore City
Case No. 117362037
Argued: September 6, 2019
IN THE COURT OF APPEALS
OF MARYLAND
No. 7
September Term, 2019
DANIEL JOSEPH GREENE
v.
STATE OF MARYLAND
Barbera, C.J.,
McDonald
Watts
Hotten
Getty
Booth,
Battaglia, Lynne A. (Senior Judge,
Specially Assigned),
JJ.
Opinion by Barbera, C.J.
Filed: June 9, 2020
Pursuant to Maryland Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act
(§§ 10-1601 et seq. of the State Government Article) this document
is authentic.
Suzanne Johnson
2020-10-23 15:39-04:00
Suzanne C. Johnson, Clerk
It is not unusual during a criminal investigation for the police, having focused on a
suspect, to ask an eyewitness to the crime to attempt to identify the suspect. Such an iden-
tification procedure may take the form of a lineup, a photographic array, a one-person
show-up, or display of a single photograph. The United States Supreme Court, recognizing
that such procedures have the potential to be impermissibly suggestive and ultimately un-
reliable, has developed a constitutionally-based body of law governing police-initiated se-
lection procedures to protect suspects from unfair identification procedures. See, e.g.,
Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293 (1967), Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188 (1972), Manson v.
Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977).
Not all investigatory procedures relating to identifying a suspect, however, seek an
eyewitness’s selection of a person as involved in the crime under investigation. Some
police procedures seek only to obtain the suspect’s identity from someone who, though not
an eyewitness to the crime, is familiar with the suspect. We are presented with such a
situation in this case.
The identification at issue here arises from a murder investigation. Shortly after the
murder, the investigating detectives focused on Daniel Joseph Greene, Petitioner, as the
suspected killer. About the same time, the detectives discovered that a surveillance camera
mounted on a building adjacent to the apartment where the murder occurred had captured
a person attempting to enter the apartment around the time of the murder. The detectives
were aware that the murder victim’s current girlfriend, Jennifer McKay, knew Petitioner
for years and, until recently, had been in an intimate relationship with him. The detectives
interviewed Ms. McKay at the police station and asked her to review the camera footage.
She did so and determined that the person depicted on the videotape footage “looks like”
Petitioner.
Petitioner was charged with having committed the murder. He filed in the Circuit
Court for Baltimore City a motion to suppress the identification of him by Ms. McKay.
Petitioner argued to the circuit court that the identification was obtained during “an imper-
missibly suggestive process,” rendering the identification inadmissible at trial. The circuit
court agreed and granted the suppression motion. The State noted a direct appeal of that
decision.1
The Court of Special Appeals held that the police-initiated procedure resulting in
the identification of Petitioner was not governed by constitutional criminal procedure law
concerning out-of-court identifications made by an eyewitness, as the suppression court
had mistakenly believed was the case. Ms. McKay’s identification of Petitioner was of an
altogether different sort; it was a “confirmatory identification,” not subject to constitutional
scrutiny. We agree and affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals.
1
The State is entitled, in this circumstance, to file a direct appeal of the suppression
court’s ruling pursuant to Maryland Code, Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article, § 12-
302(c)(4)(iii) and (iv) (Rep. Vol. 2013, Supp. 2019).
2
I.
Facts and Procedural History
Sometime during the early morning hours of November 29, 2017, Jon Hickey2 was
murdered in his apartment in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore City. At the time
of his death, Mr. Hickey had been involved for roughly a month and a half in an intimate
relationship with Ms. McKay. Before then, Ms. McKay had been in a five-year intimate
relationship with Petitioner, whom she had known since elementary school. Ms. McKay
last saw Petitioner in early November 2017, several weeks before Mr. Hickey was killed.
During their investigation of the murder, the detectives recovered surveillance vid-
eotape footage from at least one camera mounted on the rear of a house next to Mr.
Hickey’s apartment.3 The videotape showed a person apparently attempting to enter the
apartment. The detectives, believing the person in the videotape may be the murderer,
asked Ms. McKay to come to the station to determine whether she could identify the person
on the surveillance video. We describe that interview in more detail shortly. It is enough
for now to note that on multiple occasions throughout the interview Ms. McKay told the
police that the person in the video “looks like” Petitioner.
2
The record contains Mr. Hickey’s first name spelled as both “John” and “Jon.”
We follow the Court of Special Appeals and use “Jon.”
3
It is not clear from the record whether the police recovered videotape footage from
one or more cameras mounted on the neighboring home.
3
The suppression motion and hearing
On December 28, 2017, Petitioner was indicted in the Circuit Court for Baltimore
City on a charge of first-degree murder of Mr. Hickey. Petitioner, through counsel, filed a
pre-trial omnibus motion, which included a motion to suppress Ms. McKay’s out-of-court
identification and expected in-court identification of Petitioner as the person depicted on
the video. Petitioner argued that Ms. McKay’s out-of-court identification of him was the
product of impermissibly suggestive police procedures.
Approximately twenty-five minutes of the police station interview with Ms. McKay
was played at the suppression hearing. The interview began with Ms. McKay informing
the police that she had communicated with Petitioner via phone earlier the day of the inter-
view (December 4, 2017) but last saw him in person a few weeks before the murder. In
response to the detectives’ questions, Ms. McKay described Petitioner’s appearance and
the cars he sometimes drove.
The detectives then showed Ms. McKay brief videotape footage captured by the
surveillance camera. The quality of the video was not ideal; the images were dark and
grainy, and the night vision made it difficult to interpret colors. The detectives showed
Ms. McKay the video several times, slowed down the speed of the video, and produced
some still images of the footage.
Ms. McKay stated, early on, that the person in the video “looks like [Petitioner]”
based upon the depicted person’s “build” and “beard.” Ms. McKay did not speak with
certainty, however. She vacillated throughout the interview, stating that the person in the
surveillance video “kind of looks like [Petitioner],” “looks like him,” “looks more like
4
him,” and “looks more like him than doesn’t look like him.” The detectives pressed Ms.
McKay to be more certain of her identification. During the interview, the following ex-
change occurred:
DET. O’CONNOR: We know this is hard for you, you’re kind of like in the
middle of everything, so. It’s unfortunate. And I’m sure it’s probably pretty
hard to look at it, who you believe to be somebody. But we are – so I’m
going to be blunt with you. We aren’t in the I think business.
MS. MCKAY: Right.
DET. O’CONNOR: It’s what we can prove business.
MS. MCKAY: Right.
DET. O’CONNOR: And I think that – that’s why I asked if you were pre-
pared to look at this. Because it’s hard. You know, two people who you
obviously care about and you’re in the middle of it. And it’s hard to look at
someone knowing what –
MS. MCKAY: The end result was.
DET. O’CONNOR: Yeah. So is that kind of an issue possibl[e]?
MS. MCKAY: Yeah.
DET. O’CONNOR: But you need to – we need to know if that’s him or not.
And then we can do our own follow ups from there. But –
MS. MCKAY: I mean, from these pictures, yes, I would say this looks like
him.
DET. O’CONNOR: Okay.
MS. MCKAY: Yes.
DET. O’CONNOR: That’s all [inaudible].
MS. MCKAY: [Inaudible].
DET. VAUGHN: [Inaudible] from the video?
5
MS. MCKAY: Yeah.
DET. VAUGHN: Looking at the video.
MS. MCKAY: Yeah.
DET. O’CONNOR: That’s one thing, we just can’t have the I think or I don’t
know. That is what it is right there in front of you.
MS. MCKAY: Right.
DET. O’CONNOR: And nobody’s telling you to say one way or the other.
MS. MCKAY: Right.
DET. O’CONNOR: We just need to know.
MS. MCKAY: No, it looks like him.
After showing the video, the detectives displayed several still images taken from the
video for Ms. McKay to consider. Ms. McKay pointed to one image and said: “Like here,
it doesn’t look like him.” She pointed to another image and said: “but here it looks like
him.” When Detective Vaughn echoed Ms. McKay’s comment that the latter image “looks
like him,” Ms. McKay responded in the affirmative, though she added that the person in
the image “looks taller” than Petitioner.
The exchange among Detective O’Connor, Detective Vaughn, and Ms. McKay
paused briefly while the detectives had her sign and date the still images from the video
camera and collected her cell phone data. The exchange between Detective O’Connor and
Ms. McKay then resumed:
DET. O’CONNOR: But I just want to make sure that we’re for certain, that
you understand what I’m saying, like this isn’t in between stuff, okay?
6
MS. MCKAY: Yeah. No, I – that looks like him. I can’t deny that.
Ms. McKay testified at the suppression hearing that she has known Petitioner since
elementary school and was in a sexual relationship with him from 2012 through 2017. She
further testified that she did not believe the detectives had done anything to encourage her
to identify Petitioner. She stated that she recognized Petitioner from the surveillance video
but, given their prior relationship, she was reluctant to identify him.
Petitioner sought to suppress Ms. McKay’s identification of him as the person de-
picted on the surveillance camera’s videotape and still images drawn from the videotape.
Petitioner argued that the detectives had engaged in impermissibly suggestive practices
during the interview. Petitioner pointed to the detectives’ efforts to induce Ms. McKay to
identify him without equivocation; that is, they wanted her to declare that the person de-
tected by the video camera footage “is” Petitioner rather than merely “looks like” him. In
response, the State argued that even if the detectives’ behavior was suggestive, the identi-
fication was nonetheless reliable.
The circuit court, after hearing the testimony of Detective Vaughn and Ms. McKay
and the arguments of counsel, granted the motion. The court suppressed both Ms. McKay’s
out-of-court and her potential in-court identification of Petitioner. The court seemed to
conclude that the police had engaged in an impermissibly suggestive process; the court did
not express a view as to the reliability of that identification. The court explained its rea-
soning for suppressing Ms. McKay’s identification:
[I]f the police had come in and said, here’s the video, can you tell us who’s
in the video and she says I’m not sure, it’s not very clear. I’d let it in. If the
police said, okay, well, let’s go get the still pictures and maybe you can see
7
it more clearly, that would be fine too. But when they cross the line and say,
now look, Daniel has a beard, that guy[] has a beard. Daniel has a nose. Do
you see the nose? It’s the same nose. And they lead her to make a positive
identification.4
The State’s appeal
The State timely exercised its statutory entitlement to appeal the circuit court’s rul-
ing suppressing Ms. McKay’s identification of Petitioner on the video and the still images
taken from that video. See supra note 1. The Court of Special Appeals in a reported opin-
ion reversed the circuit court’s order granting the motion to suppress Ms. McKay’s identi-
fication of Petitioner. State v. Greene, 240 Md. App. 119 (2019).
The Honorable Charles E. Moylan, Jr., Senior Judge, wrote on behalf of the Court
of Special Appeals. Judge Moylan made clear at the outset that “[i]t was the police behav-
ior during [the] interview [with Ms. McKay] that was the exclusive focus of the suppression
hearing.” Id. at 125. And, though the court, Petitioner’s counsel, and, presumably, the
State, considered the issue to be of constitutional dimension, this was “not a case involving
familiar constitutional identification law at all. Jennifer McKay was not asked to look at
three separate video cam tapes and to select the one with [Petitioner] in it. Jennifer McKay
4
The circuit court, in explaining her reasoning, paraphrased the detectives’ state-
ments when she said: “Daniel has a beard, that guy has a beard. Daniel has a nose. Do you
see the nose? It’s the same nose.” The record reflects that Detective Vaughn suggested to
Ms. McKay that “that build looks like him” and “[t]he beard looks like him.” The record
further reflects that Ms. McKay tried to get “a better look” at the nose of the person in the
video. The detectives had her examine another part of the video, which she did. Ms.
McKay then noted that the person’s nose is “like pushed in more. Not as like angled like
this looks. I mean, I see it, but I don’t see it. If that makes any sense. Like, here it doesn’t
look like him, but here it looks like him.” To that, Detective Vaughn replied, “[b]ut that’s
the same person.”
8
was asked simply to confirm, if she could, that the man on the surveillance tape was [Peti-
tioner].” Id. at 124, 125. By invoking constitutional identification law, the Court of
Special Appeals noted, Petitioner was in “the wrong pew in the wrong church.” Id. at 124(capitalization omitted). “[W]hat really concerned [Petitioner] and defense counsel and
the suppression hearing judge was a discernible effort by the police to coach” a witness
whom the State would be expected to call at trial. Id. at 126. “Any suggestiveness . . .
concerned not whom Jennifer McKay would select. There was no selective identification.
It concerned how forcefully or persuasively Jennifer McKay would testify. The police
wanted to prime her to be a more effective witness.” Id. The Court of Special Appeals,
having concluded that the police-initiated procedure that produced Ms. McKay’s identifi-
cation was not subject to review for impermissible suggestiveness that rendered the iden-
tification unreliable, reversed the ruling of the suppression court.
Petitioner thereafter sought, and this Court granted, a writ of certiorari to review the
judgment of the Court of Special Appeals. Petitioner poses three questions for our consid-
eration. He first asks:
In a case of first impression, whether the Court of Special Appeals erred
in holding that Maryland adopts the “confirmatory identification” line of
out-of-state cases that exempts “non-selective” identifications from pre-
trial constitutional review?
Assuming constitutionally-based review is available here, Petitioner poses the second and
third questions:
Whether the Court of Special Appeals erred in reversing the Circuit
Court’s suppression of the identification of Petitioner, where the police
procedures used to obtain the identification violate due process?
9
Whether the Court of Special Appeals erred in alternatively holding that
the Circuit Court failed to examine the appropriate factors in ruling the
identification as inadmissible?
For reasons that shall become clear, our answer to the first question is “no.” We affirm the
holding of the Court of Special Appeals that this case does not involve constitutionally-
based identification law. Therefore, we have no need to address the remaining questions.
II.
Standard of Review
The State’s direct appeal in this matter stems from the circuit court’s ruling on Pe-
titioner’s motion to suppress evidence; we therefore apply the standards applicable to ap-
pellate review of rulings on such motions. We view the record in the light most favorable
to the prevailing party, here the Petitioner. Small v. State, 464 Md. 68, 88 (2019). We
accept the suppression court’s factual findings unless they are clearly erroneous, but we
review the court’s legal conclusions de novo. Norman v. State, 452 Md. 373, 386 (2017).
III.
The Parties’ Arguments
Petitioner argues that the Court of Special Appeals erred in overturning the circuit
court’s grant of the motion to suppress Ms. McKay’s identification of him as the person
depicted on the surveillance camera video and still images drawn from that video. Peti-
tioner asserts that the police subjected Ms. McKay to impermissibly suggestive procedures
as were described in Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293 (1967), and its progeny leading up to
the constitutionally-based due process test announced in Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188(1972), and applied in Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977). He contends that the
10
intermediate appellate court should have applied that body of constitutional identification
law to the actions by the police that led to the identification at issue here. According to
Petitioner, had the Court of Special Appeals applied that analytical framework, that court
would have concluded, as the suppression court did, that Petitioner was entitled to suppres-
sion of Ms. McKay’s out-of-court identification as well as any potential in-court identifi-
cation of him as the person depicted on the surveillance camera footage.
Petitioner also takes issue with what he characterizes as the intermediate appellate
court’s unwarranted creation of a “new” confirmatory identification “exception” to the
constitutionally-based identification law paradigm. He contends that the Court of Special
Appeals “erred because although it was not a selective identification in the traditional sense
it was not a ‘confirmatory identification’ either.” He maintains that, at the time the detec-
tives interviewed Ms. McKay, they “were not confirming they had arrested the right per-
son;” instead they merely had a “hunch” that Petitioner had committed the murder of Mr.
Hickey.5
The State counters that the Court of Special Appeals correctly viewed Ms. McKay’s
identification of Petitioner as outside the realm of constitutional identification law. The
State directs us to Biggers and Manson. Those two cases make clear the type of police-
initiated identification procedures subject to constitutional protection and, in the State’s
5
Petitioner did not seek suppression of Ms. McKay’s selection of him in a blind,
sequential photo array procedure that also occurred while Ms. McKay was at the police
station. A “blind” photo array procedure is one in which the person conducting the identi-
fication procedure does not know the suspect’s identity. See Maryland Code, Public Safety
Article, § 3-506.1(Repl. Vol. 2014).
11
view, those cases make equally clear that identifications of the sort we have here do not
come within the protection of the due process construct.
The two-step test developed in Biggers and applied five years later in Manson rests
upon such an analysis. See Manson, 432 U.S. at 99; Biggers, 409 U.S. at 196. That analysis
seeks to prevent an eyewitness from misidentifying a person whom the police suspect has
committed a crime.
In that context, the suspect’s entitlement to due process is violated if the police in
some fashion “slip[] the answer” to the eyewitness or otherwise “play[] with ‘a marked
deck’” to influence the witness’s selection of the suspect. See Conyers v. State, 115 Md.
App. 114, 121 (1997). Such impermissible suggestiveness “is not to pressure or to brow-
beat a witness to make an identification but only to feed the witness clues as to which
identification to make.” Id. The State points out that Ms. McKay was never thought to be
an eyewitness to the murder of Mr. Hickey; she therefore was not asked to select the per-
petrator from an array of photographs, an in-person lineup, or a single photograph.
As the State views the issue, and as the Court of Special Appeals held, this case does
not implicate constitutional identification law and, consequently, does not provide grist for
a suppression motion grounded in the due process analysis addressed in Biggers and Man-
son. The State urges this Court to embrace the distinction the Court of Special Appeals
drew between what that court called a “selective identification” procedure governed by that
constitutionally-based analysis and the identification procedure at issue in the present case.
The State emphasizes that Ms. McKay was not asked whether she could declare that the
person depicted in the video footage was the murderer of Mr. Hickey; instead, she was
12
asked to give her lay opinion as to whether the person she saw in the surveillance video
was her former lover, Petitioner. Under those circumstances, the suppression court should
have denied Petitioner’s motion to suppress the admissibility of Ms. McKay’s identifica-
tion.
IV.
Analysis
Of the three questions Petitioner has presented for our consideration, we need only
address the first: whether the Court of Special Appeals committed legal error in reversing
the suppression court’s grant of the motion to suppress Ms. McKay’s identification of Pe-
titioner as “look[ing] like” the person depicted in the surveillance camera’s video footage.
We disagree with Petitioner that the suppression court properly decided that the detectives
obtained Ms. McKay’s identification of him by way of an unconstitutional identification
procedure. The Court of Special Appeals correctly concluded that constitutional identifi-
cation law does not apply to the present case.
The focus of the Supreme Court’s “identification law” jurisprudence is upon the
imposition of due process limitations on efforts by the police to obtain from an eyewitness
to the crime the identification of a criminal suspect. The line of cases begins with Stovall
v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293 (1967).6
6
Stovall v. Denno was one of three decisions the Supreme Court issued on the same
day in June 1967. All three decisions addressed due process and fundamental fairness
considerations associated with identification procedures. Two cases, United States v.
Wade, 388 U.S. 218 (1967), and Gilbert v. California, 388 U.S. 263 (1967), focused on
such considerations in the context of a formally accused individual’s right to have counsel
13
The Court held in Stovall that identification testimony must be suppressed at trial if
the confrontation between the eyewitness and the suspected criminal “was so unnecessarily
suggestive and conducive to irreparable mistaken identification” as to violate a criminal
defendant’s right to due process of law. Id. at 302; see also Simmons v. United States, 390
U.S. 377, 384 (1968) (reiterating that due process protects against identifications that are
“so impermissibly suggestive as to give rise to a very substantial likelihood of irreparable
misidentification”). Stovall and Simmons were followed by Biggers. The Supreme Court
concluded in Biggers that even when a police procedure is determined to be unduly sug-
gestive, the resultant identification ought not be suppressed if the identification itself is
reliable. 409 U.S. at 201. Manson followed Biggers and applied the analysis described in
Biggers.7
The Biggers Court set forth five factors to assess the reliability of pretrial identifi-
cations: (1) the opportunity of the witness to view the criminal at the time of the crime, (2)
the witness’s degree of attention, (3) the accuracy of the witness’s prior description of the
present at corporeal identifications. See Wade, 388 U.S. at 237; Gilbert, 388 U.S. 272.
Stovall applied the due process/fundamental fairness analysis to identification procedures
that occur before attachment of the suspect’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel at formal
accusation. Stovall, 388 U.S. at 302.
7
Both Neil v. Biggers and Manson v. Brathwaite reached the Supreme Court of the
United States by way of two state prisoners’ efforts to obtain federal habeas corpus relief.
Archie Biggers prevailed in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, prompting Tennessee to
seek further review in the Supreme Court, with the Warden of the State Penitentiary Wil-
liam S. Neil as the named petitioner. Nowell Brathwaite’s case proceeded in similar fash-
ion. After he prevailed in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Connecticut sought review
in the Supreme Court, with Commissioner of Correction John Manson as the named peti-
tioner.
14
criminal, (4) the level of certainty demonstrated by the witness at the confrontation, and
(5) the length of time between the crime and the confrontation. 409 U.S. at 199–200.
Those five factors were applied in Manson, 432 U.S. at 114–16.
In that case, Petitioner Manson, see supra note 7, acknowledged the unnecessary
suggestiveness of having an undercover police officer who, upon being shown a photo-
graph of Respondent Brathwaite, identified him as the person from whom that officer pur-
chased drugs. Id. at 109. The Manson Court, upon consideration of the five Biggers reli-
ability factors, weighed those factors against the “corrupting effect of the suggestive iden-
tification itself.” Id. at 114. The Court determined that, notwithstanding the suggestive
nature of the identification procedure, it nonetheless was reliable and therefore admissible
at Respondent Brathwaite’s trial. Id. at 116.
Our brief review of the development of constitutional identification law from Stovall
to Simmons to Biggers to Manson reflects the Supreme Court’s “concern with the problems
of eyewitness identification.” Manson, 432 U.S. at 112 (emphasis added). The nature of
the identification itself, coupled with the issues surrounding the identification procedure,
has the potential to lead to misidentification. Id. The Court summarized why that can
happen: “Usually the witness must testify about an encounter with a total stranger under
circumstances of emergency or emotional stress. The witness’ recollection of a stranger
can be distorted easily by the circumstances or by later actions of the police.” Id.8
8
The Supreme Court’s most recent decision on the subject is Perry v. New Hamp-
shire, 565 U.S. 228 (2012). In Perry, an eyewitness called the police and reported that a
man was breaking into cars in the lot below her apartment. Id. at 233. After locating and
15
Nothing in Biggers or Manson, or any of the Supreme Court’s decisions that precede
those decisions, even intimates that the due process analysis that is applied to eyewitness
identification procedures also governs a procedure that seeks instead to assist the police in
ascertaining a suspect’s identity. One need only view this case through the lens of the due
process analysis in Biggers and Manson to appreciate, in the words of the State, why not:
McKay, of course, did not “view the criminal at the time of the crime,” so
her “degree of attention” at the viewing is inapplicable; she gave no “prior
description” of the perpetrator; and the “length of time between the crime”
and when she was asked to view the surveillance tape would not affect reli-
ability. Save for the “level of certainty” demonstrated by McKay when she
identified [Petitioner], the Biggers factors cannot logically be applied be-
cause, unlike other identification cases, McKay did not witness anything.
The Court of Special Appeals concluded that Ms. McKay’s identification of Peti-
tioner in the surveillance footage did not seek, much less produce, what would be described
as an eyewitness’s “selective” identification of the sort that drives the Supreme Court’s
constitutionally-based identification law. See Greene, 240 Md. App. at 125. We agree.
The identification procedure at issue here sought information of an altogether dif-
ferent sort than what is sought in a selective identification procedure. Ms. McKay was not
an eyewitness to the murder of Mr. Hickey and therefore was not asked to identify Peti-
tioner as the murderer. Instead, what the detectives hoped to obtain from Ms. McKay was
questioning Perry in the parking lot, one officer stood with him while another officer went
to speak with the eyewitness in her apartment. Id. at 233–34. Once in the apartment, the
officer asked the eyewitness to describe the man she saw breaking into the cars. Id. at 234.
In response to the officer’s question, the eyewitness pointed to her kitchen window and
said the man was standing in the parking lot next to the police officer. Id. The Supreme
Court held that the Due Process Clause does not require a judicial inquiry into the reliability
of an eyewitness identification if the identification is not procured under suggestive cir-
cumstances arranged by law enforcement. Id. at 245.
16
her opinion that the person depicted in the surveillance videotape was Petitioner. The rec-
ord discloses multiple statements by the detectives urging Ms. McKay to say more than
that the person depicted in the surveillance video (and still images derived from the video)
“looks like [Petitioner],” “looks very much like him,” and “looks more like him than it
doesn’t look like him.” The detectives, hoping to extract from Ms. McKay greater cer-
tainty, repeatedly urged her to state, unequivocally, that she recognized the person in the
video to be Petitioner.
Without doubt, the detectives’ conduct was heavy-handed. Such conduct, however,
had everything to do with encouraging Ms. McKay to be unequivocal in expressing her
opinion as to whether or not Petitioner was the person captured by the surveillance camera.
The pressure the detectives imposed upon Ms. McKay had nothing to do with the due pro-
cess concerns that attend eyewitness identification procedures. Under the five-factor con-
stitutional construct laid out in Biggers and Manson, “[t]o do something impermissibly
suggestive is not to pressure or to browbeat a witness to make an identification but only to
feed the witness clues as to which identification to make.” Conyers, 115 Md. App. at 121.
See also Biggers, 409 U.S. at 198 (emphasizing that “the primary evil” the body of consti-
tutionally-based identification law seeks to thwart is “a very substantial likelihood of [an
eyewitness’s] irreparable misidentification”).
The Court of Special Appeals concluded that the police-initiated procedure at issue
here is properly described not as a “selective identification”—because it is not one—but
rather, as a “confirmatory identification.” What the detectives sought from Ms. McKay
was not information concerning the crime they were investigating; they sought instead her
17
opinion as to whether or not the person depicted in the surveillance video footage was
Petitioner. However aggressive the detectives’ conduct may have been, it did not implicate
constitutionally-based identification law. Judge Moylan, speaking for the Court of Special
Appeals, put a fine point on the matter:
Improperly or excessively coaching a witness could be, of course,
with respect to any subject. The problem of coaching a witness is not one
associated with identification law particularly. . . . In the last analysis, any
police behavior found to have been offending in this case unquestionably
would have been the effort to encourage or cajole Jennifer McKay to testify
with a greater degree of certainty. Offensive as that effort may have been,
moreover, it had no apparent effect. All of which is to say, this is not a classic
selective identification case.
Greene, 240 Md. App. at 130.
We agree with the reasoning and holding of the Court of Special Appeals that Ms.
McKay’s identification is not governed by the due process analysis in Biggers and Manson.
It follows that the suppression court erred as a matter of law when it granted Petitioner’s
motion to suppress the identification on the ground that the police had engaged in “imper-
missibly suggestive” conduct, as that term is used in constitutionally-based identification
law parlance.9 Consequently, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals.
9
In an analysis we fully embrace, the Court of Special Appeals made clear why
“the constitutional law governing identification procedures did not apply” to the present
case. Nevertheless, that court, “purely arguendo,” also considered the case through the
lens of constitutional identification law. Greene, 240 Md. App. at 145. The Court of Spe-
cial Appeals noted that, even if one were to assume that a due process analysis applies to
the action of the detectives in this case and that their conduct was impermissibly suggestive,
those assumptions would not require suppression of Ms. McKay’s identification of Peti-
tioner as the person depicted in the surveillance video. The identification, however hypo-
thetically corrupted by impermissible suggestiveness, would survive at the second, ultimate
18
Before we conclude, we add a few words about the Court of Special Appeals’ use
of the label “confirmatory identification” to describe Ms. McKay’s identification of Peti-
tioner. Judge Moylan, writing for the court, searched for a “convenient shorthand reference
or tag” to address identification procedures that do not implicate due process concerns.
Judge Moylan found, and borrowed from, People v. Rodriguez, 593 N.E.2d 268, 269 (N.Y.
1992), the term “confirmatory identification” as a useful moniker for identifications of the
sort at issue in this case. Id. at 131. The New York Court of Appeals attaches that label to
both eyewitness and non-eyewitness identifications made by those who are so familiar with
the suspect that the identification carries “little or no risk of misidentification.”10 We, like
the Court of Special Appeals, find the “confirmatory identification” label equally applica-
ble to the non-eyewitness identification we have in this case.11
step of the analysis because the identification was “reliable,” given Ms. McKay’s
longstanding and, for a time, intimate relationship with Petitioner.
10
In Rodriguez, the New York Court of Appeals used the label “confirmatory iden-
tification” in connection with that court’s discussion of a court-recognized “familiarity ex-
ception” to a New York statutory scheme codifying a criminal defendant’s due process
entitlement to notice and opportunity to be heard. The “confirmatory identification” is an
exception to the statute’s requirement of a pretrial hearing on the admissibility of a sugges-
tive pretrial identification. The focus of what is referred to as the “familiarity exception”
is solely upon the identifier’s level of familiarity with the suspect and applies when “as a
matter of law, the witness is so familiar with the defendant that there is ‘little or no’ risk
that police suggestion could lead to misidentification.” 593 N.E.2d at 272. “In effect, it is
a ruling that however suggestive or unfair the identification procedure might be, there is
virtually no possibility that the witness could misidentify the defendant.” Id.
11
The Court of Special Appeals has referred to an identification as “confirmatory”
in more than one context. Compare Myers v. State, 243 Md. App. 154, 161 (2019) (using
“confirmatory identification” to describe an identification by a police officer who, while
19
V.
Conclusion
The detectives sought from Ms. McKay her opinion as to the identity of the person
depicted on the surveillance camera videotape. They asked her if she could identify that
person as Petitioner. Indeed, the detectives urged her to confirm their suspicion that the
person depicted on the surveillance camera videotape is Petitioner. Regardless of the level
of certainty in her identification, what Ms. McKay offered was not a selective identification
of Petitioner as the murderer of Jon Hickey, but rather a confirmatory identification of him
as a person she knew well. We therefore hold that the suppression court erred as a matter
of law in granting Petitioner’s motion to suppress that identification on the basis that the
identification procedure was “impermissibly suggestive,” as the identification at issue here
does not implicate the constitutionally-based identification law paradigm.
investigating the crime, reviewed security camera footage and identified the person on the
footage as someone he had known for several years and with whom he shared mutual
friends), with Bean v. State, 240 Md. App. 342, 359 (2019) (analyzing a scenario in which
an eyewitness to a crime first identified the defendant from social media and then later
“confirmed” that identification at the police station when police provided the eyewitness a
copy of the social media content and a single photograph of the suspect).
Some of our sister states and federal courts use the term “confirmatory identifica-
tion,” but not all uses are identical. See State v. Pressley, 181 A.3d 1017, 1020 (N.J. 2018)
(using “confirmatory identification” to describe an eyewitness’s identification of someone
with whom he or she is familiar, such as a neighbor or acquaintance, but does not know his
or her name); People v. Wheeler, 124 A.3d 1136, 1137–38 (N.Y. App. Div. 2015) (using
“confirmatory identification” when a police officer who was an eyewitness to the crime
confirms the defendant’s identity “at a place and time sufficiently connected and contem-
poraneous to the arrest itself”) (internal citation omitted); United States v. Thomas, 541 F.
Supp. 2d 18, 28 (D.D.C. 2008) (using “confirmatory identification” when eyewitness po-
lice officer confirmed the defendant’s identity “within minutes of the [crime]”).
20
Should further proceedings in this case lead to a trial, Petitioner has an opportunity
to seek exclusion of the identification by resort to one or more pertinent evidentiary rules.
Further, should one or more of the detectives or Ms. McKay testify, Petitioner is entitled
to cross-examine any or all of them about Ms. McKay’s reluctance to identify Petitioner,
without equivocation, as the person depicted on the surveillance camera’s video footage.
In the end, it would be for the factfinder, whether judge or jury, to decide how much, if
any, weight to accord to that identification.
JUDGMENT OF THE COURT OF SPE-
CIAL APPEALS AFFIRMED. COSTS IN
THIS COURT AND IN THE COURT OF
SPECIAL APPEALS TO BE PAID BY PETI-
TIONER.
21