Boston Criminal Lawyers Blog
The issue of the reliability of eyewitness identifications has been a hot topic in Massachusetts courts the last few years. Several cases from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Court have touched upon the danger of suggestiveness of eyewitness identifications, their reliability and consequently, their admissibility against defendants at trial. Commonwealth v. Johnson, decided by the SJC on February 12, 2016, is yet another decision highlighting suggestive identification issues.
The Johnson case involved an issue where the defendant, prior to trial, moved to suppress (or exclude) the identification of him by the victim of a robbery because, he argued, it was made under circumstances that were impermissibly suggestive and therefore, unreliable to be admissible as an identification of him at trial. 
These issues are litigated in Massachusetts courts daily, and most often, it isn’t much of a big deal as far as the law goes. But in this case, the major issue that sets this case apart from most others is that the impermissible identification procedure didn’t come from the police…