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5 Mass. App. Ct. 874

Commonwealth v. Baldwin

Massachusetts Appeals Court

Decided October 17, 1977

Massachusetts Appeals Court · decided 1977-10-17

Relies on Commonwealth v. Chase · Commonwealth v. Leaster · Commonwealth v. Charles

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1977-10-17

How this case has been cited

Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently July 2012

8 state decisions

2019771980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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¶1The trial judge, after a pre-trial voir dire, properly denied the defendant’s motion to suppress his in-court identification by the victim of rape and related crimes, of which the defendant was convicted. His appeal is -under G. L. c. 278, §§ 33A-33G. At the voir dire the victim testified *875that she had the defendant’s face under observation for about one hour while they were both in the back of the automobile in which the defendant had put her. (The total incident took place over a period of two hours in the morning.) After the incident, she gave the police a detailed description of the defendant and subsequently identified him from an array of eleven photographs. Assuming, without deciding, that the victim’s recognition of the defendant at a subsequent encounter in the Brighton court occurred (as the defendant argues) in improperly suggestive circumstances (cf. Commonwealth v. Leaster, 362 Mass. 407, 410-411 [1972]; Commonwealth v. Charles, 4 Mass. App. Ct. 853 [1976]) — the course taken by the trial judge — the Commonwealth satisfied its burden to show, by clear and convincing evidence, that the in-court identification would be independent of the encounter in the Brighton court. Commonwealth v. Leaster, supra at 415. Commonwealth v. Hands, 2 Mass. App. Ct. 890 (1974). Commonwealth v. Hogg, 4 Mass. App. Ct. 225, 228 (1976). See Commonwealth v. Chase, 372 Mass. 736, 745-746 (1977). The defendant’s attack on the photographic identification is groundless; it is obvious from the testimony that the police conducted themselves fairly and that the victim was careful and conscientious.

James M. Pool for the defendant.Jeremiah P. Sullivan, Jr., Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.

¶2Judgments affirmed.

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