Perry V. New Hampshire

The situation behind this case is that in an apartment building there was a hijacker that had been robbing cars for a while and one night an elderly woman looked outside of her window and saw a black man standing between cars talking to a police officer in the parking lot. The elderly woman, when questioned told police that he had been the man breaking into cars at night, when the elderly woman was asked to identify the man from an array of photos she could not do so and the only problem the Court agreed to look over was whether or not the absence of any police manipulation of that witness was reliable enough to bring before the jury to be used against the conviction of Barion Perry. 

The constitutional question in plain English  is “In a case should a court be required to exclude eyewitness identification evidence whenever the identification was made under circumstances that make the identification unreliable?”

            The Constitutional Provision involved in my case is The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Which states that “No State shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1.

The Fourteenth Amendment is applicable to unreliable eyewitness identifications regardless of whether the identification was orchestrated by the police.

After the case was argued The Supreme Court decided that it wasn’t their job or place to decide whether or not the evidence in the case should be used and that the decision of permissible evidence would be left up to the jury. The conviction of Barion Perry still hasn’t been decided mainly because of the evidence debate. 

I’m not to sure how to predict the outcome of this case because it could go in either direction. I personally don’t believe this evidence should

Be used against Perry because I feel like the evidence is unreliable. The witness didn’t see Perry take anything and she was not able to identify him when she was asked. The conclusion of this case is strictly dependant upon the jury so at this point and time this could end either way.