Barion Perry v. New Hampshire

Summary

The Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause does not require a preliminary judicial inquiry into the reliability of an eyewitness identification made under suggestive circumstances that were not arranged by law enforcement; absent improper police conduct, reliability is tested through counsel, cross-examination, protective rules of evidence, eyewitness-specific jury instructions, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt, with credibility left to the jury. The Court reasoned that its eyewitness-identification precedents uniformly involved police-arranged suggestiveness, that the reliability screen presupposes improper state action because its aims are deterring rigged lineups, showups, and photo arrays and preserving reliable evidence tainted by police suggestion, and that the general fallibility of eyewitness evidence does not alone make its admission fundamentally unfair. The judgment of the New Hampshire Supreme Court was affirmed. Justice Thomas concurred, agreeing with the result but stating he would not extend the Stovall line, which he views as wrongly grounded in substantive due process; Justice Sotomayor dissented, contending the majority grafts a mens rea requirement onto the two-step inquiry and would have assessed the identification under the ordinary totality-of-the-circumstances reliability test regardless of police arrangement.