Supreme Court of Connecticut
State v. Artis
October 21, 2014
Summary
The court assumed, without deciding, that the police identification procedure was unnecessarily suggestive and that the resulting identification evidence should have been suppressed. It overruled the prior rule of automatic reversal for the erroneous admission of unreliable eyewitness identification evidence, holding that the error is subject to harmless-error review, and concluded that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt because an eyewitness who knew the defendant independently identified him as one of the attackers. The court therefore reversed the Appellate Court and directed it to affirm the trial judgment.