State v. L.H.

Challenge to police failure to document conversations between officers and witnesses making eyewitness identifications.

As a friend-of-the-court, the ACLU-NJ contended that when police fail to record the circumstances of how an eyewitness identification procedure occurred, courts must suppress the identification. Without critical information about things like who said what to whom, the reliability of the identification is sufficiently suspect that suppression is the appropriate remedy. The brief, authored by Gibbons P.C., points out that out-of-court identifications are the most dangerous form of evidence because of jurors’ misconceptions about their reliability. As a result, and as recognized by New Jersey Supreme Court cases, Rules of Court, and Attorney General directives, full, contemporaneous records of out-of-court identification procedures, including the verbatim dialogue between the police officer and witness, are required as a precondition for admissibility.