## Facts

- Nashua, New Hampshire police responded around 3:00 a.m. to a report that an African-American man was breaking into cars in an apartment parking lot.
- An officer found Barion Perry between two cars holding stereo amplifiers, with a metal bat nearby.
- Eyewitness Nubia Blandon, viewing from an upstairs apartment, was asked to describe the perpetrator; she pointed out the window and stated that the man she saw was standing in the lot next to a police officer.
- Perry was arrested following this on-the-scene identification.
- About a month later, Blandon could not identify Perry from a photo array and could not provide a detailed description; another witness later identified Perry from a photographic lineup.
- Perry was charged with theft by unauthorized taking and related offenses and was convicted after a jury trial.

## Issues

1. Whether the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause requires a preliminary judicial reliability inquiry for an eyewitness identification made under suggestive circumstances when those circumstances were not arranged by law enforcement.
2. Whether suppression under the Court’s identification-procedure cases applies absent improper police conduct creating unnecessary suggestiveness.

## Decision

- The Court affirmed Perry’s conviction.
- The Due Process Clause does not require a preliminary judicial inquiry into reliability when the identification was not procured through an unnecessarily suggestive identification procedure arranged by law enforcement.
- Traditional trial protections (cross-examination, counsel’s argument, evidentiary rules, and jury instructions) generally suffice to test reliability where there is no improper police arrangement.
- Justice Thomas concurred in the judgment, disputing the substantive-due-process rationale of the identification line but agreeing existing precedent limited suppression to police-arranged suggestiveness.
- Justice Sotomayor dissented, arguing reliability screening should apply whenever unnecessarily suggestive circumstances create a substantial risk of misidentification, regardless of police involvement.

## Legal Principles

- Due process exclusion of eyewitness identification evidence is a limited doctrine tied to improper state action in arranging unnecessarily suggestive identification procedures.
- The reliability screening framework from the Court’s identification cases is triggered only after a defendant shows improper police conduct that created unnecessary suggestiveness.
- Absent police-arranged suggestiveness, reliability is ordinarily assessed through standard trial mechanisms rather than mandatory pretrial suppression.
- The federal constitutional rule sets a minimum requirement; jurisdictions may adopt more protective rules under state law or evidentiary standards.

## Conclusion

The Court held that due process requires judicial screening of eyewitness identifications for reliability only when law enforcement arranged an unnecessarily suggestive identification procedure; otherwise, reliability challenges are handled through ordinary adversarial trial safeguards.


Perry v. New Hampshire, 565 U.S. 228 (2012)