Perry v. New Hampshire

Perry (defendant) was convicted of breaking into a car. One witness who observed him at the scene could not pick him from photographs or describe him to police, but a second witness successfully identified him. Perry sought to suppress the identification evidence as unnecessarily suggestive, though the suggestive circumstances (if any) were not the product of a police-arranged identification procedure.

Whether the use of photographs to assist witness identification, absent police-arranged suggestive procedures, requires a preliminary judicial inquiry into reliability.