Commonwealth v. Martin

(dissenting, with whom Marshall, C.J., and Ireland, J., join). Eleven years ago, in suppressing a suggestive one-on-*292one identification remarkably similar to the one at issue here, we observed that “the danger of mistaken identification by a victim or a witness poses a real threat to the truth-finding process of criminal trials. Indeed, mistaken identification is believed widely to be the primary cause of erroneous convictions. . . . Compounding this problem is the tendency of juries to be unduly receptive to eyewitness evidence.” Commonwealth v. Johnson, 420 Mass. 458, 465 (1995) (Johnson).…