A witness by the name of Hughes said that he was overtaken at considerable speed by a Renault 25 with a registration number beginning C7.
Held: The peculiar risks of mistaken facial identification do not apply to the same extent to evidence of sightings of other objects, such as a motor car.
Glidewell LJ said: ‘Mr. Griffith Williams submits that a Turnbull type direction should have been given to the jury as regards both the car and the man. As to the car, unlike a human being, the appearance of a car remains constant unless it is deliberately altered by having its colour changed or by having some pieces added to it. Save for such deliberate alteration, it cannot in its nature change shape or colour or size. A human being’s facial expression alters constantly and his bodily position and appearance alters constantly. Of course, a human being’s dress alters and his style of hair may alter from time to time. Identifying a particular car, in our view, depends upon first, the witness being sufficiently knowledgeable about makes of cars to be able clearly to distinguish one from another – some people can, some cannot; secondly, being able to recollect the make and the colour of the car he has seen; and thirdly, being able to observe and then recollect the most important of the individual distinguishing features which every car carries with it, that is to say its registration number. As to this, the judge said at p. 23 in relation to Mr. Hughes:
‘He saw that it was a C registered car and as I told you in what I was saying before I had our break, he made one statement, then he made another statement, and was asked to go down to Worcester, Hindlip Hall, in order to see if he could identify the car and he told you that on his way down he remembered the 7. He had thought and thought about it, and you may remember that a number of witnesses appeared to be being criticised for the fact that in their initial statement they did not put everything that they had later come to remember. You are required to bring your common sense into the jury box, as I am sure you have, and you will judge that suggestion according to its merits. If you really put your thinking cap on and you perhaps remember more than when you first thought about it, of course the danger the other way is that you may begin to think that you remember things that did not happen at all. You judge that criticism for what it may be worth.’
In our view that was a perfectly proper reminder to the jury. It is our judgment that a Turnbull direction as such is not needed in relation to a motor car. What is necessary is to do what the judge here did: to draw the jury’s attention in relation to each witness, first of all, to the opportunity which the witness had to identify the car. The judge did that in relation to a number of the witnesses. He reminded the jury that Mr. Farrell was travelling at about 80 miles an hour, but he put it more graphically, 102 feet a second, in the summing-up. He reminded the jury that Mr. Marsh had said that he only had a fleeting glance. Secondly, he should draw the jury’s attention to a witness’s apparent ability or inability to distinguish between makes of cars and the characteristics of cars. Thirdly, he should make the point, which the judge made in the passage to which I have just referred, that the jury must decide how far a witness is genuinely recollecting what he saw and how far his mind has invented or has absorbed information from somewhere else and then transmuted that into making him think that he has recollected something that he has not actually recollected at all. In our view the judge in his comments to the jury fulfilled the duty upon him to warn them properly in respect of identifying motor cars.’
Judges:
Glidewell LJ
Citations:
(1991) 94 Cr App R 109
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Citing:
Distinguished – Regina v Turnbull and Another etc CCA 9-Jun-1976
The defendants appealed against their convictions which had been based upon evidence of visual identification.
Held: Identification evidence can be unreliable, and courts must take steps to reduce injustice. The judge should warn the jury of . .
Cited by:
Cited – The Queen v Crawford PC 11-Nov-2015
From the Court of Appeal of the Cayman Islands – The crown appealed against the quashing of the respondent’s conviction for possession of an unlicensed firearm. A gun was found where he had been seen to discard a gun whilst being chased. The . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Evidence
Updated: 26 October 2022; Ref: scu.554671