Loserth v. State

In Loserth v. State, 931 S.W.2d 322 (Tex.App.--San Antonio 1996), the victim was murdered inside her apartment. 931 S.W.2d at 323-24. A neighbor heard her scream around 3:40 a.m. that morning but did not know what to do. Id. at 323. When he later heard a crashing noise, he looked at the victim's apartment and saw a man on the balcony. Id. After the man then jumped from the third floor, the witness called the police. Id. The principal eyewitness was unable to give much of a description, noting only that the person was tall, thin, and wearing dark clothes like a jump suit. Id. at 325. He was shown a single color photograph of the defendant. Id. He was not shown a traditional lineup since the police were only trying to determine whether the defendant had been seen around the apartment complex. Id. The witness positively identified defendant as the man he saw the night of the murder. Id. He never wavered in his identification and he was the only witness whose testimony placed the defendant at the scene of the crime. Id. The defendant filed a motion to suppress the witness's identification testimony. Id. at 327. The trial court allowed the witness to make an in-court identification but suppressed the photographic identification. Id. In reversing, the intermediate court held that showing the photograph to the witness was impermissible, suggestive, and resulted in a substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification. Id. at 330. The Court of Criminal Appeals faulted the intermediate court's failure to consider some of the underlying facts in a light most favorable to the trial court's admission of the in-court identification. Loserth, 963 S.W.2d at 774. It vacated the judgment and remanded to the court of appeals for reconsideration. Id.