Dock Identification in UK Law

When a witness is invited to identify the perpetrator in court, there must be a considerable risk that his evidence will be influenced by seeing the accused sitting in the dock in this way. So a dock identification can be criticised in two complementary respects: not only does it lack the safeguards that are offered by an identification parade, but the accused's position in the dock positively increases the risk of a wrong identification.

Where it is decided that the evidence may be admitted, it will always be necessary to give the jury careful directions as to the dangers of relying on that evidence and in particular to warn them of the disadvantages to the accused of having been denied the opportunity of participating in an identification parade, if indeed he has been deprived of that opportunity.

In the present case, it may well be that the judge bemoaned the fact that no identification parade had been held and pointed out the advantages of such a parade. But, despite what the Board had said in Pop, he did not point out that Mr Robateau had thereby lost the potential advantage of an inconclusive parade.

He should have gone on to warn the jury of the dangers of identification without a parade and should have explained to them the potential advantage of an inconclusive parade to a defendant such as the appellant. For these reasons, he should have explained, this kind of evidence was undesirable in principle and the jury would require to approach it with great care: R v Graham [1994] Crim LR 212 and Williams (Noel) v The Queen [1997] 1 WLR 548.

The truth of this issue could have been tested by an identification parade. If Claudette had failed to pick out the accused on the parade, her assertion that the accused were known to her would have been shown to be false. By not holding identification parades, the police had denied the accused an opportunity to demonstrate conclusively that she was not telling the truth.

Mr. Thornton submitted that the judge should have given the jury a specific direction about the absence of an identification parade and the dangers of a dock identification. But their Lordships consider that in the present case such directions were unnecessary. The judge told the jury that they should first consider whether Claudette Bernard was a credible witness.

The mandatory obligation in the first sentence of paragraph 2.3 relates to a situation where a suspect is being produced by the police to a witness not by the witness to the police. It outlaws the police attempting to obtain an identification of a known suspect by a witness otherwise than by a formal identification parade or one of the other methods of identifying known suspects authorised by paragraphs 2.4, 2. There ought to be an identification parade where it would serve a useful purpose.