Appellant was convicted in the Jefferson Circuit Court of robbery in the first degree and was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. Appellant now appeals to this Court as a matter of right.
Around midnight on the morning of February 8, 1994, the Dairy Mart on Berry Boulevard in Louisville was robbed by a short white man with brown hair and a mustache who was wearing a brown or dark tan jacket, dark pants, and dark shoes. The man, whose face was partially visible through the two-inch slits cut into the plastic grocery bag he was wearing over his head, brandished a twelve-inch knife and forced the two clerks to open the safe where the night’s revenue had been placed. The robber made off with $2,000 to $3,000, dropping some of the rubber-banded stacks of cash and food stamps in the store and in the parking lot. The clerks observed the robber go into an apartment complex across the street. The pоlice were notified and arrived shortly thereafter.
The appellant advances two arguments on appeal. The first is that the trial court erred when it refused the defense request to instruct the jury on the lesser-ineluded offense of receiving stolen property under $800. The second is that the trial court erred when it refused to suppress the in-court and out-of-cоurt identification of the appellant by the robbery victims.
The first argument can be found mer-itless by simple mathematics. Of the $842 in cash and $122 in food stamps, the appellant claims $200 from one sister, $100 from an aunt, and $85 from another sister were all loans for the appellant to purchase a сar. This accounts for only $335 of the $842, leaving $507 unaccounted for. The $122 in food stamps was claimed to be winnings from a dice game. The appellant cannot therefore claim that a reasonable juror could have concluded that he received stolen property valued at less than $300, as the $507, some of it in marked stacks, exceeds the amount required for a felony conviction under KRS 514.110. The trial court was corrеct in refusing to give an instruction on this lesser-ineluded offense.
An instruction on a lesser included offense should not be given unless the evidence is such that а reasonable juror could doubt that the defendant is guilty of the crime charged but conclude that he is guilty of the lesser included offense.
Luttrell v. Commonwealth,
Ky.,
The appellant’s second argument on appeal is that the trial court erred by allowing the in-court and out-of-court identification by the store clerks. There was a pretrial suppression hearing on the admissibility оf the out-of-court identification. This “identification” occurred minutes after the robbery and consisted of an officer standing with the appellаnt in the parking lot while each clerk separately identified the appellant as having similar characteristics to those of the robber. The court expressly ruled that neither of the clerks actually made an identification, but observed that there were shared charactеristics between the appellant and the robber. Such a “show-up” identification may be unreliable and suspect, but such show-ups are nonethеless necessary in some instances because they occur immediately after the commission of the crime and aid the police in either establishing probable cause or clearing a possible suspect, and the police do not need to delay the procеss in order to allow the suspect to have counsel present.
Stidham v. Commonwealth,
Ky.,
The first
Biggers
factor in the “totality of the circumstances” test is the opportunity to
By analyzing the five
Biggers
factors, the totality of circumstances indicate that the appellant’s due process rights were not violated. The in-trial identification was reliable, even thоugh the pretrial identification may or may not have been suggestive, as shown by the same five
Biggers
factors discussed above.
See Jones v. Commonwealth,
Ky.App.,
For the foregoing reasons, the decision of the Jefferson Circuit Court is hereby affirmed.
