Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Page 3
Court of Appeal:
In-Court Identification Not Tainted by Earlier ‘Suggestions’
Opinion Says Identifying Officer’s Admission That Accused Was Frequent Topic of Conversation at Station, That Rumors Linked Defendant to Suspect Vehicle, Did Not Render Procedure to Be ‘Unduly Suggestive’
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Third District Court of Appeal yesterday held that an officer’s in-court identification was not based on an illegally suggestive procedure simply because the witness had previously looked up a photograph of the defendant after the incident due to the fact that the accused was talked about at the station “quite a bit” and had been rumored to have links to the suspect vehicle.
In an unpublished opinion by Justice Harry E. Hull Jr., joined in by Presiding Justice Laurie M. Earl and Justice Louis Mauro, the court distinguished officer identifications from those involving lay witnesses, declaring:
“[A]s law enforcement officers, [the witnesses] are ‘not inexperienced lay witnesses who might be expected to infer from [a] stationhouse showup’ that…officers believed they had the culprit, thereby influencing their identification….The fact that other officers had mentioned defendant before the [incident] and mentioned defendant’s name in connection with the blue Chevrolet truck after the…pursuit [in question] does not render the identification procedure in this case unduly suggestive. Law enforcement officers are allowed to discuss with each other potential suspects as part of the investigative process.”
Challenging the identification was Thomas Henderson, who was convicted in 2024 of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, reckless evasion, and resisting arrest relating to two incidents occurring in the summer of 2022. That July, Officer Joseph Lensing of the Redding Police Department engaged in a high-speed pursuit of a blue Chevrolet Silverado that was missing a license plate and registration tags.
Driver’s Face
Lensing saw the driver’s face before he bailed out of his car and got away. After fellow officers suggested that Henderson may be the culprit based on a familiarity with the truck and alleged associations with a woman depicted on an identification card found in the vehicle, Lensing pulled up a booking photo of the defendant but was unsure if he was the suspect.
On Aug. 22, 2023, Lensing was on patrol when he observed the same man driving an identical blue Silverado. His partner, Chase Kiracofe, made a U-turn to follow the vehicle, which collided with a tree before reversing into the passenger side of the police vehicle at a high rate of speed and escaping.
Before trial, the defendant moved to exclude any in-court identification by the officers as unduly suggestive, unreliable, and a violation of his constitutional due process rights. He requested a hearing under Evidence Code §402.
At the ensuing hearing, Lensing testified that he had seen a photograph of the defendant because he was a frequent subject of conversation at the station and that other officers had told him that he had been linked to a similar truck. He testified that, after the August incident, he was able to identify Henderson with certainty.
Shasta Superior Court Judge Jody Burgess denied Henderson’s motion to exclude, saying:
“I will not let him say, I can ID as of July of ’22. He cannot do that because clearly he can’t, which I think opens him up for heavy cross-examination as to whether he can truly [] do it come August.”
At trial, Lensing identified Henderson in court as the driver of the Silverado during both incidents. Burgess sentenced the defendant to more than five years in prison.
Yesterday’s opinion affirms the judgment.
Highly Suggestive
Hull noted:
“Defendant contends that Officers Lensing and Kiracofe identified him through a highly suggestive procedure…because they heard through conversations within the police station that defendant had prior contacts with police and that defendant was possibly connected to the blue Chevrolet truck and its female passenger….He…argues that this suggestive nature persisted even though the officers viewed his photographs before the August…pursuit, because witnesses tend to retain…the image of the photograph they saw, instead of the person actually seen.”
Rejecting this assertion, the justice wrote:
“Officer Lensing was not presented with the photo of a single suspect by investigating officers to identify the culprit….Nor did officers present Officer Lensing with a lineup that suggested they believed defendant was the culprit….Rather, Officer Lensing had already seen photographs of defendant because his name had already been mentioned at the police station prior to the July 2022 pursuit, and then Officer Lensing viewed defendant’s photograph during his own investigation. Indeed, defendant concedes that ‘a trained officer could not be found through the photo identification process to have impermissibly suggested to himself the person he saw on a particular date.’ ”
He continued:
“This is common sense. To hold otherwise would potentially invalidate every criminal investigation that relied in some part on pictures of the person who had been a suspect and who was eventually charged with the commission of a crime by precluding the investigating officers’ later in-court identification of the defendant.”
Saying that Henderson “has not shown that the identification procedure in this case was unduly suggestive,” he declared that “[t]he judgment is affirmed.”
The case is People v. Henderson, C101988.
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