Edwin Franqui v. Connecticut

Minutes after watching her boyfriend murdered beside her, a 16-year-old witness frantically named two brothers, by street name, as having been in the car from which the shots were fired. She did not say who was the shooter and who had been driving. Hours later, in a written statement, she filled in that detail – naming Edwin Franqui as the driver. But, when she took the witness stand years later, she would not confirm that identification, testifying under oath that she did not know who had been driving and refusing every invitation to “remember” otherwise: “No. I know what I seen.” The only evidence that put Franqui behind the wheel was her written statement – read aloud to the jury not by her, but by a uniformed detective, days after she had already left the witness stand for good. On that statement, and her initial, role-less identification at the scene, a jury convicted Franqui of conspiracy to commit murder, accessory to murder, and accessory to assault in the first degree, and the trial court sentenced him to 50 years in prison. The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed Franqui’s conviction, reasoning that because the witness’s statement identified only two people in the car, and the jury could credit a separate, similarly recanted statement attributing the shooting to Franqui’s identically-named older brother, the jury could conclude – by process of elimination – that Franqui “must have” been driving. The question presented is: Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires independent, reliable corroboration before a recanted, out-of-court identification may serve as the primary evidentiary basis for a criminal conviction.