In the case of Biggers v. Tennessee in 1967, the U.S Supreme Court was asked to consider whether a lineup identification procedure violated due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The defendant, Mr. Biggers, had been identified by a victim as her assailant during a police-arranged lineup that took place while he was in custody for an unrelated crime and without his counsel present. He argued this constituted an unfair trial because it denied him his right to counsel at a critical stage of prosecution and also tainted the witness's testimony against him at trial. The court ruled against Mr. Biggers stating that there is no absolute right to have counsel present during pre-trial lineups and such procedures do not necessarily violate due process rights unless they are unnecessarily suggestive or conducive to irreparable mistaken identification which would lead to substantial likelihood of misidentification. This ruling established important precedent regarding when legal representation must be provided for defendants during criminal proceedings and how courts should evaluate claims about potentially biased eyewitness identifications.

In the dissenting opinion for Biggers v. Tennessee, the justice argued that the identification procedure used in this case was suggestive and unreliable, thus violating due process rights of the defendant. The justice pointed out that there were significant inconsistencies in victim's description of her attacker before she identified Mr. Biggers as her assailant from a single photograph shown to her by police officers five months after the crime occurred. This method was deemed highly prejudicial because it suggested to the victim who they wanted her to identify as perpetrator without providing any other options or safeguards against misidentification. Furthermore, no lineup or array of photographs were presented for comparison which could have potentially reduced chances of error in identification process significantly according to research findings on eyewitness testimony reliability cited by dissenting justices.