A Miranda warning almost always renders admissible evidence of any inculpatory statement a suspect makes subsequently. But what about when the Miranda warning is preceded by interrogation in which the suspect has made involuntarily an inculpatory statement? Does the Miranda warning serve to inoculate the constitutional violation that has already occurred? The Sixth Circuit established the relevant test recently in United States v. Ray.
The defendant, Alvin Ray, was suspected of drug dealing, and police secured a warrant to search his residence. When police went to execute the warrant, they encountered a teenage boy in the front yard. When police entered the house, they found Ray and his girlfriend, the mother of the boy, asleep in an upstairs bedroom. A search of the house recovered marijuana, crack cocaine and three firearms. Later, at the police station, Ray, after being read his Miranda rights, acknowledged ownership of the items.
Ray moved to suppress his statements. His main and best argument, which the capable district court judge, Hon. Avern Cohn, ignored essentially, was that the police had coerced an involuntary statement from him at the residence. More specifically, Ray claimed that, while the search was ongoing, he was in custody and told by police that, if he did not admit to possession of the contraband etc, his girlfriend would also be arrested and her child would become a ward of the state. The Miranda warning at the police station did not inoculate this coercion and the statement that followed was also not voluntary, Ray argued.
The Sixth Circuit reversed the district court's ruling admitting Ray's statements and remanded for an evidentiary hearing both as to the voluntariness of the statement at the house and the effect of the Miranda warning. This latter point required it to establish the relevant test.
The Sixth Circuit began by considering the Supreme Court's decision in Missouri v Seibert, 542 US 600 (2004), a 4-1-4 decision, and concluded that it did not establish any rule, because there was not five votes for any rule at all. So the Sixth Circuit found it necessary to dig from Seibert some workable rule.
The court recited the two controlling inquiries as follows: (1) whether a reasonable person in the defendant's shoes would have seen the renewed questioning as a new and distinct experience from the initial interrogation; and, (2) whether Miranda warnings could have made sense as presenting a genuine choice to follow-up on an earlier admission. Five factors, the Sixth Circuit advised, should guide this inquiry: (a) the completeness and detail of the question and answer in the first round; (b) the overlapping content of the two statements; (c) the timing and setting of the first and second interrogations; (d) continuity of police personnel; and, (e) the degree to which the interrogator's questions treated the second round as continuous to the first.
The Sixth Circuit's opinion was authored by U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio and was joined by Circuit Judges Eric Clay and Damon Keith.
Robert L. Abell
www.RobertAbellLaw.com
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