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Remedy for Miranda Violation and Use of Derivative Evidence
OREGON v. ELSTAD, Supreme Court of the United States, (1985) 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285
FACTS:
Following a burglary in Salem, Oregon, an informant contacted the Polk County sheriff's Office to implicate Michael Elstad, a neighbor and friend of the family who occupied the burgled home. Later police officers procured an arrest warrant for young Elstad. When the police executed the arrest warrant, Elstad's mother led the officers to his bedroom where Elstad was listening to his stereo.
One officer placed Elstad under arrest and escorted him to the living room. When Officer Burke and Elstad had been seated, Burke asked Elstad if he suspected why the police wished to talk to him. Elstad answered in the negative. Officer Burke mentioned a burglary at the Gross home, a fact that Elstad readily admitted having heard. When Burke told Elstad that the police felt that he was involved, Elstad looked at Burke and stated, "Yes, I was there."
At the Sheriff's Department offices, Officer McAllister first advised Elstad of his Miranda rights, to which Elstad indicated that he understood their significance. He stated that other individuals paid him to show them how to gain entrance to the Gross residence. Elstad gave a full confession which the officers had typed and which Elstad signed following some minor corrections.
Retained counsel represented Elstad at his bench trial where he was convicted of first degree burglary. Prior to the trial, Elstad's counsel unsuccessfully attempted to have the confession suppressed on the theory that the interrogation at Elstad's house "let the cat out of the bag" and thus, tainted the station house confession, citing Wong Sun v. United States, 361 U.S. 461 (1963). The judge ruled that the statement, "I was there," had to be excluded due to the obvious Miranda violation, but the voluntary written confession would be admitted into evidence since it had not been tainted by the living room conversation.
The Oregon Court of Appeals reversed Elstad's burglary conviction using the rationale that the signed confession, though voluntary, was rendered inadmissable due to initial improper custodial interrogation in the family living room in violation of the principles of Miranda.
PROCEDURAL QUESTION:
Where a confession, voluntary in itself, follows an interrogation which violated the principles of Miranda v. Arizona, must the voluntary confession be excluded from evidence?
HELD: No.
RATIONALE:
Justice O'CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.
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The arguments advanced in favor of suppression of respondent's confession rely heavily on metaphor. One metaphor, familiar from the Fourth Amendment context, would require that respondent's confession, regardless of its integrity, voluntariness, and probative value, be suppressed as the "tainted fruit of the poisonous tree" of the Miranda violation. A second metaphor questions whether a confession can be truly voluntary once the "cat is out of the bag." Taken out of context, each of these metaphors can be misleading. They should not be used to obscure fundamental differences between the role of the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule and the function of Miranda in guarding against the prosecutorial use of compelled statements as prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. The Oregon court assumed and respondent here contends that a failure to administer Miranda warnings necessarily breeds the same consequences as police infringement of a constitutional right, so that evidence uncovered following an unwarned statement must be suppressed as "fruit of the poisonous tree." We believe this view misconstrues the nature of the protections afforded by Miranda warnings and therefore misreads the consequences of police failure to supply them.
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The Court in Miranda requires suppression of many statements that would have been admissible under traditional due process analysis by presuming that statements made while in custody and without adequate warnings were protected by the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment, of course, is not concerned with nontestimonial evidence. See Schmerber v. California (1966) (defendant may be compelled to supply blood samples). Nor is it concerned with moral and psychological pressures to confess emanating from sources other than official coercion. Voluntary statements "remain a proper element in law enforcement." Miranda v. Arizona. "Indeed, far from being prohibited by the Constitution, admissions of guilt by wrongdoers, if not coerced, are inherently desirable. * * * Absent some officially coerced self-accusation, the Fifth Amendment privilege is not violated by even the most damning admissions." United States v. Washington (1977).
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Respondent's contention that his confession was tainted by the earlier failure of the police to provide Miranda warnings and must be excluded as "fruit of the poisonous tree" assumes the existence of a constitutional violation. This figure of speech is drawn from Wong Sun v. United States (1963), in which the Court held that evidence and witnesses discovered as a result of a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded form evidence. The Wong Sun doctrine applies as well when the fruit of the Fourth Amendment violation is a confession. It is settled law that a confession obtained through custodial interrogation after an illegal arrest should be excluded unless intervening events break the causal connection between the illegal arrest and the confession so that the confession is sufficiently an act of free will to purge the primary taint.
But as we explained in Quarles and Tucker, a procedural Miranda violation differs in significant respects from violations of the Fourth Amendment, which have traditionally mandated a broad application of the "fruits" doctrine. The purpose of the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule is to deter unreasonable searches, no matter how probative their fruits.
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The Miranda exclusionary rule, however, serves the Fifth Amendment and sweeps more broadly than the Fifth Amendment itself. It may be triggered even in the absence of a Fifth Amendment violation. The Fifth Amendment prohibits use by the prosecution in its case in chief only of compelled testimony. Failure to administer Miranda warnings creates a presumption of compulsion. Consequently, unwarned statements that are otherwise voluntary within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment must nevertheless be excluded from evidence under Miranda. Thus, in the individual case, Miranda's preventive medicine provides a remedy even to the defendant who has suffered no identifiable constitutional harm.
But the Miranda presumption, though irrebuttable for purposes of the prosecution's case in chief, does not require that the statements and their fruits be discarded as inherently tainted. Despite the fact that patently voluntary statements taken in violation of Miranda must be excluded from the prosecution's case, the presumption of coercion does not bar their use for impeachment purposes on cross-examination. Harris v. New York (1971). The Court in Harris rejected as an "extravagant extension of the Constitution," the theory that a defendant who had confessed under circumstances that made the confession inadmissible, could thereby enjoy the freedom to "deny every fact disclosed or discovered as a 'fruit' of his confession, free from confrontation with his prior statements" and that the voluntariness of his confession would be totally irrelevant. [Citations omitted.] Where an unwarned statement is preserved for use in situations that fall outside the sweep of the Miranda presumption, "the primary criterion of admissibility [remains] the 'old' due process voluntariness test." Schulhofer, Confessions and the Court, 79 Mich.L.Rev. 865, 877 (1981).
In Michigan v. Tucker (1974), the Court was asked to extend the Wong Sun fruits doctrine to suppress the testimony of a witness for the prosecution whose identity was discovered as the result of a statement taken from the accused without benefit of full Miranda warnings. As in respondent's case, the breach of the Miranda procedures in Tucker involved no actual compulsion. the Court concluded that the unwarned questioning "did not abridge respondent's constitutional privilege *** but departed only from the prophylactic standards later laid down by this Court in Miranda to safeguard that privilege." Since there was no actual infringement of the suspect's constitutional rights, the case was not controlled by the doctrine expressed in Wong Sun that fruits of a constitutional violation must be suppressed. In deciding "how sweeping the judicially imposed consequences" of a failure to administer Miranda warnings should be, the Tucker Court noted that neither the general goal of deterring improper police conduct nor the Fifth Amendment goal of assuring trustworthy evidence would be served by suppression of the witness' testimony. The unwarned confession must, of course, be suppressed, but the Court ruled that introduction of the third-party witness' testimony did not violate Tucker's Fifth Amendment rights.
We believe that this reasoning applies with equal force when the alleged "fruit" of a noncoercive Miranda violation is neither a witness nor an article of evidence but the accused's own voluntary testimony. As in Tucker, the absence of any coercion or improper tactics undercuts the twin rationales-trustworthiness and deterrence-for a broader rule. Once warned, the suspect is free to exercise his own volition in deciding whether or not to make a statement to the authorities. The Court has often noted that "'a living witness is not to be mechanically equated with the proffer of inanimate evidentiary objects illegally seized. *** [T]he living witness is an individual human personality whose attributes of will, perception, memory and volition interact to determine what testimony he will give.'" United States v. Ceccolini (1979) (emphasis added) (quoting from Smith v. United States, 117 U.S.App.D.C. 1, 3-4, 324 F.2d 879, 881-882 (1963) (Burger, J.) (Footnotes omitted)).
Because Miranda warnings may inhibit persons from giving information, this Court has determined that they need be administered only after the person is taken into "custody" or his freedom has otherwise been significantly restrained. Unfortunately, the task of defining "custody" is a slippery one, and "policemen investigating serious crimes [cannot realistically be expected to] make no errors whatsoever." Michigan v. Tucker, supra. If errors are made by law enforcement officers in administering the prophylactic Miranda procedures, they should not breed the same irremediable consequences as police infringement of the Fifth Amendment itself. It is an unwarranted extension of Miranda to hold that a simple failure to administer the warnings, unaccompanied by any actual coercion or other circumstances calculated to undermine the suspect's ability to exercise his free will so taints the investigatory process that a subsequent voluntary and informed waiver is ineffective for some indeterminate period. Though Miranda requires that the unwarned admission must be suppressed, the admissibility of any subsequent statement should turn in these circumstances solely on whether it is knowingly and voluntarily made.
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The failure of police to administer Miranda warnings does not mean that the statements received have actually been coerced, but only that courts will presume the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination has been intelligently exercised.
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The Oregon court nevertheless identified a subtle form of lingering compulsion, the psychological impact of the suspect's conviction that he has let the cat out of the bag and, in so doing, has sealed his own fate. But endowing the psychological effects of voluntary unwarned admissions with constitutional implications would, practically speaking, disable the police from obtaining the suspect's informed cooperation even when the official coercion proscribed by the Fifth Amendment played no part in either his warned or unwarned confessions. As the Court remarked in Bayer:
"[A]fter an accused has once let the cat out of the bag by confessing, no matter what the inducement, he is never thereafter free of the psychological and practical disadvantages of having confessed. He can never get the cat back in the bag. The secret is out for good. In such a sense, a later confession may always be looked upon as fruit of the first. But this Court has never gone so far as to hold that making a confession under circumstances which preclude its use, perpetually disables the confessor from making a usable one after those conditions have been removed."
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This Court has never held that the psychological impact of voluntary disclosure of a guilty secret qualifies as state compulsion or compromised the voluntariness of a subsequent informed waiver. The Oregon court, by adopting this expansive view of Fifth Amendment compulsion, effectively immunizes a suspect who responds to pre-Miranda warning questions from the consequences of his subsequent informed waiver of the privilege of remaining silent. This immunity comes at a high cost to legitimate law enforcement activity, while adding little desirable protection to the individual's interest in not being compelled to testify against himself. When neither the initial nor the subsequent admission is coerced, little justification exists for permitting the highly probative evidence of a voluntary confession to be irretrievably lost to the fact finder.
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Though belated, the reading of respondent's rights was undeniably complete. McAllister testified that he read the Miranda warnings aloud from a printed card and recorded Elstad's responses. There is no question that respondent knowingly and voluntarily waived his right to remain silent before he described his participation in the burglary. It is also beyond dispute that respondent's earlier remark was voluntary, within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment. ***
Respondent, however, has argued that he was unable to give a fully informed waiver of his rights because he was unaware that his prior statement could not be used against him. Respondent suggests that Deputy McAllister, to cure this deficiency, should have added an additional warning to those given him at the Sheriff's office. Such a requirement is neither practicable nor constitutionally necessary. In many cases, a breach of Miranda procedures may not be identified as such until long after full Miranda warnings are administered and a valid confession obtained.
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When police ask questions of a suspect in custody without administering the required warnings, Miranda dictates that the answers received be presumed compelled and that they be excluded from evidence at trial in the State's case in chief. The Court has carefully adhered to this principle, permitting a narrow exception only where pressing public safety concerns demanded. The Court today in no way retreats from the bright line rule of Miranda. We do not imply that good faith excuses a failure to administer Miranda warnings; nor do we condone inherently coercive police tactics or methods offensive to due process that render the initial admission involuntary and undermine the suspect's will to invoke his rights once they are read to him. A handful of courts have, however, applied our precedents relating to confessions obtained under coercive circumstance to situations involving wholly voluntary admissions, requiring a passage of time or break in events before a second, fully warned statement can be deemed voluntary. Far from establishing a rigid rule, we direct courts to avoid one; there is no warrant for presuming coercive effect where the suspect's initial inculpatory statement, though technically in violation of Miranda, was voluntary. The relevant inquiry is whether, in fact, the second statement was also voluntarily made. As in any such inquiry, the finder of fact must examine the surrounding circumstances and the entire course of police conduct with respect to the suspect in evaluating the voluntariness of his statements. The fact that a suspect chooses to speak after being informed of his rights is, of course, highly probative. We find that the dictates of Miranda and the goals of the Fifth Amendment proscription against use of compelled testimony are fully satisfied in the circumstances of this case by barring use of the unwarned statement in the case in chief. No further purpose is served by imputing "taint" to subsequent statements obtained pursuant to a voluntary and knowing waiver. We hold today that a suspect who has once responded to unwarned yet uncoercive questioning is not thereby disabled from waiving his rights and confessing after he has been given the requisite Miranda warnings.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals of Oregon is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
Justice BRENNAN, with whom Justice MARSHALL joins, dissenting.
Notes
1. As the principal case demonstrates, the principles of Miranda may be violated without violating the arrestee's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. If there has been no violation of constitutional dimension, there is no occasion to apply the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine of Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963). To the extent that Elstad's rights under Miranda were violated and produced evidence, such evidence must be excluded, but once properly warned, all evidence voluntarily offered will be admissible in court against a defendant.
2. Consider how the Court would have treated Elstad's case if the officer had applied some physical coercion in the bedroom in order to get Elstad to discuss the case. Would a Miranda warning later properly applied at the station house, followed by Elstad's confession, cure the constitutional violation in the bedroom? Would Elstad's station house confession be the product of the Fifth Amendment violation in the bedroom?
Public Safety Exception to Administration of Miranda Warnings
NEW YORK v. QUARLES, Supreme Court of the United States, 467 U.S. 649, 104 S.Ct. 2626 (1984)
FACTS:
Benjamin Quarles, respondent, was charged with criminal possession of a handgun. Pursuant to a motion to suppress both the gun and statements made prior to receiving his Miranda warnings, the trial court ruled in favor of Quarles. The New York courts affirmed the trial court ruling and the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari to determine whether Miranda required suppression of oral statements and a weapon.
The case arose when a young lady reported to Officer Kraft and his partner the fact that she had been raped by a six-foot male wearing a jacket with the name "Big Ben" printed on the back. The woman related that Big Ben had just entered a nearby supermarket and was armed with a hand gun. Upon entering the store, Officer Kraft spotted the suspect, but momentarily lost him between rows of food products. Following Quarles' apprehension, but prior to offering any Miranda warning, Officer Kraft frisked arrestee Quarles and found only an empty shoulder holster. Immediately, Kraft asked Quarles where the weapon could be found and Quarles answered with a reply which disclosed the location of the handgun.
Officer Kraft read the Miranda warnings to Quarles from a printed form and inquired whether he would be willing to answer additional questions without an attorney. Quarles answered in the affirmative and admitted that he owned the gun and had purchased it in Miami.
The trial court ruled that both Quarles' initial statement to police and the handgun would be suppressed from use as evidence to prove illegal handgun possession since the police had custodially interrogated Quarles without properly advising him of his Miranda rights. The trial court's decision was upheld by New York appellate courts and the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari.
PROCEDURAL QUESTION:
Does a "public safety" exception exist to the usual requirement that Miranda warnings be administered to persons in custody prior to any interrogation?
HELD: Yes.
RATIONALE:
For the reasons which follow, we believe that this case presents a situation where concern for public safety must be paramount to adherence to the literal language of the prophylactic rules enunciated in Miranda.
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In this case we have before us no claim that respondent's statements were actually compelled by police conduct which overcame his will to resist. See Beckwith v. United States, 425 U.S. 341, 347-348 (1976); Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U.S. 737 (1966). Thus the only issue before us is whether Officer Kraft was justified in failing to make available to respondent the procedural safeguards associated with the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination since Miranda.
The New York Court of Appeals was undoubtedly correct in deciding that the facts of this case come within the ambit of the Miranda decision as we have subsequently interpreted it. We agree that respondent was in police custody because we have noted that "the ultimate inquiry is simply whether there is a 'formal arrest or restraint on freedom of movement' of the degree associated with formal arrest," California v. Beheler, 463 U.S. 1121, 1125 (1983) (per curiam), quoting Oregon v. Mathiason, 429 U.S. 492, 495 (1977) (per curiam). Here Quarles was surrounded by at least four police officers and was handcuffed when the questioning at issue took place.
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We hold that on these facts there is a "public safety" exception to the requirement that Miranda warnings be given before a suspect's answers may be admitted into evidence, and that the availability of that exception does not depend upon the motivation of the individual officers involved. In a kaleidoscopic situation such as the one confronting these officers, where spontaneity rather than adherence to a police manual is necessarily the order of the day, the application of the exception which we recognize today should not be made to depend on post hoc findings at a suppression hearing concerning the subjective motivation of the arresting officer. Undoubtedly most police officers, if placed in Officer Kraft's position, would act out of a host of different, instinctive, and largely unverifiable motives - their own safety, the safety of others, and perhaps as well the desire to obtain incriminating evidence from the suspect.
Whatever the motivation of individual officers in such a situation, we do not believe that the doctrinal underpinnings of Miranda require that it be applied in all its rigor to a situation in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety. The Miranda decision was based in large part on this Court's view that the warnings which it required police to give to suspects in custody would reduce the likelihood that the suspects would fall victim to constitutionally impermissible practices of police interrogation in the presumptively coercive environment of the station house.
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The police in this case, in the very act of apprehending a suspect, were confronted with the immediate necessity of ascertaining the whereabouts of a gun which they had every reason to believe the suspect had just removed from his empty holster and discarded in the supermarket. So long as the gun was concealed somewhere in the supermarket, with its actual whereabouts unknown, it obviously posed more than one danger to the public safety: an accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it.
In such a situation, if the police are required to recite the familiar Miranda warnings before asking the whereabouts of the gun, suspects in Quarles' position might well be deterred from responding. Procedural safeguards which deter a suspect from responding were deemed acceptable in Miranda in order to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege; when the primary social cost of those added protections is the possibility of fewer convictions, the Miranda majority was willing to bear that cost. Here, had Miranda warnings deterred Quarles from responding to Officer Kraft's question about the whereabouts of the gun, the cost would have been something more than merely the failure to obtain evidence useful in convicting Quarles. Officer Kraft needed an answer to his question not simply to make his case against Quarles but to insure that further danger to the public did not result from the concealment of the gun in a public area.
We conclude that the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination.
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In recognizing a narrow exception to the Miranda rule in this case, we acknowledge that to some degree we lessen the desirable clarity of that rule. At least in part in order to preserve its clarity, we have over the years refused to sanction attempts to expand our Miranda holding. See, e.g., Minnesota v. Murphy, 465 U.S. 420 (1984) (refusal to extend Miranda requirements to interviews with probation officers); Fare v. Michael C., 442 U.S. 707 (1979) (refusal to equate request to see probation officer with request to see a lawyer for Miranda purposes); Beckwith v. United States, 425 U.S. 341 (1976) (refusal to extend Miranda requirements to questioning in noncustodial circumstances).
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The exception will not be difficult for police officers to apply because in each case it will be circumscribed by the exigency which justifies it. We think police officers can and will distinguish almost instinctively between questions necessary to secure their own safety or the safety of the public and questions designed solely to elicit testimonial evidence from a suspect.
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We hold that the Court of Appeals in this case erred in excluding [from evidence] the statement, "the gun is over there," and the gun because of the officer's failure to read respondent his Miranda rights before attempting to locate the weapon. Accordingly we hold that it also erred in excluding the subsequent statements as illegal fruits of a Miranda violation. We therefore reverse and remand for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Notes
1. Under the public safety exception to Miranda, the determination of when a public safety emergency exists is to be decided by an objective standard of what a reasonable officer would have concluded under the circumstances.
2. Would the majority opinion have admitted the gun and the pre-Miranda statement if there had been proof that Quarles had been physically coerced by the officers at the time he made his statement? Would your answer change if the police, prior to offering the Miranda warnings, told Quarles that if anyone were harmed by the hidden gun that he would be certainly held criminally responsible?
3. The public safety exception to the Miranda warning requirement makes the task of determining when the warnings must be given less clear than prior to the decision in Quarles. Now the officer must determine whether custody exists, whether the officer's conduct constitutes interrogation, and whether any exception under the public safety doctrine reasonably exists. The dissenters in Quarles contended that the "bright line" of custody and interrogation which normally "triggered" the need for the warnings has been destroyed by the concept of the public safety exception with the result that both the police and judges will have difficulty applying the new standards.