Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

MIRANDA WARNINGS: Police method outlawed

Two-step interview undermines suspects' rights, justices rule

WASHINGTON -- Police cannot extract information from suspects and only then tell them of their right to remain silent, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in outlawing an interrogation tactic often used by investigators.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court determined the two-step interrogation "effectively threatens to thwart" protections against coerced confessions afforded by the familiar Miranda warning, which starts, "You have the right to remain silent."

Writing for the majority, Justice David H. Souter said the tactics in a Missouri case "by any objective measure reveal a police strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings." Souter said some such interrogations could be allowed if police could show they were not trying to circumvent Miranda.

The decision was among four involving Miranda warnings that the court decided this session, with two coming down in favor of law enforcement and the other two, including the double-interview case, going against police.

In a second decision Monday, the court sided with police in the case of a Colorado man who told an officer not to bother reading him his rights.

Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University, said that since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Miranda v. Arizona ruling in 1966, the justices often have stopped short of making the warnings an absolute right. They have allowed police some room for error and provided for admissibility of some evidence when warnings are not given.

"Miranda has been, since it was decided, one of those cases where the court has been schizophrenic," Saltzburg said. "The court goes back and forth."

In January, the court ruled police may not try to wrest confessions from criminal suspects already indicted without first telling them they have a right to see a lawyer. This month, the court refused to require special treatment for young people under police questioning.

The Supreme Court ruling on two-step interrogation methods arose in the case of murder suspect Patrice Seibert.

Seibert was convicted of plotting to set a 1997 fire that killed a teenager who had been staying at the family home in Rolla, Mo. Police said she arranged to have her home burned to cover up the death of her 12-year-old son, who had cerebral palsy. Seibert had been worried she would be charged with neglect in her son's death.

According to the ruling, Seibert was questioned for about 40 minutes at 3 a.m. a few days after the fire without first being given her Miranda warning. At the end of the interrogation, she admitted the fire was set to cover up the death.

After a 20-minute break, police read the Miranda warning, then turned on a tape recorder and confronted her about the statements she had just made.

Seibert was convicted of second-degree murder, but she successfully appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court to have the statements suppressed in court. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

"The message for officers is you have to read rights first before questioning," said Amy Bartholow, Seibert's public defender. "Criminal defendants will have more rights in the interrogation room."

Such two-stage questioning often works because suspects might be more willing to talk before they are told they have a right to remain silent.

In the majority opinion, Souter and three other liberal justices said they saw a growing and worrisome trend toward the technique in many national police training manuals and classes.

Officials with the Henderson and North Las Vegas police said their departments do not teach the technique because doing so might undermine their efforts to win convictions in court.

"We're very cognizant and aware of Fourth Amendment issues and what is permissible and what is not," said Henderson police spokesman Shane Lewis. "Our biggest concern is to secure a conviction, and we certainly don't want a case thrown out based upon improper actions at the scene."

North Las Vegas police spokesman Tim Bedwell said many acceptable occasions exist when people are questioned without being read their Miranda rights, such as when they are pulled over for a traffic violation or when they voluntarily come to a police station to speak with officers.

"This isn't really a change for us," Bedwell said. "We've been aware to stay away from the tendency to trick someone into a confession and then read them their Miranda rights."

Officials with Las Vegas police declined comment Monday, saying they and their lawyers had yet to review the court's decision.

The court left the door open for police to use some confessions obtained after double interviews. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the determining fifth justice, wrote that police could use pre-Miranda confessions by proving the interrogation was not done "in a calculated way to undermine the Miranda warning."

In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that would hinder lower courts from determining whether officers had gone too far. She was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Future courts deciding on admissibility of such statements, she wrote, "will be forced to conduct the kind of difficult, state-of-mind inquiry that we normally take pains to avoid."

The second case decided Monday involved Samuel Patane. Colorado Springs, Colo. police came to his house to question him about a domestic case and told him he had a right to remain silent, but he said he already knew his rights. He then directed them to a gun in his bedroom and was charged with illegal possession of a firearm.

The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the gun could not be used as evidence against Patane because its discovery came from a statement made without a Miranda warning.

Thomas and two other justices said a failure to give a suspect Miranda warnings did not make such evidence inadmissible in court. O'Connor and Kennedy, while not going that far, said that the government presented a strong case for allowing evidence in the Patane case.

Review-Journal writer Frank Curreri contributed to this report.