§ 24.11 CUSTODIAL INTERROGATION: WHEN MIRANDA WARNINGS ARE NOT REQUIRED

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 24.11. Custodial Interrogation: When Miranda Warnings Are Not Required

[A] Public-Safety Exception¹⁹⁵

In New York v. Quarles,¹⁹⁶ the Supreme Court recognized a "public safety" exception to Miranda. In Quarles, a woman informed two officers shortly after midnight that she had been raped, that her assailant was armed, and that he had fled into a nearby all-night grocery store with a weapon. One of the officers entered the store and spotted a man, Q, fitting the description of the assailant.

Q fled to the rear of the store, with the officer in pursuit. The officer, now accompanied by three other officers, took Q into custody and handcuffed him. When the officer discovered that Q had an empty shoulder holster, he asked Q (without issuing Miranda warnings) where the gun was. Q nodded in the direction of some empty cartons and said "the gun is over there." The officers retrieved the weapon.

The lower courts suppressed Q's statement about the gun. However, the Supreme Court reversed on the ground that the custodial interrogation occurred in a situation posing a threat to the public safety and, therefore, fit within this newly recognized exception to Miranda. Speaking for the majority, Justice Rehnquist stated that the police "were confronted with the immediate necessity" of finding the weapon. As long as the gun's whereabouts were unknown, it posed a "danger to the public safety: An accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it."

The Court has not clarified the boundaries of the public-safety exception, leaving it to lower courts instead to reach conflicting fact-sensitive outcomes,¹⁹⁷ except to state in Quarles that there must be an "objectively reasonable need to protect the police or the public from [an] immediate danger"; there must exist an "exigency requiring immediate action by the officers beyond the normal need expeditiously to solve a serious crime." Moreover, the questions asked by the police in such circumstances must be "reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety."

In Quarles, the Court considered it irrelevant that there was no evidence that the interrogating officer was motivated by a concern for public safety when he asked about the gun. Justice Rehnquist stated that the exception "should not be made to depend on post hoc findings at a suppression hearing concerning the subjective motivation of the . . . officer." Indeed, the Court admitted that in emergency circumstances most officers act for a "host of different, instinctive, and largely unverifiable motives . . . [including] the desire to obtain incriminating evidence from the suspect."

The Court conceded that recognition of the public-safety exception reduces the "desirable clarity" of Miranda. But, "[t]he exception will not be difficult for police officers to apply because in each case it will be circumscribed by the exigency which justifies it." The Court expressed confidence that the police "can and will distinguish almost instinctively between questions necessary to...