Missouri v. Seibert: two-stepping towards the apocalypse.

AuthorWeiss, Stewart J.

Missouri v. Seibert, 124 S. Ct. 2601 (2004)

  1. INTRODUCTION

    In Missouri v. Seibert, the Supreme Court ruled that a police officer's use of the "question first" (a.k.a. "two-step") interrogation technique rendered the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona (1) ineffective and that the resulting statement must be held inadmissible at trial. (2) The Court affirmed the Missouri Supreme Court's decision that this practice, which involves withholding the Miranda warnings until a suspect has already given a statement and then prompting the suspect to repeat the unwarned statement, was wrongly used in Patricia Seibert's post-arrest interrogation to defeat the purpose of the Miranda warnings. (3) The Court distinguished its earlier ruling in Oregon v. Elstad which permitted a defendant's confession to be admitted into evidence despite the fact that he had made a prior self-incriminating statement before receiving his Miranda warnings. (4) In Seibert, the Court based its decision not on the traditional analysis of whether the respective statements were voluntary or coerced, but rather on whether the Miranda warning, when given midstream, was truly effective. (5) The plurality ruled that a waiver of Miranda rights could be given voluntarily but that the structure of a two-step interrogation could still render that waiver invalid by confusing the suspect as to the "nature of his rights and the consequences of abandoning them." (6)

    The Court did not overrule Elstad, but rather it added a new level of analysis to determine the effectiveness of Miranda warnings given midstream. Although the Court vigorously criticized police who use the "two-step" interrogation technique as an "end-run" around Miranda, it chose not to implement a clear rule barring this technique in all cases. (7)

    This note argues that instead of solving the troubling issues which brought this case before the Court, the Seibert opinion added another layer of ungainly analysis to an already abstruse process. The Court left police without a clear rule of conduct and gave lower courts the unenviable task of determining not just whether a suspect's Miranda rights were waived voluntarily but also whether the warnings themselves were effective given the "totality of the confusion" surrounding a custodial interrogation.

  2. BACKGROUND: THE EVOLUTION OF MIRANDA'S EXCLUSIONARY RULE

    1. MIRANDA AND ITS MANY EXCEPTIONS

      Until 1966, the predominant standard for determining whether a defendant's confession could be admitted at trial was the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (8) In the decades before Miranda, the Court rested the question of admissibility of confessions on whether it believed the defendant's "will was overborne" during interrogation. (9) To accomplish this inquiry, the Court examined the "totality of the circumstances" surrounding the defendant's interrogation and confession, taking into account not only the conduct of the interrogators but also the impact on the accused. (10) Despite applying this test on a regular basis, (11) the Court struggled to articulate a clear standard for determining when a suspect's will was overborne. In the years leading up to the Miranda decision, the Court acknowledged that an evolving desire for fairness in police procedure had complicated the Court's efforts to articulate a precise due process test for involuntary confessions. (12) Although the Miranda decision eclipsed due process as the governing standard for police interrogations, the "totality of the circumstances" analysis remains the basis of all inquiries into the voluntariness of a challenged confession. (13)

      Throughout the decade preceding Miranda, the Court evinced a strong concern that coercive interrogation techniques produced unreliable and untrustworthy confessions. (14) Furthermore, coercive police tactics offended a community's "sense of fair play and decency." (15) These dual concerns culminated in the Court's Miranda decision. The Miranda Court acknowledged that a custodial interrogation is an inherently coercive atmosphere which "exacts a heavy toll on individual liberty and trades on the weakness of individuals." (16) The Court recognized that a suspect placed in such a situation was especially likely to waive his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. (17) To prevent potential infringements of suspects' Fifth Amendment rights, the Court established "concrete constitutional guidelines for law enforcement agencies and courts to follow." (18) These guidelines clearly stated that a confession would be inadmissible at trial if the defendant had not first been informed that he "has the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, that he has the right to the presence of an attorney, and that if he cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for him prior to any questioning if he so desires." (19) If the accused invoked these rights at any time during an interrogation, the police had to respect this request and stop the interrogation. Any failure by the police to comply would trigger the exclusionary rule, rendering any resulting statement inadmissible in a court of law. (20)

      However, soon after declaring these clear "constitutional guidelines," the Supreme Court created a number of exceptions to Miranda's exclusionary rule. In Harris v. New York, the Court refused to completely exclude a statement given by a defendant despite the fact that he was not provided the Miranda warnings. (21) Instead of deeming the statement inadmissible because of this violation, the Court ruled that it could be used by the prosecution to impeach the defendant's testimony, but not in the case-in-chief. (22) Because the defendant did not claim his statement was coerced, the Court determined the statement was trustworthy (23) and voluntary under the totality of the circumstances test and therefore did not warrant complete exclusion. (24) In Michigan v. Tucker, the Court allowed the admission of testimony from a witness identified by a statement taken in violation of Miranda. (25) Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority, noted that although the police did disregard the commands of Miranda, they did not violate the underlying Fifth Amendment rights which the Miranda Court had set out to protect. (26) The idea that Miranda's exclusionary rule is an overinclusive command which "sweeps more broadly than the Fifth Amendment" is the foundation of almost all the Miranda exceptions. (27) Ten years later, the Court's ruling in New York v. Quarles created a "public safety" exception to Miranda. (28) The Court determined that police were not required to provide Miranda warnings to a suspect if they had a reasonable concern for the public's safety. (29) The next year, in Oregon v. Elstad, the Court established the exception reconsidered in Missouri v. Seibert. (30)

    2. OREGON V. ELSTAD--ADMITTING A VOLUNTARY CONFESSION GIVEN AFTER A MID-STREAM MIRANDA WARNING

      1. Majority Ruling

        Elstad addressed the question of whether the Fifth Amendment requires suppression of a voluntary statement made after a suspect has waived his Miranda rights if the suspect had given an earlier, voluntary but unwarned statement to police. (31) The Court ruled that the second statement, if given in the absence of coercion, was admissible. (32) The case was brought by a defendant convicted of burglary by the State of Oregon. (33) Upon arrest, the defendant had a brief conversation with police at his house in which he admitted to being involved in a burglary. (34) However, the defendant was not given the Miranda warnings until he was taken to the police station, at which point he waived his rights and gave a full confession. (35) The trial court refused to suppress the defendant's post-warning statement despite the fact that he made an incriminating statement before receiving the Miranda warnings. (36) The Oregon Court of Appeals reversed the trial court on the grounds that the defendant's initial, unwarned confession had "let the cat out of the bag" and created a coercive situation from which the defendant believed he could not escape, save for repeating his unwarned confession. (37)

        On review, the United States Supreme Court reversed the Oregon Court of Appeals. (38) The Court ruled that because both of the defendant's statements were given voluntarily, Miranda's broad exclusionary rule should not apply to the second, warned statement. (39) Citing the absence of "any coercion or improper tactics," the Court determined that the dual rationales for the Miranda warning, ensuring the trustworthiness of testimony and deterring impermissible police behavior, were not pressing in this case. (40) The Court distinguished cases in which actual physical or verbal coercion was used to elicit an unwarned statement from cases like Elstad's, in which a simple failure to warn created an irrebuttable "presumption of compulsion." (41) In cases where the first statement was actually coerced (an "involuntary" confession), the Court conceded that the "taint" of the coercive tactics could render the second statement involuntary. (42) In such cases, it advocated a strict examination of a number of different factors to determine if this "taint" dissipated before the second statement was given. (43) In contrast, the Court explained that any inadvertent or unintentional delay in implementing the "prophylactic Miranda procedures" could be redeemed simply with a defendant's "voluntary and informed waiver" if there was no evidence of actual coercion. (44) Applying this standard to the defendant, the Court found that Elstad's second statement was voluntary because neither interrogation had any "earmarks of coercion" and the interrogating officers did not exploit the inadmissible first statement to elicit the post-warning statement. (45) Thus, even though the failure to warn cast a presumption of compulsion on Elstad's first statement, the effect of this presumed...

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