Supreme Court warns police about Miranda's delicate balance

By Curt Anderson
The Associated Press

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

Writing for the majority, Justice David 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 one of 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 yesterday, 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 have often 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 cases The four cases decided this year by the Supreme Court involving its 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona requiring police to warn suspects they have the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present when answering questions: Missouri v. Seibert: Police cannot intentionally undermine the Miranda warning by questioning a suspect twice, the first time before reading the warning, to extract a confession. However, some double interviews could be permissible if police can show they were not intended to skirt Miranda requirements. U.S. v. Patane: Failure to give a suspect a Miranda warning does not necessarily make evidence or statements inadmissible in court. The case involved a man who told officers they did not have to read him a Miranda warning because he already knew his rights. Yarborough v. Alvarado: Juveniles do not get special treatment during police questioning because of their age. Fellers v. U.S.: People who have been formally indicted on criminal charges must be given their Miranda warnings before police begin any questioning. The Associated Press

In January, the court ruled that 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 her home in Rolla, Mo., a town in the Ozark Mountains. 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 may be more willing to talk before they're told they have a right to remain silent. The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Souter for himself and three other liberal justices, noted a growing and worrisome trend toward the technique in many national police-training manuals and classes.

Still, the court left the door open for police to use some confessions obtained after double interviews. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the determining fifth justice, wrote that police could use pre-Miranda confessions only 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 make it difficult for lower courts to determine if officers had gone too far. She was joined by Chief Justice William 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 yesterday 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 was the result of 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 the government presented a strong case for allowing evidence in the Patane case.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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