Source: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/21/231.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 08:00:33+00:00

Document:
Franklyn S. Michaelson, under appointment by the Supreme Court, and Hatch & Parent for Defendant and Appellant.
Roger S. Hanson, John M. Pitkin and Cherie A. Parker as Amici Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Appellant.
Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General, Jack R. Winkler, Chief Assistant Attorney General, S. Clark Moore, Assistant Attorney General, Robert F. Katz and Kent M. Bridwell, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
About 10 p.m. on Saturday, February 7, 1976, Officer Berry of the Eureka Police Department arrested defendant and three companions at the scene of a burglary in that city. He placed defendant in handcuffs and advised him of his rights under Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436, 467-473 [16 L. Ed. 2d 694, 719-723, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 10 A.L.R.3d 974]. fn. 2 Berry asked defendant if he understood these rights, and defendant replied that he did. The officer then asked defendant if, "having these rights in mind," he wanted to talk to the police. Defendant refused to do so, and he was transported to the Eureka police station and booked.
The arrest of two of defendant's companions had taken place in a nearby parked car. Visible in that car were numerous items of personal property, including a pill bottle which the police promptly seized. From the label on the bottle the police learned the prescription had been issued to a person with a Santa Barbara address. The police became suspicious that much of the property in the car was stolen, and telephoned the Santa Barbara Police Department. Detective Rogers of that department undertook an investigation of the possible connection of defendant and his companions with four recent burglaries in Santa Barbara.
Meanwhile, some two hours after the arrest -- i.e., approximately midnight on February 7 -- Officer Berry renewed the interrogation of defendant at the Eureka police station. The officer readvised defendant of his Miranda rights and "asked him again if he wished to make a [21 Cal. 3d 236] statement ...." Again defendant replied that he did not want to talk to the police, and he was transferred to the county jail.
On Monday, February 9, Detective Rogers of the Santa Barbara Police Department arrived in Eureka to pursue his investigation. The Eureka police turned over to Rogers the suspected stolen property, and advised him that defendant had twice refused to make a statement. Rogers then interrogated defendant's three companions in turn. Each was given the Miranda warnings, replied in the affirmative when asked to waive those rights, and confessed to participating in the Santa Barbara burglaries.
Finally, on Tuesday, February 10 -- i.e., three days after the arrest -- Detective Rogers initiated a third interrogation of defendant, despite knowledge that defendant had previously refused to discuss his criminal involvement. The questioning took place in the county jail. Rogers began by telling defendant that his three companions had confessed to committing the Santa Barbara burglaries; that one of his companions told the police that various items taken in those burglaries had been pawned by defendant in Los Angeles; that the Los Angeles Police Department investigated the lead and found that defendant had in fact pawned such items on five or six occasions; that he, Rogers, had also been informed that defendant had broken into a van and stolen some articles and then hidden them at a state beach; and that he had recovered the articles at the place described.
After reciting these facts Detective Rogers again read defendant his Miranda rights, established that he understood them, and asked if defendant wanted to talk to him. This time defendant replied, "I guess so, yeah." Taking this to be a valid waiver of defendant's privilege against self-incrimination, Rogers proceeded to question him about the four Santa Barbara burglaries. Defendant confessed to the crimes.
[1a] Defendant contends his confession was inadmissible because it was the product of custodial interrogation renewed by the police after he had twice indicated to them that he wished to remain silent. A long line of decisions of this court holds that the introduction of such a confession violates the privilege against self-incrimination of article I, section 15, of the California Constitution. fn. 3 That privilege, we have ruled, "precludes use by the prosecution of any extrajudicial statement by the defendant, whether inculpatory or exculpatory, either as affirmative evidence or for purposes of impeachment, obtained during custodial interrogation in violation of the standards declared in Miranda and its California progeny." (People v. Disbrow (1976) 16 Cal. 3d 101, 113 [127 Cal. Rptr. 360, 545 P.2d 272].) We review first the relevant language of Miranda, then the holdings of its "California progeny" which have applied that language and made it an intrinsic part of the law of this state.
Of course, because no warnings of any kind were given in Miranda, the decision did not actually adjudicate the precise issue now before us. That issue, which has often been presented to the courts since Miranda, typically arises from the following sequence of events: the police give the suspect the Miranda warnings and seek to question him, but he successfully invokes his right to remain silent; rather than promptly release or arraign him, however, the police continue to hold him in custody; thereafter the police again give him the Miranda warnings and renew the interrogation, and this time he confesses. There are variations on this theme: there may be more than two attempts at interrogation; the interval between interrogations may be long or short; at the start of the second or subsequent interrogation the police may or may not confront the suspect with additional evidence or statements of his accomplices; and the later questioning may be conducted by a different police officer, in a different location, and deal with a different crime. Nevertheless, in a long line of decisions this court has consistently held that a statement taken from the suspect in any of these circumstances is inadmissible because in violation of the principles of Miranda and the privilege against self-incrimination of the California Constitution.
The line began with People v. Fioritto (1968) 68 Cal. 2d 714 [68 Cal. Rptr. 817, 441 P.2d 625]. There the defendant and two companions were arrested for burglary and taken to the police station. The police gave the defendant the Miranda warnings and asked him to sign a waiver of his rights. He refused. The police then confronted him with his two accomplices, who had previously confessed and implicated him. The police again gave the defendant the Miranda warnings and renewed their request that he sign the waiver. This time he did so, and confessed to the burglary.
The second case of this type was People v. Ireland (1969) 70 Cal. 2d 522 [75 Cal. Rptr. 188, 450 P.2d 580, 40 A.L.R.3d 1323]. There the defendant was arrested and given the Miranda warnings. He responded by saying, "Call my parents for my attorney." The arresting officers neither complied with this request nor communicated it to their superiors. At the police station the defendant was again advised of his Miranda rights. After he was booked another officer gave the Miranda warnings for the third time, and asked if the defendant was willing to talk to him. The defendant agreed, and confessed to murdering his wife.
The fourth case of this sequence is People v. Burton (1971) 6 Cal. 3d 375 [99 Cal. Rptr. 1, 491 P.2d 793]. There a juvenile was arrested and taken to the police station. He asked to see his father, who had arrived at the station during the booking process, but permission was denied. Thereafter the police carefully explained to the juvenile his Miranda rights; he waived them, and subsequently confessed to assault and murder.
Finally, in People v. Enriquez (1977) 19 Cal. 3d 221 [137 Cal. Rptr. 171, 561 P.2d 261], the defendant was arrested four hours after he was seen inflicting fatal stab wounds to the victim, and was subsequently interrogated in custody. The police gave him the Miranda warnings and asked if he wished to talk about the case. He replied in the affirmative, but immediately thereafter told each of his two interrogators that he wanted a lawyer present before discussing the matter further. Rather than honoring the request, however, the police pressed him not to assert this right. They gave him the Miranda warnings again, and this time he waived his right to counsel. The interrogation proceeded, and the defendant made inculpatory statements.
[1b] The People seek to distinguish the foregoing precedents on factual grounds, stressing primarily two aspects of the record before us: (1) the interrogation which produced the confession did not immediately follow defendant's assertion of his right to remain silent, but came three days later; and (2) that interrogation was conducted by an officer of a different law enforcement agency and dealt with crimes different from those for which defendant had been arrested and first questioned. The distinctions, however, are not relevant to the purposes sought to be served by Fioritto and its progeny.
As noted at the outset, the Miranda-Fioritto line of decisions is premised on the perception that "the setting of in-custody interrogation" of a suspect without counsel is inherently coercive. That setting, with its subtle pressures of unfamiliar surroundings, physical and psychological isolation, and police-dominated atmosphere, remains the same whether the suspect is in custody for three hours or three days. It is true that after refusing to talk to the police defendant herein did not undergo immediately renewed interrogation, as in Fioritto; but he was spared that form of coercion only to be subjected to another, less obvious but perhaps more insidious.
[1c] It follows that the failure of the police to cease all attempts at interrogation of defendant herein after he refused to waive his right to remain silent was not cured by their subsequent failure to comply with the laws requiring his prompt arraignment. Two such wrongs do not make a right; they remain separate abuses, compounding the infringement of defendant's privilege against self-incrimination.
Nor is the failure of the Eureka police to cease efforts to question defendant cured by the fact that his subsequent interrogation was at the hands of the Santa Barbara police and dealt with different offenses. The People speculate that a suspect "may be perfectly willing to speak with the authorities and thereby waive his rights as to one particular offense, and yet wish to remain silent as to another offense," and "so too might he be willing to speak with representatives of one agency while preferring [21 Cal. 3d 245] not to do so with those from another agency." The argument is unconvincing.
We conclude that the defendant's confession was inadmissible under article I, section 15, of the California Constitution (fn. 3, ante) and the authorities cited herein. The trial court therefore erred in denying his motion to suppress, and the judgment must be reversed.
Because of the importance of the legal issue we shall not attempt, as defendant urges us with some justification, to distinguish Mosley on its facts: for present purposes we shall concede that the "circumstances" relied on by the high court are essentially the same as those which we hold herein are inadequate to protect defendant's privilege against self-incrimination under the California Constitution. (Part II, ante.) We therefore proceed to the question of how this conflict between California and federal law is to be resolved.
 We need not be detained, in reaching that question, by the People's effort to reopen the entire issue of the authority of the courts of this state to construe provisions of the California Constitution to furnish greater protections to our citizens than do textually parallel provisions of the federal Constitution. We recently addressed that issue in various contexts and in considerable depth. (See, e.g., People v. Brisendine (1975) 13 Cal. 3d 528, 545-552 [119 Cal. Rptr. 315, 531 P.2d 1099] (illegal search and seizure); People v. Longwill (1975) 14 Cal. 3d 943, 951 & fn. 4 [123 Cal. Rptr. 297, 538 P.2d 753] (same); People v. Disbrow (1976) supra, 16 Cal. 3d 101, 114-115 (privilege against self-incrimination); People v. Hannon (1977) 19 Cal. 3d 588, 606-607 & fn. 8 [138 Cal. Rptr. 885, 564 P.2d 1203] (right to speedy trial).) We have examined anew the People's arguments on the point, and find no reason to depart from our firmly established precedents.
Finally, our right to decline to follow Mosley in construing state law was reaffirmed in Justice Brennan's dissenting opinion in that very case. (423 U.S. at pp. 120-121 [46 L.Ed.2d at pp. 331-332].) In language we have noted once before (Disbrow, at p. 115 of 16 Cal.3d), he said: "In light of today's erosion of Miranda standards as a matter of federal constitutional law, it is appropriate to observe that no State is precluded by the decision from adhering to higher standards under state law. Each State has power to impose higher standards governing police practices under state law than is required by the Federal Constitution. [Citations.] ... Understandably, state courts and legislatures are, as matters of state law, increasingly according protections once provided as federal rights but now increasingly depreciated by decisions of this Court. [Citations.] I note that Michigan's Constitution has its own counterpart to the privilege against self-incrimination." So too, of course, does the California Constitution.
Secondly, the Mosley test is evidently designed to apply to other circumstances than those presented in the case itself. But the opinion does not attempt a compendium of such additional circumstances, and indeed the effort would have been futile. A major element of uncertainty is thus injected into the law: when has a suspect's right to cut off questioning been "scrupulously honored?" In Mosley the suspect was interrogated twice; will the confession be admissible when he is interrogated three times, as here, or even more? In Mosley two hours intervened between the interrogations; will the confession be admissible when the period of incommunicado detention is three days, as here, or still longer?
These are not idle inquiries. Given the high stakes involved in the admission of a confession into evidence, both trial and appellate counsel operating under the Mosley test would doubtless feel compelled to litigate every conceivable factual aspect of the issue of whether defendant's right to stop the interrogation was "scrupulously honored" in the case at hand. The consequences seem clear.
Not only would this constitute an "immense tax on judicial resources" (id., at p. 112, fn. 11), but in a certain number of cases it would undoubtedly produce inconsistent results on essentially similar facts. The stability and predictability of the law on this important topic would thereby be impaired, making it more difficult for the police to conform [21 Cal. 3d 251] their conduct to constitutional dictates. fn. 12 No less important, instances of individual injustice would necessarily ensue: as defendant correctly observes, "Such a fundamental right as the privilege against self-incrimination is not adequately protected where its effectiveness depends upon subtle differences in either the evidence a defendant is capable of presenting or in the predisposition of the trier of fact."
It was precisely the purpose of the Fioritto line of decisions to protect the constitutional privilege by removing such vagaries from the law. Thus in Fioritto (at p. 717 of 68 Cal.2d) we declared that "A principal objective of [Miranda] was to establish safeguards that would liberate courts insofar as possible from the difficult and troublesome necessity of adjudicating in each case whether coercive influences, psychological or physical, had been employed to secure admissions or confessions." That concern was vindicated in each of our decisions following Fioritto; in particular, in Disbrow (at p. 111 of 16 Cal.3d) we amplified on the reasoning as follows: "The precision with which the Miranda court established not simply broad procedural guidelines but a precise manual for the conducting of custodial interrogations can be interpreted only as expressing an intention to create a single, uncomplicated, universally applicable test for determining whether a particular confession was coerced."
Under this court's decision of People v. Fioritto (1968) 68 Cal. 2d 714 [68 Cal. Rptr. 817, 441 P.2d 625], defendant's confession is arguably inadmissible. But under the United States Supreme Court's more recent decision of Michigan v. Mosley (1975) 423 U.S. 96 [46 L. Ed. 2d 313, 96 S. Ct. 321], defendant's confession is admissible. The question presented therefore is whether in light of Mosley we shall continue to adhere to Fioritto.
The short answer to this argument is that Fioritto was not decided under the California Constitution; rather, it was based on this court's understanding of the principles announced in Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436 [16 L. Ed. 2d 694, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 10 A.L.R.3d 974], a United [21 Cal. 3d 253] States Supreme Court decision interpreting the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. fn. 1 The California Constitution was not even mentioned in Fioritto.
Raoul Berger reminds us that "[a] common historicist fallacy is to import our twentieth-century conceptions into the minds of the Founders." (Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment (1977) p. 306.) The majority's "new states' rights" doctrine is a clear example of this fallacy -- importing the high court's social philosophy of the 1960s into our own Constitution of a century ago.
"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
"You have the right to talk to a lawyer and have him present with you while you are being questioned.
"If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer one will be appointed to represent you before any questioning, if you wish."
FN 3. "Persons may not ... be compelled in a criminal cause to be a witness against themselves ...."
FN 5. For an example of a persistent "softening-up" technique, see People v. Honeycutt (1977) 20 Cal. 3d 150, 160 [141 Cal. Rptr. 698, 570 P.2d 1050].
FN 6. In addition, Penal Code section 145 provides that "Every public officer or other person, having arrested any person upon a criminal charge, who willfully delays to take such person before a magistrate having jurisdiction, to take his examination, is guilty of a misdemeanor."
FN 7. It seems unlikely, moreover, that defendant would "selectively" choose to confess to the four Santa Barbara burglaries, in which he was implicated only by circumstantial evidence and unproved accusations, while refusing to say so much as a word about the Eureka burglary, in which he was caught red-handed.
FN 8. We have previously considered a fact situation similar to the case at bar. In People v. Randall (1970) supra, 1 Cal. 3d 948, the defendant was arrested in Los Angeles on a charge apparently originating in that county. Given the Miranda warnings, he called an attorney. The next morning he was again questioned about the Los Angeles charge. After that session, however, the Los Angeles police received a phone call from the Santa Barbara Sheriff's office advising them of an outstanding warrant for the defendant's arrest on a grand theft charge in Santa Barbara County. The Los Angeles police then renewed the interrogation, repeated the Miranda warnings, and questioned the defendant about the Santa Barbara charge. He waived his rights and confessed to the latter crime. As noted above, we held the confession inadmissible under Fioritto and Ireland.
FN 9. At trial the detective admitted he had lied to the defendant in telling him that his accomplice had confessed to the murder.
FN 12. Even in applying the comparatively inflexible Fioritto rule under present law, the courts have sometimes reached contrary conclusions on admissibility that are difficult to justify in terms of the factual differences between the cases. (Compare, e.g., People v. Miller (1974) 40 Cal. App. 3d 228 [114 Cal. Rptr. 779] (per Thompson, J.), with People v. Parker (1975) 45 Cal. App. 3d 24 [119 Cal. Rptr. 49] (same).) We have no doubt that such discrepancies would be far more frequent under Mosley.

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