Opinion ID: 1803153
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the fifth amendment and miranda[4]

Text: We now address Everett's first claim, which is one of first impression in this Court. Everett contends that his motion to suppress his confession and the biological samples he provided should have been granted because they were obtained in violation of his rights under the Fifth Amendment. In reviewing a motion to suppress evidence, the trial court's findings of fact are accorded a presumption of correctness. This Court, however, must review independently mixed questions of law and fact that ultimately determine constitutional rights. Connor v. State, 803 So.2d 598, 607 (Fla.2001), cert. denied, 535 U.S. 1103, 122 S.Ct. 2308, 152 L.Ed.2d 1063 (2002). The pertinent facts are undisputed; thus, we review de novo the constitutional issue raised. [5]
Within hours of the murder, an Alabama bail bondsman, unaware of the murder but searching for Everett because he was a fugitive, found him in Panama City, Florida, and transferred him to Alabama authorities. On November 14, 2001, roughly two weeks after the murder, two Panama City Beach police officers investigating the case, having traced the wooden fish bat found near the crime scene to Everett, traveled to Alabama. They read Everett his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), and Everett agreed to talk. During the questioning, however, he abruptly stated, I wish to have a lawyer present.... I mean I want a lawyer. The officers immediately stopped their questioning. Several days later, on November 19, the Panama City Beach Police requested an Alabama deputy to ask Everett to provide DNA samples for the Florida murder investigation. Everett consented both verbally and in writing. After the DNA swabs were taken, however, Everett advised the Alabama deputy that he had information for Florida authorities. The officer read Everett his Miranda rights, and Everett began his statement. At that point Sergeant Tilley of the Panama City Beach Police Department arrived to retrieve the DNA samples. On the record, Tilley noted that Everett had previously invoked his right to counsel, but had now contacted him desiring to provide information. Sergeant Tilley also read Everett his Miranda rights before Everett continued. At the conclusion of his statement, Everett said, I do want to talk to a lawyer, but I did want to let you know to get you in the right direction. Sergeant Tilley immediately stopped the interview. Appellant's November 19 statement was not offered at trial. Finally, on November 27, Alabama authorities informed Everett that Sergeant Tilley was en route to serve an arrest warrant for the Florida murder. After Sergeant Tilley served the warrant, Everett asked to speak to him. At the outset of the interview, Everett acknowledged that he had previously invoked his right to have counsel present but had now asked to speak to Sergeant Tilley without an attorney present. In the ensuing statement, Everett confessed to the crimes.
On two separate occasions after Everett invoked his right to counsel under Miranda, law enforcement officers contacted him. On the first occasion, Everett was asked for his consent to provide DNA samples; on the second, officers served him with an arrest warrant. Everett contends these actions violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The issue presented concerns the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination and the procedures established to protect it. Accordingly, we begin by reviewing those principles. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that [n]o person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. U.S. Const. amend. V. Thus, it protects a person accused of a crime from being compelled by the State to provide evidence against himself. See Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 761, 86 S.Ct. 1826, 16 L.Ed.2d 908 (1966). In Miranda, 384 U.S. at 479, 86 S.Ct. 1602, the United States Supreme Court was concerned with the inherent pressures of in-custody interrogation and the importance of the privilege against self-incrimination. The Court established prophylactic procedures intended to protect that right, which included requiring authorities to articulate, before custodial interrogation commences, four warnings now thoroughly ingrained in police procedure: (1) that the individual has the right to remain silent, (2) that anything the person says may be used in court, (3) that the individual has the right to have an attorney present during questioning, and (4) that if the individual cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for him before questioning. Id. at 479, 86 S.Ct. 1602. Once the warnings are given, the procedure is clear: If the individual indicates in any manner, at any time prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease.... Without the right to cut off questioning, the setting of an in-custody interrogation operates on the individual to overcome free choice in producing a statement after the privilege has been once invoked. If the individual states that he wants an attorney, the interrogation must cease until an attorney is present. At that time, the individual must have an opportunity to confer with the attorney and to have him present during any subsequent questioning. If the individual cannot obtain an attorney and he indicates that he wants one before speaking to police, they must respect his decision to remain silent. Id. at 473-74, 86 S.Ct. 1602 (emphasis added); see also Michigan v. Mosley, 423 U.S. 96, 104 n. 10, 96 S.Ct. 321, 46 L.Ed.2d 313 (1975) (noting that Miranda distinguished between the procedural safeguards triggered by a request to remain silent and a request for an attorney and directed that `the interrogation must cease until an attorney is present' only `[i]f the individual states that he wants an attorney'). Clearly, Miranda requires that once a defendant has invoked the right to counsel during questioning, no further interrogation of that individual in custody is permitted, unless counsel is present. The Court, however, did not require counsel's presence for all further communications; only for interrogations. In Rhode Island v. Innis, 446 U.S. 291, 100 S.Ct. 1682, 64 L.Ed.2d 297 (1980), the Court considered what constitutes interrogation for these purposes. First, the Court concluded that the character of interrogation must reflect a measure of compulsion above and beyond that inherent in custody itself. Id. at 300, 100 S.Ct. 1682. The Court then defined the term as follows: We conclude that the Miranda safeguards come into play whenever a person in custody is subjected to either express questioning or its functional equivalent. That is to say, the term interrogation under Miranda refers not only to express questioning, but also to any words or actions on the part of the police (other than those normally attendant to arrest and custody) that the police should know are reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response from the suspect. ... A practice that the police should know is reasonably likely to evoke an incriminating response from a suspect thus amounts to interrogation. But, since the police surely cannot be held accountable for the unforeseeable results of their words or actions, the definition of interrogation can extend only to words or actions on the part of police officers that they should have known were reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response. Innis, 446 U.S. at 300-02, 100 S.Ct. 1682 (emphasis added) (footnotes omitted). A short time later the Supreme Court provided further guidelines regarding the boundaries of custodial interrogation. In Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981), law enforcement officers immediately ceased the questioning upon the defendant's invocation of his right to remain silent and to counsel. The next day, however, two different officers went to the jail, and after giving Miranda warnings to the defendant, interrogated him. He then incriminated himself. 451 U.S. at 479, 101 S.Ct. 1880. The Court held the confession was obtained in violation of Edwards's Fifth Amendment rights. Id. at 480, 101 S.Ct. 1880. The Court reiterated that an accused, ... having expressed his desire to deal with the police only through counsel, is not subject to further interrogation by the authorities until counsel has been made available to him, unless the accused himself initiates further communication, exchanges, or conversations with the police.  Id. at 484-85, 101 S.Ct. 1880 (emphasis added).
The question in this case is whether a law enforcement officer's request for a consent to search from, or service of an arrest warrant on, a defendant in custody who has invoked the right to counsel violates the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court has distinguished between the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination: The former arises from the fact that the suspect has been formally charged with a particular crime and thus is facing a state apparatus that has been geared up to prosecute him. The latter is protected by the prophylaxis of having an attorney present to counteract the inherent pressures of custodial interrogation, which arise from the fact of such interrogation and exist regardless of the number of crimes under investigation or whether those crimes have resulted in formal charges. Arizona v. Roberson, 486 U.S. 675, 685, 108 S.Ct. 2093, 100 L.Ed.2d 704 (1988). The scope of the right to counsel under Miranda is more limited than under the Sixth Amendment. The invocation of the right to counsel under Miranda does not require the immediate appointment of an attorney because the right extends only to interrogation. Miranda, 384 U.S. at 474, 86 S.Ct. 1602 (If authorities conclude that they will not provide counsel during a reasonable period of time in which investigation in the field is carried out, they may refrain from doing so without violating the person's Fifth Amendment privilege so long as they do not question him during that time.); see also Innis, 446 U.S. at 300 n. 4, 100 S.Ct. 1682 (stating that the definitions of interrogation under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments are not necessarily interchangeable). In Roberson, where the Court held that once a suspect has invoked the right to counsel under Miranda in one crime, the person cannot be interrogated regarding another crime, the Court stated that even if counsel has not been provided, police are free to inform the suspect of the facts of the second investigation as long as such communication does not constitute interrogation. 486 U.S. at 687, 108 S.Ct. 2093. The police are not forbidden all contact with a defendant in custody; in fact, the Court expressly exempted from the definition of interrogation routine police contact normally attendant to arrest and custody. Innis, 446 U.S. at 301, 302, 100 S.Ct. 1682 (stating that interrogation extends only to police officers' words or actions they  should have known were reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response). Service of an arrest warrant is a routine police procedure. It does not require any response from a suspect; nor can it be reasonably expected to elicit an incriminating response. Thus, this action does not constitute interrogation, and we affirm the trial court's denial of the motion to suppress on this claim. The officer's request for appellant's consent to provide DNA biological samples was the same search request the officers made of several other individuals whom they had not otherwise been able to eliminate from a list of potential suspects in this sexual battery/murder case. Such a request for the consent to search is not reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response. The Supreme Court's cases support such a conclusion. In Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 761, 86 S.Ct. 1826, a police officer ordered a doctor to take a blood sample from the injured Schmerber, whom the officer suspected of driving while intoxicated. The Court rejected the defendant's claim that use of this evidence violated his privilege against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment. Acknowledging that the evidence was compelled, the Court cited Justice Holmes's statement in Holt v. United States, 218 U.S. 245, 252-53, 31 S.Ct. 2, 54 L.Ed. 1021 (1910), that the prohibition of compelling a man in a criminal court to be witness against himself is a prohibition of the use of physical or moral compulsion to extort communications from him, not an exclusion of his body as evidence when it may be material. Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 763, 86 S.Ct. 1826. The Court held that the [Fifth Amendment] privilege protects an accused only from being compelled to testify against himself, or otherwise provide the State with evidence of a testimonial or communicative nature, and that the withdrawal of blood and use of the analysis in question in this case did not involve compulsion to these ends. 384 U.S. at 761, 86 S.Ct. 1826. The right to silence only applied to testimonial or communicative acts of a suspect. This Court, too, has noted that [t]he constitutional privilege against self-incrimination in history and principle seems to relate to protecting the accused from the process of extracting from his own lips against his will an admission of guilt. In the better-reasoned cases it does not extend to the exclusion of evidence of his body or of his mental condition as evidence when such evidence is relevant and material, even when such evidence is obtained by compulsion. Parkin v. State, 238 So.2d 817, 820 (Fla.1970). Accordingly, neither the service of the arrest warrant nor the request that Everett consent to providing physical evidence constitutes a word or action that the police should know is reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response from the suspect. Innis, 446 U.S. at 301, 100 S.Ct. 1682. We note that most courts that have considered this issue have held similarly. See, e.g., United States v. Shlater, 85 F.3d 1251, 1256 (7th Cir.1996) (holding that a consent to search is not an interrogation within the meaning of Miranda ); United States v. Hidalgo, 7 F.3d 1566, 1568 (11th Cir.1993) (holding that consent to search obtained after defendant invoked right to remain silent is not a self-incriminating statement because it is neither testimonial nor communicative); United States v. Smith, 3 F.3d 1088, 1098 (7th Cir.1993) (We have held that a consent to search is not a self-incriminating statement and, therefore, a request to search does not amount to interrogation. This view comports with the view taken by every court of appeals to have addressed the issue.); United States v. Rodriguez-Garcia, 983 F.2d 1563, 1568 (10th Cir.1993) (stating that a request for consent to search is not custodial interrogation and holding that consent to search is not the type of incriminating statement which the Fifth Amendment was designed to address); Cody v. Solem, 755 F.2d 1323, 1330 (8th Cir.1985) (stating that Fifth Amendment right to counsel stems from privilege against self-incrimination and is not an independent right and that consent to search is not an incriminating statement because it is not testimonial, nor is physical evidence obtained pursuant to search); State v. Morato, 619 N.W.2d 655, 662 (S.D.2000) (stating that [a]n officer's request that a suspect consent to a search, however, is not an interrogation or its functional equivalent and Morato's consent to search does not constitute an incriminating statement); State v. Crannell, 170 Vt. 387, 750 A.2d 1002, 1009 (2000) (concluding that the request for consent to search did not violate defendant's Fifth Amendment rights); contra United States v. Yan, 704 F.Supp. 1207, 1211-12 (S.D.N.Y.1989) (holding that a request for search constitutes an interrogation); State v. Britain, 156 Ariz. 384, 752 P.2d 37, 39 (Ct.App.1988), (view[ing] a request for consent to search, after the [Fifth Amendment] right to counsel has been invoked, as interrogation and the serving of a search warrant as conduct `reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response').