Opinion ID: 2454056
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Is Harris compatible with article I, section 7 of the Washington Constitution?

Text: ¶ 11 Eserjose concedes that Harris is controlling under the Fourth Amendment. He contends, though, that Harris is incompatible with article I, section 7 of the Washington Constitution, it being well settled that this provision is often more protective than the Fourth Amendment in the search and seizure context. [6] State v. Jackson, 150 Wash.2d 251, 259, 76 P.3d 217 (2003). Our state's exclusionary rule, moreover, is generally less permissive than its federal counterpart, the rule having been described as nearly categorical. State v. Winterstein, 167 Wash.2d 620, 636, 220 P.3d 1226 (2009). That rule is intended to protect individual privacy against unreasonable governmental intrusion, to deter police from acting unlawfully, and to preserve the dignity of the judiciary by refusing to consider evidence that has been obtained through illegal means. State v. Bonds, 98 Wash.2d 1, 12, 653 P.2d 1024 (1982). ¶ 12 The State points out that this court has recognized exceptions to Washington's exclusionary rule, such as the independent source exception, which this court has recognized in State v. Coates, 107 Wash.2d 882, 887, 735 P.2d 64 (1987), and Gaines, 154 Wash.2d 711, 116 P.3d 993. Whether the exception carved out in Harris is compatible with article I, section 7, however, is an open question. [7] Courts in other states have considered whether Harris is compatible with their constitutions, but the results are mixed. The Supreme Court of Arizona, for example, adopted the Harris exception in State v. Cañez, 202 Ariz. 133, 42 P.3d 564 (2002). Notably, Arizona's article II, section 8 is identical to Washington's article I, section 7. On the other hand, in State v. Mariano, 114 Hawai`i 271, 281, 160 P.3d 1258 (Ct.App. 2007), the Intermediate Court of Appeals of Hawaii said, We cannot condone the parsimonious Fourth Amendment protection the Supreme Court doled out in Harris.  It went on to say that article I, section 7 of the Hawaii Constitution [8] is more protective than the Fourth Amendment. Similarly, the Supreme Court of Connecticut concluded that the Harris exception falls short of the protection required by that state's constitution. State v. Geisler, 222 Conn. 672, 690, 610 A.2d 1225 (1992), abrogated on other grounds by State v. Brocuglio, 264 Conn. 778, 826 A.2d 145 (2003); see also State v. Luurtsema, 262 Conn. 179, 811 A.2d 223 (2002), overruled on other grounds by State v. Salamon, 287 Conn. 509, 949 A.2d 1092 (2008). ¶ 13 In order to determine whether the Harris exception is compatible with article I, section 7 of our state's constitution, it is necessary to consider the Court's rationale in Harris very carefully. As noted above, the United States Supreme Court rested its decision in that case on the fact that the police officers there had probable cause to believe that the suspect had committed a felony before they made their warrantless entry into the suspect's home. The Court emphasized that a warrantless arrest is generally permissible so long as it is supported by probable cause. Harris, 495 U.S. at 17-18, 110 S.Ct. 1640 (citing United States v. Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 96 S.Ct. 820, 46 L.Ed.2d 598 (1976)). In distinguishing its decision in Harris from its earlier decision in Payton, which drew a line at the entrance to the home, the Court said, Nothing in the reasoning of that case suggests that an arrest in a home without a warrant but with probable cause somehow renders unlawful continued custody of the suspect once he is removed from the house. Id. at 18, 110 S.Ct. 1640. The Court was expressing the view that, once the suspect was outside the constitutionally protected space of his home, the police had the legal authority to keep him in custody and question him. In that regard, it explained that, [b]ecause the officers had probable cause to arrest Harris for a crime, Harris was not unlawfully in custody when he was removed to the station house, given Miranda warnings, and allowed to talk. Id. Having decided that the suspect was in legal custody, the Court went on to hold that the suspect's confession was properly admissible. ¶ 14 The United States Supreme Court also distinguished its decision in Harris from that in Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 95 S.Ct. 2254, 45 L.Ed.2d 416 (1975). In Brown, the record showed that the police officers did not have probable cause to effect an arrest, let alone obtain an arrest warrant, when they entered the suspect's home. However, after removing the suspect from his home and transporting him to the police station, the police officers informed him of his Miranda rights and obtained a confession. The Supreme Court held that the giving of Miranda warnings does not automatically purge the taint of an illegal arrest. Id. at 605, 95 S.Ct. 2254. In rejecting the notion that Miranda warnings, by themselves, necessarily break the causal connection between the illegal arrest and the subsequent confession for Fourth Amendment purposes, the Court also rejected a but for rule that would regard all evidence as fruit of the poisonous tree simply because it would not have come to light but for the illegal actions of the police. Id. at 599, 603, 95 S.Ct. 2254. Rather, to ensure that police had not exploited the Fourth Amendment violation, the Court reaffirmed the attenuation analysis of Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963): In order for the causal chain, between the illegal arrest and the statements made subsequent thereto, to be broken, Wong Sun requires not merely that the statement meet the Fifth Amendment standard of voluntariness but that it be `sufficiently an act of free will to purge the primary taint.' Brown, 422 U.S. at 602, 95 S.Ct. 2254 (quoting Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 486, 83 S.Ct. 407). ¶ 15 In Harris, the United States Supreme Court did not engage in the attenuation analysis it employed in Brown, stating that attenuation analysis is only appropriate where, as a threshold matter, courts determine that `the challenged evidence is in some sense the product of illegal governmental activity.' Harris, 495 U.S. at 19, 110 S.Ct. 1640 (quoting United States v. Crews, 445 U.S. 463, 471, 100 S.Ct. 1244, 63 L.Ed.2d 537 (1980)). The Court went on to determine that the challenged evidence in Harris was not the product of illegal governmental activity because, unlike the circumstances in Brown, the police in Harris had probable cause and, for that reason, the legal authority to keep the defendant in custody once he was outside the home. Id. Thus, as we have seen, the Court concluded that the suspect's subsequent confession was not the product of unlawful custody. ¶ 16 Nor, in the Court's view, was the confession the fruit of having been arrested in the home rather than someplace else. Id. The Court analogized the situation in Harris to that in Crews, where the defendant sought the suppression of a witness's in-court identification on the ground that his presence in the courtroom was precipitated by an illegal arrest. His theory was that he was the fruit of the illegal arrest, and that he should have been suppressed, rendering in-court identification impossible. The Court held that the in-court identification was not `come at by exploitation' of the violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. Crews, 445 U.S. at 471, 100 S.Ct. 1244 (quoting Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 488, 83 S.Ct. 407). It explained that the exclusionary rule delimits what proof the Government may offer against the accused at trial by closing the courtroom door to evidence secured by official lawlessness, but the defendant was not himself a suppressible `fruit,' since [a]n illegal arrest, without more, has never been viewed as a bar to subsequent prosecution, nor as a defense to a valid conviction. Id. at 474, 100 S.Ct. 1244 (citing Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103, 119, 95 S.Ct. 854, 43 L.Ed.2d 54 (1975); Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519, 72 S.Ct. 509, 96 L.Ed. 541 (1952); Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436, 7 S.Ct. 225, 30 L.Ed. 421 (1886)). ¶ 17 The Court in Harris did not elaborate on its analogy to Crews except to say that, because the police had a justification to question Harris prior to his arrest, his subsequent confession was not an exploitation of the illegal entry into [his] home. Harris, 495 U.S. at 19, 110 S.Ct. 1640. The Court, it seems, reasoned that, because the police had the legal authority to hold the suspect regardless of his illegal arrest, they were not exploiting the illegality of that arrest (i.e., the fact that the arrest was made in the house rather than someplace else) any more than the State exploited the illegality of the arrest in Crews, which, under the rule derived from the Ker and Frisbie cases, did not require the suspect's release or suppression at trial. Id. at 18-19, 110 S.Ct. 1640. In this way, the Court in Harris divided the arrest from its illegal nature, leaving only the fact of arrest in the chain of causation leading to the challenged confession. See id. at 20, 110 S.Ct. 1640 (We ... hold that the station house statement in this case was admissible because Harris was in legal custody... and because the statement, while the product of an arrest and being in custody, was not the fruit of the fact that the arrest was made in the house rather than someplace else.). Hence, according to the Court, the legal issue was the same, for Fourth Amendment purposes, as it would have been had the police arrested Harris on his doorstep, illegally entered his home to search for evidence, and later interrogated him at the police station. ¶ 18 In summary, the reason attenuation analysis was considered appropriate in Brown but not in Harris is that the police officers in Harris had probable cause to believe the suspect was guilty of a felony before their unlawful entry into his house. It was probable cause that furnished the legal authority for the police to keep the suspect in custody once he was outside his house. Because the Payton violation ended at the suspect's door, the United States Supreme Court considered the suspect's confession at the police station properly admissible. ¶ 19 In analyzing article I, section 7 of our state constitution, we do not attach the same significance to the fact that the police officers possess probable cause before their unlawful entry. In our judgment, a rule that makes the admissibility of a confession depend entirely on the legality of custody is incompatible with the purposes of our state's exclusionary rule because it completely ignores the illegality of the preceding arrest. Our state's exclusionary rule, like its federal counterpart, aims to deter unlawful police conduct, but its paramount concern is protecting an individual's right of privacy. State v. Afana, 169 Wash.2d 169, 180, 233 P.3d 879 (2010). It accomplishes this by closing the courtroom door to evidence gathered through illegal means. By design, then, it is concerned with the way evidence is obtained, with the legality of each link in the causal chain, not merely the last. While the rule authorizing warrantless arrests in a public place may be indifferent to how the suspect came to be outside his home, it does not follow that the exclusionary rule is equally indifferent. The question of the legality of custody following an illegal arrest and the question of the admissibility of the suspect's confession should be kept separate. A rule that treats the answer to the first as dispositive of the second falls short of the protection afforded by our state constitution. ¶ 20 That is not to say that the legality of custody is unimportant, only that it does not necessarily break the causal chain between an illegal arrest and a subsequent confession. Article I, section 7 requires courts to consider the connection between the arrest and the confession. In our view, the proper inquiry is whether the confession is `sufficiently an act of free will to purge the primary taint.' Brown, 422 U.S. at 602, 95 S.Ct. 2254 (quoting Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 486, 83 S.Ct. 407). In Brown, the United States Supreme Court identified three factors, aside from the giving of Miranda warnings, that courts should consider in determining if a confession was sufficiently attenuated from an illegal arrest: [t]he temporal proximity of the arrest and the confession, the presence of intervening circumstances, and, particularly, the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct. Id. at 603-04, 95 S.Ct. 2254 (footnote and citation omitted). After applying these factors, the Court concluded that the suspect's confession was inadmissible: The illegality here ... had a quality of purposefulness. The impropriety of the arrest was obvious.... The manner in which Brown's arrest was effected gives the appearance of having been calculated to cause surprise, fright, and confusion. Id. at 605, 95 S.Ct. 2254. ¶ 21 Although we have not explicitly adopted the attenuation doctrine under article I, section 7, we have employed it time and again in prior decisions to determine whether, in the time-worn metaphor of Nardone v. United States, 308 U.S. 338, 341, 60 S.Ct. 266, 84 L.Ed. 307 (1939), the challenged evidence was fruit of the poisonous tree or so attenuated as to dissipate the taint. See, e.g., State v. Warner, 125 Wash.2d 876, 889 P.2d 479 (1995); State v. Rothenberger, 73 Wash.2d 596, 440 P.2d 184 (1968); State v. Vangen, 72 Wash.2d 548, 433 P.2d 691 (1967). For instance, in State v. Armenta, 134 Wash.2d 1, 17, 948 P.2d 1280 (1997), we applied the Brown factors to determine whether a suspect's confession was tainted by a prior illegal seizure. [9] While we have expressed the exclusionary prohibition in broad terms, our cases do not stand for the proposition that the exclusionary rule under article I, section 7 operates on a but for basis. [10] Rather, we have consistently adhered to the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine as articulated in Nardone and Wong Sun. See, e.g., Gaines, 154 Wash.2d at 717, 116 P.3d 993; State v. O'Bremski, 70 Wash.2d 425, 428, 423 P.2d 530 (1967); McNear v. Rhay, 65 Wash.2d 530, 541, 398 P.2d 732 (1965), abrogated on other grounds by State v. Hill, 123 Wash.2d 641, 870 P.2d 313 (1994). In doing so, we have, at least, implicitly adopted the attenuation doctrine, that doctrine being intimately related to the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. ¶ 22 In fact, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine and the attenuation doctrine stem from the same source. In the very opinion in which he described evidence derived from the `Government's own wrong' as fruit of the poisonous tree, Justice Felix Frankfurter said, Sophisticated argument may prove a causal connection, but [a]s a matter of good sense, ... such connection may have become so attenuated as to dissipate the taint. Nardone, 308 U.S. at 341, 60 S.Ct. 266 (quoting Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385, 392, 40 S.Ct. 182, 64 L.Ed. 319 (1920)). The United States Supreme Court then relied on this language in Wong Sun, stating, [T]his [is not] a case in which the connection between the lawless conduct of the police and the discovery of the challenged evidence has `become so attenuated as to dissipate the taint.' Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 487, 83 S.Ct. 407 (quoting Nardone, 308 U.S. at 341, 60 S.Ct. 266). The Court went on to say, We need not hold that all evidence is fruit of the poisonous tree simply because it would not have come to light but for the illegal actions of the police. Rather, the more apt question in such a case is whether, granting establishment of the primary illegality, the evidence to which instant objection is made has been come at by exploitation of that illegality or instead by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the primary taint. Id. at 487-88, 83 S.Ct. 407 (quoting John MacArthur Maquire, Evidence of Guilt 221 (1959)). Thus, the attenuation doctrine defines the parameters of the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. Evidence is not fruit of the poisonous tree if the connection between the challenged evidence and the illegal actions of the police is so attenuated as to dissipate the taint. ¶ 23 This court's decision in Vangen, which the State cited in its brief, illustrates the appropriateness of applying the attenuation doctrine under article I, section 7. There, police officers arrested a person who was suspected of defrauding an innkeeper of $200 through the use of credit cards bearing a false name. The police officers erroneously believed that what was in fact only a misdemeanor constituted a felony. Because they had no warrant for the person's arrest, and the misdemeanor had not been committed in their presence, the arrest was unlawful. This circumstance, we said, had `ballooned' into a `false arrest' and a `poisoned tree,' which the defendant contended rendered his subsequent confession at the police station inadmissible as fruit of the poisonous tree. Vangen, 72 Wash.2d at 552, 433 P.2d 691. We disagreed, holding that his confession was properly admitted. [I]t is clear that the confession was not the result of that arrest or of information procured solely therefrom. The appellant arrested late on October 21, and taken to his cell at 12:05 a.m. on October 22at all times stoutly maintained that he was Elmer J. Johnson and that the credit cards in his possession were his. He insisted that he was Elmer J. Johnson through a second interrogation on the morning of October 22. Not until after the police had contacted the real Elmer J. Johnson in Minneapolis by telephone would the appellant admit that he was not Elmer J. Johnson, but Dean Allen Vangen. He then gave an entirely voluntary statement to Detective Homer Hall, after being advised of his constitutional rights, including his right to counsel and to remain silent. Id. at 553, 433 P.2d 691. We observed that an illegal detention does not ipso facto make a confession involuntary and quoted with approval a portion of the opinion of the Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut in State v. Traub, 151 Conn. 246, 196 A.2d 755 (1963). Vangen, 72 Wash.2d at 555, 433 P.2d 691. ¶ 24 As the Connecticut court said, Even though a detention is illegal, if the confession is truly voluntary and the causation factor of the illegal detention is so weak, or has been so attenuated, as not to have been an operative factor in causing or bringing about the confession, then the connection between any illegality of detention and the confession may be found so lacking in force or intensity that the confession would not be the fruit of the illegal detention. [ Traub, 151 Conn. at 250, 196 A.2d 755.] We think the foregoing quotation fits the present situation with tailor-like exactness.... The appellant persisted in his claim that he was Elmer J. Johnson until contacts with the real Elmer J. Jonson in Minneapolis removed his claim to that name, which makes it clear that it was this informationand not his arrest, legal or illegalthat induced the confession. Id. We are still convinced that this is the right approach. When a court determines that evidence is not the fruit of the poisonous tree, a defendant's privacy rights are respected, the deterrent value of suppressing the evidence is minimal, and the dignity of the judiciary is not offended by its admission. An alternative but for principle would make it virtually impossible to rehabilitate an investigation once misconduct has occurred, granting suspected criminals a permanent immunity unless, by chance, other law enforcement officers initiate an independent investigation. The factors the United States Supreme Court identified in Brown are designed to aid courts in determining whether an illegal arrest was, as was said in Vangen, the operative factor in causing or bringing the confession about. Id. For that reason, we again embrace the Brown factors as the proper analytical framework for determining whether a confession is sufficiently an act of free will to purge the taint of an illegal arrest.