Opinion ID: 796155
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Mosby's Confession

Text: 24 Indeed, both parties concede that Harris III governs our analysis of Mosby's confession. Accordingly, to evaluate attenuation in the context of a custodial confession following a warrantless home arrest, we apply the Brown factors. See supra; Harris III, 77 N.Y.2d at 434. All four factors—administration of Miranda warnings, temporal proximity of the arrest and statement, intervening circumstances, and the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct—suggest that the link between Mosby's arrest and confession was sufficiently attenuated so as not to require suppression. 25 The police did not begin questioning Mosby about the Bloomingdale Street homicides until approximately five hours after his arrest and following Miranda warnings. New York courts have found custodial statements given after Miranda warnings and similar passages of time sufficiently attenuated to break the causal chain from an unlawful arrest. See, e.g., People v. Divine, 21 A.D.3d 767, 800 N.Y.S.2d 545, 545 (2005) (four hours); People v. Santos, 3 A.D.3d 317, 770 N.Y.S.2d 314, 314 (2004) (six hours); People v. Russell, 269 A.D.2d 771, 704 N.Y.S.2d 395, 395-96 (2000) (five hours); People v. Folks, 246 A.D.2d 433, 668 N.Y.S.2d 179, 180 (1998) (seven or eight hours). 26 In addition, there were significant intervening circumstances between the warrantless arrest and the confession—most notably, Ms. Pulley's spontaneous appearance and reference to Mosby as Florida. While his arrest might, in some sense, have been a but-for cause of his encounter with Ms. Pulley outside the house, this is not sufficient to justify exclusion. See Hudson, 126 S.Ct. at 2164 ([B]ut-for causality is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for suppression.); Ceccolini, 435 U.S. at 274, 98 S.Ct. 1054. Ms. Pulley's appearance, in other respects, was entirely unrelated to Mosby's warrantless arrest, and was not a product of it for Fourth Amendment purposes. Cf. Harris II, 495 U.S. at 19, 110 S.Ct. 1640. Moreover, her unexpected statement connected Mosby to an entirely different crime from the one that prompted his arrest. See 6 WAYNE R. LAFAVE, ET AL., FOURTH AMENDMENT: SEARCH & SEIZURE, § 11.4 ([O]ne kind of `intervening circumstances' is the post-arrest discovery of information connecting defendant with another crime.). 27 The final Brown factor, flagrancy and purpose of police conduct, reflects the policies of deterrence and judicial integrity underlying the exclusionary rule. See Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 217, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979) (When there is a close causal connection between the illegal seizure and the confession, not only is exclusion of the evidence more likely to deter similar police misconduct in the future, but also use of the evidence is more likely to compromise the integrity of the courts.). In Brown, the Supreme Court found that the arrest at issue, both in design and execution, was investigatory, and that the police had embarked on an expedition for evidence in the hope that something might turn up. 422 U.S. at 605, 95 S.Ct. 2254. The Court concluded that the illegal arrest therefore had a quality of purposefulness that tilted the balance toward exclusion of the defendant's subsequent confession. Id.; see also Dunaway, 442 U.S. at 218, 99 S.Ct. 2248. Here, the police could not have been trying to arrest Mosby for the purpose of linking him to the Bloomingdale Street homicides, since they had no idea he was involved in those homicides until after he was arrested and moved outside the house. The arrest, moreover, cannot be characterized as investigatory, since the police had already witnessed Mosby's involvement in a drug transaction. 28 Suppressing Mosby's confession would be unlikely to deter future police misconduct, since the police—at the time they entered 46 Costar to make a routine drug arrest—could not have anticipated the fortuitous chain of events that ultimately connected Mosby to the homicides. This is especially true because the catalyst for those events was the appearance of Ms. Pulley and her spontaneous comment to the police. Cf. Ceccolini, 435 U.S. at 276, 98 S.Ct. 1054 (The greater the willingness of the witness to freely testify, the greater the likelihood that he or she will be discovered by legal means and, concomitantly, the smaller the incentive to conduct an illegal search to discover the witness.). In addition, the social costs of suppressing Mosby's voluntary confession to two homicides would have been considerable. See Hudson, 126 S.Ct. at 2165 (Quite apart from the requirement of unattenuated causation, the exclusionary rule has never been applied except where its deterrence benefits outweigh its substantial social costs.) (internal quotation marks omitted). For these reasons we conclude that the New York courts would in all probability have found that Mosby's custodial confession was too attenuated from his warrantless arrest to require suppression. Consequently, the failure to raise this issue did not prejudice Mosby within the meaning of Strickland.