Opinion ID: 1059907
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Suppression of Jackson's Statements to Police

Text: Jackson does not dispute the sufficiency of the Commonwealth's evidence indicating that before his in-custody interrogation by the police, he was fully advised of his Fifth Amendment rights as required by Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 467-73, 479, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 1624-27, 1630, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). Although a juvenile, Jackson was not unfamiliar with these rights as evidenced by his statement to Investigator John R. Malbon that he had previously been arrested and informed of his legal rights about three times. Malbon testified that while being advised of his rights, Jackson appeared calm and alert. In any case, Jackson does not contend that he failed to understand either his rights or the effect of a waiver but rather that the police engaged in a strategy designed to capitalize on Jackson's youth and isolation. His claim is that the police interrogated him for approximately 25 to 28 hours and placed him in a situation where he was deprived of sleep, deprived of the advice and counsel of his mother, [and he] was placed in a small windowless interrogation room for hours on end, and denied repeated access by his parent to him despite her best efforts. We find no support in the record for Jackson's statement that he was deprived of sleep and interrogated for 25 to 28 hours. Jackson was brought to the Norfolk Police Department on the night of Bonney's murder and put in a temporary holding cell. Although he was awakened several times during the night and offered food, water, and use of the bathroom, Jackson was permitted to sleep until 7:05 the following morning. The investigators interrogated Jackson four separate times between 7:20 a.m. and 1:59 the next morning. These sessions, together with related contacts setting up the interviews and permitting Jackson to review the written transcripts of the preceding two interrogations, totaled four hours and thirty-eight minutes. The longest uninterrupted period of contact with Jackson was one hour and twenty minutes. After each contact, Jackson was left alone either in a locked cell or a locked interview room while police investigated the accuracy of his statements. Jackson decided not to testify at the pretrial hearing on the admissibility of his confession and called his mother, Carol Lee Jackson, as his only witness on this subject. Her testimony focused primarily on the alleged delay by the police in permitting her to see her son. Jackson does not claim that he asked for the presence of his mother, [3] but suggests that police interrogation of a 16-year-old juvenile without the presence of one of his parents is a violation of his constitutional rights. In Wright v. Commonwealth, 245 Va. 177, 185-86, 427 S.E.2d 379, 385-86 (1993), vacated on other grounds, 512 U.S. 1217, 114 S.Ct. 2701, 129 L.Ed.2d 830 (1994), we rejected the contention of a juvenile capital murder defendant that his confession was involuntary in part because his mother was not present at the interrogation. Like Jackson, Wright had been advised of his rights when arrested on prior occasions and had knowingly waived those rights before making the statement at issue. Perceiving no significant difference between the situation in Wright and the situation in this case, we reject Jackson's suggestion. The alleged police delay in honoring Ms. Jackson's request to see her son is irrelevant to the issue of the voluntariness of his statements. As the United States Supreme Court observed in Moran v. Burbine, 475 U.S. 412, 422, 106 S.Ct. 1135, 1141, 89 L.Ed.2d 410 (1986), [e]vents occurring outside of the presence of the suspect and entirely unknown to him surely can have no bearing on the capacity to comprehend and knowingly relinquish a constitutional right. In Moran, the police failed to tell a suspect in custody that his attorney was trying to reach him. Id. at 433, 106 S.Ct. at 1147. Under these circumstances, the Constitution of Virginia provides no greater protection than the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. See Walton v. City of Roanoke, 204 Va. 678, 682, 133 S.E.2d 315, 318 (1963). Hence, we find no violation of Jackson's rights under either constitution because of the failure of the police to permit Ms. Jackson immediate access to her son. For these reasons, we conclude that Jackson's statements were the product of his free will, made after a knowing, voluntary, and intelligent waiver of his Miranda rights. See Wright, 245 Va. at 185-86, 427 S.E.2d at 385-86.