Opinion ID: 1944210
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Defendant's Elstad/Seibert Argument

Text: Pursuant to this Court's frequently articulated raise-or-waive rule, we do not consider at the appellate level issues that were not properly presented before the trial court. See, e.g., State v. Hak, 963 A.2d 921, 927 (R.I.2009); State v. Bouffard, 945 A.2d 305, 311 (R.I.2008). An important corollary to the requirement that issues first be raised at the trial court level is that a general objection is not sufficient to preserve an issue for appellate review; rather, assignments of error must be set forth with sufficient particularity to call the trial justice's attention to the basis of the objection. Union Station Associates v. Rossi, 862 A.2d 185, 192 (R.I.2004); see also State v. Anderson, 752 A.2d 946, 948 (R.I.2000). Raising the argument for the first time on appeal, defendant contends that the United States Supreme Court's holdings in Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985), and Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600, 124 S.Ct. 2601, 159 L.Ed.2d 643, (2004), [5] should have been applied by the trial justice so as to bar the admission of defendant's Breathalyzer test results at trial. [6] At the May 9, 2001 suppression hearing before the trial justice, defendant pointed to the Elstad opinion only with respect to the admission of the statements that he made to the police after he was given his Miranda warnings. Significantly, he never made a similar argument with respect to the Breathalyzer test results. The defendant's reliance on Seibert is misplaced. Both Seibert and Elstad involved oral statements by a defendant, not Breathalyzer test results (nor any other type of nontestimonial evidence). In Elstad, the United States Supreme Court took care to note that the Fifth Amendment, of course, is not concerned with nontestimonial evidence. Elstad, 470 U.S. at 304, 105 S.Ct. 1285. In fact, during the suppression hearing, defendant's trial counsel explicitly distinguished his Elstad argument with respect to defendant's statements (made after he was Mirandized ) to police from his argument concerning the admissibility of defendant's Breathalyzer test results. The Superior Court took up the issue of the admissibility of the test results only after the discussion of the admissibility of defendant's statements, including the applicability of Elstad, was concluded. We are, therefore, confident that defendant's trial counsel would not have prevailed on a Seibert -based argument even had that case been available at the time that the motion to suppress was argued before the trial justice. It is self-evident that the constitutional principles implicated in Elstad were well-known to defendant's counsel at the time of trial, but he opted not to invoke those principles when he sought to suppress the Breathalyzer results. Having failed to raise those issues with respect to the admissibility of defendant's Breathalyzer test results before the trial justice below, we must consider them waived for the purposes of our review. B