Opinion ID: 894985
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Should the Gun Have Been Suppressed?

Text: The court of appeals held that suppression of H.V.'s statement also required suppression of the gun as fruits of the poisonous tree, a legal doctrine first recognized in the context of the Fourth Amendment. [58] But both the United States Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals have rejected this doctrine in the Fifth Amendment context of physical evidence obtained after failing to give Miranda warnings. [59] The court of appeals held otherwise, distinguishing cases in which Miranda rights were not read from cases like this one in which an invocation of those rights was ignored. [60] That distinction was expressly rejected by the Court of Criminal Appeals in Baker v. State : Both Tucker [ [61] ] and Elstad [ [62] ] involved the failure to give the required warnings rather than the failure to scrupulously honor warnings given. Neither the Supreme Court nor this Court has addressed whether the Tucker / Elstad rule applies to the fruits of statements made in the latter context. But the principle is the same: mere noncompliance with Miranda does not result in a carryover taint beyond the statement itself. . . . We hold that the Tucker / Elstad rule applies to the failure to scrupulously honor the invocation of Miranda rights. In the absence of actual coercion, the fruits of a statement taken in violation of Miranda need not be suppressed under the fruits doctrine. . . . [63] The court of appeals pointed out that Elstad made a distinction between unread rights and ignored rights in a footnote. [64] But Elstad was not based on that distinction, but on reasoning that Miranda does not involve a constitutional violation. [65] The court of appeals also pointed out that in 2000 the Supreme Court abandoned its characterization of Miranda as a prophylactic rather than a constitutional rule. [66] But the Court held four years later that this did not change the rule that physical evidence was admissible even if gained from questioning that violated Miranda. [67] More relevant to the question here is a different principle stated by the Supreme Court in Elstad and since: the Self-Incrimination Clause concerns compelled testimony, not physical evidence. [68] The Fifth Amendment provides that [n]o person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself;  [69] thus, there can be no Fifth Amendment violation when a person's testimony is excluded. [70] Physical evidence that does not compel a defendant to testify against himself cannot be a violation of the Fifth Amendment rights that Miranda protects, which is precisely what the Supreme Court held in 2004. [71] The court of appeals expressed concern that suppressing testimonial statements but not physical evidence might encourage police to reject a request for counsel deliberately in the hope of getting something they could use. [72] But evidence obtained through deliberate violations of constitutional rights is usually inadmissible on that basis alone. [73] In this case, H.V.'s counsel does not argue that his disclosure of the gun's location was involuntary or coerced for any reason other than violation of his Miranda request for counsel. The warnings and invocation of counsel here all occurred in court before a magistrate without police involvement, so there could have been no police coercion. [74] Because violations of Miranda do not justify exclusion of physical evidence resulting therefrom, we hold the courts below erred in excluding the gun that brought about Daniel Oltmanns's death.