Opinion ID: 6317124
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Jones’s Routine Booking Questions

Text: As stated above, standard booking questions (such as height, age, name, and date of birth) are always permissible under Muniz, even if they may be incriminating in effect. For example, height is a permissible booking question even if witnesses to a crime cite the criminal as being a specific or unusual height. Likewise, asking for a phone number is a standard and appropriate booking question, even if law enforcement has access to incriminating messages that include that phone number as a sender. Routine booking 11 questions asked of Jones include, for example, his name, weight, date of birth, phone number, former residences, employment status, and current address. For this reason, although Jones argues that questions about his home state of Mississippi were improper, we hold that they were not. Booking questions involving past residences are clearly attendant to administrative needs, and can be utilized for a variety of purposes, including to conduct warrant searches, to establish community ties, and to determine potential necessities prior to trial (if a defendant is indigent, unhoused, or has no local connections on whom to rely). The detectives’ questions about Jones’s origin and current address are therefore booking questions, even though they may have had the tendency to show a connection with his co-defendant. As noted, determining whether a question is reasonably related to the police’s administrative concerns, versus whether it is an interrogation seeking incriminating evidence, sometimes requires a case-by-case determination. Whether an officer should know that a line of questioning is incriminating and not reasonably related to booking will change depending upon the alleged crime and the extent of an officer’s knowledge regarding said crime. For example, if an officer booking an inmate is unaware that an element of the crime occurred last Saturday, then it might not be a violation of Miranda for the officer to attempt to develop rapport at booking by asking if he saw the big game that day, even though the information in the response may be used by the Commonwealth later. On the other hand, if a booking officer knows that part of the crime occurred on Saturday during the big game, that same question 12 becomes an improper interrogation. With this in mind, we look to the remaining questions asked of Jones during his booking. Other appropriate booking questions asked of Jones were not necessary to his arrest, but were nonetheless not intended to incriminate him and were reasonably related to the administration of booking. For example, in this case, weather was not related to the crime nor Jones’s arrest. Questions Jones was asked about weather were therefore proper. Questions about how long he had been employed, what brought him to Kentucky, and comparisons between Mississippi and Kentucky were similarly appropriate. Each of these questions, although perhaps nonessential to the process of booking, were reasonably related to other questions and administrative concerns in this case such that they fell under the exception to Miranda.