Opinion ID: 1229128
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: recorded telephone conversations

Text: Watkins assigns error to the court's admission into evidence of his tape-recorded conversations with Sina Mayo, Tammy Moffitt, and Philip Jones. Watkins asserts that the police threatened Sina Mayo with prosecution as an accessory after the fact if she refused to cooperate, and that she consented to the installation of a tape recorder on her telephone only in response to that threat. He argues that her consent to the recording, being coerced, was invalid. We held, in Cogdill v. Commonwealth, 219 Va. 272, 277-79, 247 S.E.2d 392, 396 (1978), that a telephone conversation recorded by or with the consent of one of the parties to the communication is not an interception within the meaning of the wire-tap statutes. We further held that such a voluntarily recorded conversation was properly admitted in evidence. Id. If a party to a conversation consents to record it only under duress, the argument may be made that the rule announced in Cogdill is inapplicable. Such coercion, however, must overbear the will of the party; it must amount to duress before it will vitiate the consent. It is not sufficient to show that the party consented to record the conversation merely to advance his own interests, to avoid prosecution, or to gain some advantage for himself or another. See United States v. Jones, 839 F.2d 1041, 1050-51 (5th Cir.1988), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 108 S.Ct. 1999, 100 L.Ed.2d 230 (1988); United States v. Kelly, 708 F.2d 121, 126 (3rd Cir.1983), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 916, 104 S.Ct. 279, 78 L.Ed.2d 258 (1983); United States v. Kolodziej, 706 F.2d 590, 593 (5th Cir.1983). Viewed in that light, it is obvious that Sina Mayo's consent to record the conversations was not coerced. After she permitted the police to install the tape recorder, the police turned the recorder off and left her premises. The decision whether to turn the equipment on at any time was left entirely to her. Further, there was no indication of any motivation on the part of her sister and brother to record their conversations except a willingness to help the police find Watkins. Both voluntarily recorded their conversations with him. The evidence most damaging to Watkins emerged from his recorded conversation with Sina Mayo's brother, Philip Jones, in which Watkins stated that he had to kill McCauley because McCauley knew him. Jones voluntarily recorded that conversation when no one else was present. The court correctly admitted the recordings.