Opinion ID: 1142672
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Whether the trial court erred in allowing into evidence without a hearing the confession Pierre made while on the telephone with her brother and which a police officer overheard.

Text: Pierre urges that the trial court erred when it admitted Officer Boyd's testimony that he heard Pierre admit the crime while she spoke on a detective's office phone to her brother, John. Pierre also claims that Boyd's act of listening and testifying violated Pierre's first amendment right to privacy and her fifth and fourteenth amendment right against self-incrimination. Custodial interrogation occurs in questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 1611, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966); see also Arizona v. Mauro, 481 U.S. 520, 107 S.Ct. 1931, 95 L.Ed.2d 458 (1987) (police did not conduct custodial interrogation when they tape-recorded defendant's conversation with his wife in the presence of an officer); Rhode Island v. Innis, 446 U.S. 291, 100 S.Ct. 1682, 64 L.Ed.2d 297 (1980) ( Miranda safeguards apply only during express police questioning or its functional equivalent). Although Pierre made the inculpatory statement while in custody, she did not make it in response to custodial interrogation or any police action designed to elicit a response. The interrogation had ended. Thus, the fifth amendment imposed on the trial court no need to ascertain voluntariness, knowledge, and intelligence of waiver. As for the privacy one might expect in a telephone conversation in an open room with police officers nearby, the accepted law of search and seizure holds that one may only challenge an intrusion where one would objectively and reasonably expect privacy. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351-52, 88 S.Ct. 507, 511, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (petitioner possessed a reasonable expectation of privacy in an enclosed, public telephone booth). Pierre could not reasonably have expected privacy when she conversed on a telephone in an open office a few feet from where two police officers sat.