Opinion ID: 854149
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Indiana Constitutional Right to be Free From Self-Incrimination

Text: Ajabu moved unsuccessfully before trial to suppress the statements he gave at the Hamilton County Jail and at the Allemenos residence. He contends the trial court erred in denying the motion and in subsequently admitting the statements into evidence over objection. Ajabu's principal contention is that the conduct of the police and prosecutors in not informing him of Roberts's phone call before any interrogation violated his right to be free from self-incrimination protected by Article I, Section 14 of the Indiana Constitution. He also argues that this conduct was so shocking that it denied him due process of law under the Fourteenth Amendment. The latter claim is discussed in Part II.
The Supreme Court of the United States has rejected nearly identical contentions under the Constitution of the United States. In Moran v. Burbine, 475 U.S. 412, 106 S.Ct. 1135, 89 L.Ed.2d 410 (1986), the Court squarely held that neither the Fifth Amendment nor the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of due process is violated by admission of a confession obtained after an attorney, unknown to the suspect, unsuccessfully seeks to intervene in an interrogation. Recognizing the insuperable hurdle Burbine presents as a matter of federal constitutional doctrine, Ajabu urges us to hold that the Indiana Constitution is violated where (1) police fail to inform a suspect prior to interrogation of a lawyer's unsolicited and unknown efforts to contact the suspect; or (2) police do not honor counsel's request to be present during any questioning. He argues that his waiver of his right to be free from self-incrimination was not knowing, voluntary, and intelligent under these circumstances. Stated another way, Ajabu's claim is that a confession that is voluntary in a volitional sense must nonetheless be excluded, because he was unaware of the lawyer's efforts to reach him, and this knowledge would have affected his decision to speak with authorities. Ajabu correctly observes that Burbine does not prevent Indiana from providing greater procedural guarantees for defendants on independent state grounds. Id. at 428, 106 S.Ct. at 1144-45. The State responds that the Indiana constitutional right is equivalent to the Fifth Amendment, and therefore reflects Burbine, or at least the Indiana right is not more protective than the Fifth Amendment. In assessing this claim, we first must be clear about the nature of the right at issue. The federal right to counsel as protected by the Sixth Amendment, so as to ensure a fair trial after charges are filed, cf. United States v. Gouveia, 467 U.S. 180, 104 S.Ct. 2292, 81 L.Ed.2d 146 (1984), is not implicated here because Ajabu had not been charged or arraigned at the time of the alleged constitutional deprivation. [3] Nor does Ajabu cite the state constitutional provision guaranteeing that [i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall have the right to ... be heard by himself and counsel... IND. CONST. art. I, § 13. Rather, in moving to suppress his statements at trial, Ajabu relied solely on his right to be free from self-incrimination under the Constitutions of Indiana (Article I, Section 14) and the United States (Fifth Amendment). Accordingly, we do not address the possible application of the Section 13 right to counsel to these facts. [4] Because it is rooted in the right to be free from self-incrimination, Ajabu's claim is grounded on his right to elect to have a lawyer present during pre-charge interrogation for prophylactic reasons established in Miranda. The issue presented, therefore, is whether that right was violated where Ajabu did not request an attorney during or before interrogation and did not know of the activities of the lawyer his father had contacted. [5]
Article I, Section 14 of the Indiana Constitution provides that [n]o person, in any criminal prosecution, shall be compelled to testify against himself. [6] Neither party cites any directly controlling precedents, and Ajabu conceded in his motion to suppress that there appear to be none. [7] In the absence of relevant Indiana cases, a variety of sources may be taken into consideration. There are analogous precedents under the federal constitution and those of a few other states. We also have an extensive history of decisions of this Court on various self-incrimination issues under the Indiana and United States Constitutions. In construing the Indiana Constitution, we recently noted that it is appropriate to look to the language of the text in the context of the history surrounding its drafting and ratification, the purpose and structure of our constitution, and case law interpreting the specific provisions. Boehm v. Town of St. John, 675 N.E.2d 318, 321 (Ind.1996) (internal quotation marks omitted). This case involves a federal constitutional analog that applies in state proceedings by virtue of Fourteenth Amendment incorporation. In that circumstance, we have found Indiana case law construing the Indiana provision prior to the date of incorporation to be most helpful in determining whether the Indiana Constitution demands more than its federal counterpart. Moran v. State , [8] 644 N.E.2d 536, 540 (Ind.1994); see also Peterson v. State, 674 N.E.2d 528, 533-34 (Ind.1996) (reviewing pre-incorporation case law in assessing whether standing is required to challenge constitutionality of search or seizure under Section 11 of the Indiana Bill of Rights), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 118 S.Ct. 858, 139 L.Ed.2d 757 (1998). More generally, [e]arly decisions of this Court interpreting our Constitution ... have been accorded strong and superseding precedential value. Prior cases construing and applying [the Indiana provision] independently from federal [doctrine] are important sources for our consideration. Collins v. Day, 644 N.E.2d 72, 77 (Ind.1994) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). As elaborated below, both the federal and Indiana self-incrimination provisions look to a common interwoven history. Common roots and a history of coextensive construction may support the conclusion that the Indiana and federal constitutions protect the same bundle of rights and the same constitutional values. However, past reliance on federal case law in construing an Indiana constitutional provision does not preclude formulation of an independent standard for analyzing state constitutional claims. Id. at 75. Even where an Indiana constitutional provision is substantially textually coextensive with that from another jurisdiction, as in this case, we may part company with the interpretation of the Supreme Court of the United States or any other court based on the text, history, and decisional law elaborating the Indiana constitutional right. [9]
The cardinal principle of constitutional construction [is] that words are to be considered as used in their ordinary sense. Tucker v. State, 218 Ind. 614, 670, 35 N.E.2d 270, 291 (1941). On this first line of inquiry in any constitutional caseconstitutional textthe document is unambiguous for these purposes: No person, in any criminal prosecution, shall be compelled to testify against himself. IND. CONST. art. I, § 14 (emphasis added). The construction Ajabu urges us to adopt would require judicial redefinition of the word compelled to mean something it did not mean when the Indiana Constitution was adopted, and does not mean today. Compare WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY 284 (3d ed.1988) (defining compel to mean to force or constrain ... to get or bring about by force) with NOAH WEBSTER, AN AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 235 (3d ed. 1856) (defining compelled to mean forced; constrained; obliged). The 1850-51 constitutional debates are bereft of any discussion of this provision and give us no reason to find an unusual usage of these common words. [10] The decisional law as far back as 1860 has focused on the prerequisite of compulsion: [The right] exempts no one from the consequences of a crime which he may have committed, but only from the necessity of himself producing the evidence to establish it. Wilkins v. Malone, 14 Ind. 153, 156 (1860). Stated concisely, our cases establish that there is a right not to be forced to speak, but there is no right to bar a confession freely given after appropriate warnings and waivers. See also Corder v. State, 467 N.E.2d 409, 415 (Ind.1984) (defendant who spoke freely to court-appointed psychiatrists was not denied his rights under Section 14 or the Fifth Amendment); Ross v. State, 204 Ind. 281, 293, 182 N.E. 865, 869 (1932) (The essence of the privilege is freedom from testimonial compulsion.); cf. State ex rel. Keller v. Criminal Court of Marion County, 262 Ind. 420, 428, 317 N.E.2d 433, 438 (1974) (The Fifth Amendment is not a bar to any conviction resting on self-incrimination. It prohibits only compelled self-incrimination.). We recently reiterated that the purpose underlying an Indiana constitutional provision is critical to ascertaining what the particular constitutional provision was designed to prevent. Town of St. John, 675 N.E.2d at 321 (internal quotation marks omitted). In this case, there is no connection between the purpose to be advanced by Article I, Section 14 and the evil Ajabu asks us to proscribe. The treatment of a lawyer whose services and efforts were unknown to Ajabu cannot have affected the voluntariness of his decision to speak with his interrogators about the crimes in this case. This is a critical point. As Justice Brennan declared in holding the federal self-incrimination right applicable to the states in 1964: [T]he constitutional inquiry [under the Fifth Amendment] is not whether the conduct of state officers in obtaining the confession was shocking, but whether the confession was free and voluntary. Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 7, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 1493, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964) (internal quotation marks omitted). Or, as this Court remarked in rejecting a claim that the Indiana constitutional right had been abridged in a 1902 case: Whether [the suspect] should so testify was, therefore, a personal privilege which he could claim or not as he chose. If he gave such criminating [sic] evidence voluntarily, his constitutional rights were not violated. It is a general rule that when a personal privilege exists for a witness to testify or not as he chooses, if he does testify without objection he will be deemed to have done so voluntarily. State v. Comer, 157 Ind. 611, 613, 62 N.E. 452, 453 (1902); see also Ogle v. State, 193 Ind. 187, 127 N.E. 547 (1920) (assertion of right to remain silent during police questioning is personal and may be waived). In sum, the language, textual history, and purpose of Article I, Section 14 of the Indiana Constitution all point to the conclusion that it protects the defendant against use of his compelled testimony, not his voluntary statements. The propriety of the treatment of a third person is extraneous to that analysis.
That we reach the same conclusions drawn by the Supreme Court of the United States on this issue in Burbine is consistent with the interwoven history of the federal and state rights. The Indiana right has been thought to be derived in part from earlier state constitutions. WILLIAM P. MCLAUGHLIN, THE INDIANA STATE CONSTITUTION 46 (1996). Similarly, the language of the Fifth Amendment enjoys some precedent in state constitutional provisions that were enacted before the Federal Bill of Rights. Eben Moglen, Taking the Fifth: Reconsidering the Origins of the Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 92 MICH.L.REV. 1086, 1118-23 (1994) (concluding that historical evidence is thin and inconclusive on precise impact of state provisions on framing of Fifth Amendment). Although not dispositive, the parallel development of the federal and Indiana doctrines is also relevant to this inquiry. The Fifth Amendment right to be free from self-incrimination was not held applicable to state criminal trials via the Fourteenth Amendment until 1964. Malloy, 378 U.S. at 6, 84 S.Ct. at 1492-93. Since that time, self-incrimination issues have more often been presented to our state courts under the Fifth Amendment. To the extent the state constitutional right has been implicated since Malloy, separate analysis of the right has been sparse. Indeed, we declared without elaboration in a 1970 case that the Indiana right has the same scope and effect as the privilege against self-incrimination in the Fifth Amendment. Haskett v. State, 255 Ind. 206, 209, 263 N.E.2d 529, 531 (1970) (footnote omitted). Other post- Malloy decisions appear to have assumed as much without saying so explicitly. See, e.g., Bivins v. State, 433 N.E.2d 387, 390 (Ind.1982); Brown v. State, 256 Ind. 558, 270 N.E.2d 751 (1971). However, for a century and a half before Malloy, the two doctrines existed in parallel but did not apply to the same proceedings. As a result, there is an abundance of decisional law from the pre- Malloy period construing the Indiana right to be free from self-incrimination. Not surprisingly, Indiana self-incrimination doctrine emerged as virtually identical to the federal constitutional right. Many Indiana decisions, based on independent state grounds, in fact preceded and presaged similar rulings from the Supreme Court of the United States. [11] In other instances, judicial development of the Indiana and Fifth Amendment rights to be free from self-incrimination occurred similarly but independently, in some circumstances reaching identical conclusions without reference to relevant authority from the other jurisdiction. Compare Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U.S. 547, 12 S.Ct. 195, 35 L.Ed. 1110 (1892) (holding that right was available in grand jury proceedings) with Comer, 157 Ind. at 613, 62 N.E. at 453 (finding the same under Indiana Constitution ten years after Counselman, but without referring to federal jurisprudence). And there are cases in which the Indiana rule was formulated in express reliance on a federal antecedent. See, e.g., Wilson v. Ohio Farmers' Ins. Co., 164 Ind. 462, 73 N.E. 892 (1905) (relying in part on Chief Justice John Marshall's reasoning in the trial of Aaron Burr). The similarity of the text of Section 14 of the Indiana Bill of Rights to its federal counterpart and their parallel judicial history support but do not compel the conclusion that the framers of the Indiana Constitution and the authors of the Fifth Amendment had the same objectives. As Chief Justice Shepard recently put it: Much of the national or federal consensus on the broad outlines of various fundamental rights is the product of cross-breeding between state and federal constitutional discourse. It is hardly surprising then ... that a national synthesis has emerged about the central features of certain core values. Randall T. Shepard, The Maturing Nature of State Constitution Jurisprudence, 30 VAL.U.L.REV. 421, 440-41 (1996) (footnote omitted). Even if no national consensus has emerged on this point, [12] interpretation of a provision of our state constitution consistent with precedent under its federal counterpart is appropriate where the tools for constitutional interpretation point in that direction. Robert F. Williams, In the Glare of the Supreme Court: Continuing Methodology and Legitimacy Problems in Independent State Constitutional Rights Adjudication, 72 NOTRE DAME L.REV. 1015, 1017 (1997). This is true of the core value of the right not to incriminate oneself.
There are good reasons not to stray from the historical focus on testimonial compulsion. This case presents no claim of compulsion, but rather turns on whether alleged misconduct outside the interrogation room can nullify an otherwise valid confession. Ajabu's proposed construction of Section 14 would transfer to the bar and others the right to terminate an interrogation that was proceeding voluntarily. Miranda warnings are intended to give the suspect some control over the circumstances surrounding the interrogation. They do not give a lawyer control over the interrogation unless the suspect requests it. Moreover, the warnings are not designed to suggest to suspects otherwise speaking without compulsion that they should have a lawyer present when they have explicitly declined one, or that they should not talk at all. Because the federal and state rights serve the same goals, the reasoning with respect to the right to be free from self-incrimination expressed in Burbine is also applicable to Article I, Section 14 of the Indiana Constitution. In Burbine, the Supreme Court rejected a similar invitation to expand the self-incrimination right under the federal constitution. Writing for a six-to-three majority, Justice O'Connor dismissed the notion that a lawyer's efforts to contact a suspect could render a Miranda waiver invalid: Events occurring outside of the presence of the suspect and entirely unknown to him surely can have no bearing on the capacity to comprehend and knowingly relinquish a constitutional right. Burbine, 475 U.S. at 422, 106 S.Ct. at 1141. In essence, the Court held that the protections Miranda and subsequent cases provide were adequate to ensure that the waiver was voluntary as a matter of law. Id. at 422-23, 106 S.Ct. at 1141-42. And as a matter of Fifth Amendment doctrine, Burbine emphasized the elemental and established proposition that the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination is, by hypothesis, a personal one that can only be invoked by the individual whose testimony is being compelled. Id. at 434 n. 4, 106 S.Ct. at 1147 n. 4. The Court was equally unequivocal that the conduct of the police towards counsel had no bearing on the waiver analysis: [W]hether intentional or inadvertent, the state of mind of the police is irrelevant to the question of the intelligence and voluntariness of respondent's election to abandon his rights. Although highly inappropriate, even deliberate deception of an attorney could not possibly affect a suspect's decision to waive his Miranda rights unless he were at least aware of the incident. Id. at 423, 106 S.Ct. at 1142 (citation omitted). In concluding in Burbine that the Fifth Amendment had not been offended, Justice O'Connor made several points consistent with the result we reach today: (1) because Miranda warnings are prophylactic and not themselves constitutionally required, the warnings did not provide a license for molding police conduct so long as they served their purpose of protecting the self-incrimination right; (2) how police treated an attorney whose representation was unknown to the suspect is unrelated to Miranda's purpose of dissipating the coercion inherent in police interrogation; (3) Miranda is a bright-line rule whose case of application would be jeopardized if the validity of the waiver hinged on events occurring outside the stationhouse; (4) expanding Miranda would upset the careful balance that decision struck between the objective of preventing coerced confessions and the need to enable police to gather truthful information through non-coercive questioning; and (5) the benefit to the suspect of knowing of the attorney's unsolicited efforts would be marginal and the costs to society great, because counsel's inquiry would actively encourage the suspect not to speak at all. Id. at 424-27, 106 S.Ct. at 1142-44.