Opinion ID: 2976881
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Coomer’s Oral Confession at the Police Station

Text: While we conclude that Coomer’s first oral statement was admissible, we proceed to examine whether Coomer’s confession at the police station was properly made insofar as it relates to Coomer’s intervening second confession, which the state courts found was obtained in violation of 4 Harmless error analysis applies to coerced confessions. Ariz. v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 295 (1991). Because we affirm the District Court’s holding regarding Coomer’s first confession, we need not reach Coomer’s argument that the admission of this confession had a substantial and injurious effect in determining the jury’s verdict. Cf. Jordan v. Hurley, 397 F.3d 360, 363 (6th Cir. 2005) (engaging in harmless error analysis after finding confrontation clause error). No. 06-1235 Coomer v. Yukins Page 10 Miranda.5 See United States v. Gale, 952 F.2d 1412, 1417 n.8 (D.C. Cir. 1992) (analyzing admissibility of the defendant’s fourth statement “only as it relates to his second and third statements” because there was no Miranda violation involved with the first statement).
Both state court decisions found that Coomer’s oral confession at the police station was admissible. The trial court determined that Coomer was properly Mirandized prior to her confession, and that no evidence suggested undue coercion by the police to obtain a waiver of her rights. The Michigan Court of Appeals went further, agreeing that Coomer had been properly Mirandized, and also holding that Coomer’s confession was sufficiently disconnected from the prior unlawful written statement made by Coomer in her apartment: Here, defendant was in custody at the police station, she was fully advised of her Miranda rights, and she waived those rights. Defendant’s contention that a reasonable person would not have felt at liberty to terminate the second oral statement is simply not supported by the record. There is no indication that the second oral statement given at the police station was obtained illegally or involuntarily. Further, the second oral statement given at the police station was not fruit of the poisonous tree based on the contention that the written statement given at defendant’s apartment should have been preceded by Miranda warnings. Suppression of the oral statement given by defendant at the police station would not be appropriate absent a causal connection between that statement and the earlier, improperly written statement. . . . [T]here was a time lapse of approximately three hours between the written statement made at the apartment and the second oral statement at the police station. . . . At the police station, defendant was properly advised of her Miranda rights before giving her second oral statement. Under these circumstances, the statement given at the police station is sufficiently disconnected from the prior written statement that the later oral statement cannot be considered the fruit of the poisonous tree. (JA at 138 (emphasis added).) Thus, the Michigan Court of Appeals found no error in the trial court’s admission of Coomer’s second oral confession.
Coomer maintains that her confession at the police station was tainted by her earlier, improper written confession in her apartment. The Supreme Court spoke directly to this circumstance in Oregon v. Elstad: 5 The trial court found that Coomer’s written confession had immediately followed her verbal confession, and thus, “a reasonable person who had just orally implicated herself in a crime of this nature who sits down to put that implication in writing at the request of an officer would not reasonably think that they would be free to leave.” (JA at 180.) At oral argument, counsel for Coomer focused extensively on the seeming incongruity between the Michigan trial court’s determination that Coomer’s first confession in her apartment was lawfully obtained, while her second, written confession just moments later was not. We do not review the lawfulness of Coomer’s written confession here. However, we note that the trial court’s reasoning to exclude Coomer’s written confession best encapsulates our view of the operative distinction between the oral and written confessions in Coomer’s apartment. No. 06-1235 Coomer v. Yukins Page 11 It is an unwarranted extension of Miranda to hold that a simple failure to administer the warnings, unaccompanied by any actual coercion or other circumstances calculated to undermine the suspect’s ability to exercise his free will, so taints the investigatory process that a subsequent voluntary and informed waiver is ineffective for some indeterminate period. Though Miranda requires that the unwarned admission must be suppressed, the admissibilty of any subsequent statement should turn . . . solely on whether it is knowingly and voluntarily made. 470 U.S. 298, 309 (1985) (emphasis added). Elstad involved a young suspect who was interrogated without being Mirandized by police in his home, where he first confessed to a crime. After the suspect was taken to the police station and given proper warnings, he again confessed. The suspect argued at trial that his second confession should not be admitted because it was the fruit of the first tainted confession. The Supreme Court refused to adopt the suspect’s “cat out of the bag” theory and held that “a careful and thorough administration of Miranda warnings serves to cure the condition that rendered the unwarned statement inadmissible.” Id. at 310-11. The Supreme Court reasoned that the change in location and circumstances, and the lack of any evidence suggesting that the police exploited the suspect’s unwarned admission to secure the second, supported its finding that the suspect’s waiver of his rights was freely given. Thus, the Court held that the second confession was not tainted by the first confession. In deciding whether a second confession has been tainted by the prior coerced statement, the Supreme Court instructed courts to consider “the time that passes between confessions, the change in place of interrogations, and the change in identity of interrogators[.]” Id. at 310. A plurality of the Court recently elaborated on these factors, directing courts to examine “the completeness and detail of the questions and answers in the first round of interrogation, the overlapping content of the two statements, the timing and setting of the first and the second, the continuity of police personnel, and the degree to which the interrogator’s questions treated the second round as continuous with the first.” Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600, 615 (2004) (plurality opinion); see also id. at 622 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (stating that Elstad controls absent a deliberate evasion of Miranda by the police).
We find that the state courts’ decisions that Coomer’s second confession was lawfully obtained were not unreasonable applications of Supreme Court precedent. As the Michigan Court of Appeals held, we conclude that there is “no indication that the second oral statement given at the police station was obtained illegally or involuntarily.” (JA at 138.) At the police station, Coomer was offered food, and she acknowledged at the trial court hearing that she waived her rights and spoke freely with the officers. Her Miranda warnings were complete, and the record before us supports the conclusion that Coomer’s waiver was knowing and voluntary. Coomer argues that her police station confession was tainted by her earlier, unlawfully obtained written confession. The Michigan Court of Appeals addressed this question, and noted several factors in finding that the second confession did not need to be suppressed: the time lapse of approximately three hours between the written statement in Coomer’s apartment and her confession at the police station; the absence of coercive police conduct; the change in location; the voluntary nature of her first oral statement that immediately preceded the unlawful written confession; and her waiver of rights at the police station. We agree with the Michigan court. Like the suspect in Elstad, Coomer was administered complete Miranda warnings and offered her second oral confession in different circumstances than those surrounding her written confession. Kucyk testified that, once they arrived at the police No. 06-1235 Coomer v. Yukins Page 12 station, he told Coomer that the circumstances had changed, that she was now in custody, and that he was required to read her Miranda rights. While Coomer offered much of the same story as she discussed at her apartment, and the police personnel remained largely the same, several hours had passed since her first oral confession, Coomer was confined in the police station, and, crucially, Coomer had been Mirandized. See Elstad, 470 U.S. at 314 (“A subsequent administration of Miranda warnings to a suspect who has given a voluntary but unwarned statement ordinarily should suffice to remove the conditions that precluded admission of the earlier statement.”). Even under the Seibert plurality’s test, a reasonable person in Coomer’s shoes “could have seen the station house questioning as a new and distinct experience,” and “the Miranda warnings could have made sense as presenting a genuine choice whether to follow up on the earlier admission.” 542 U.S. at 615-16. Coomer relies on Seibert to argue that Coomer’s second oral confession was tainted by her unlawfully obtained written confession to the extent that her police house confession must be found involuntary. In Seibert, Miranda warnings given mid-interrogation, after the suspect gave an unwarned confession, were found ineffective, 542 U.S. at 617 (plurality opinion), because the police employed a “technique . . . designed to circumvent Miranda,” id. at 618 (Kennedy, J., concurring). In any event, the District Court here distinguished the facts of Seibert: “Unlike the coordinated and continuing interrogation in Seibert where Miranda warnings were given midstream, [Coomer’s] statement at the Sheriff’s Department was subject to independent evaluation.” (JA at 88.) We agree. Coomer’s new circumstance at the sheriff’s department “placed [her] in a position where she could make an informed choice about whether to waive her constitutional rights.” (Id.) Indeed, she was in a new location (at the station instead of in her home), there had been a break in time between the two statements (the written confession was made at approximately 12:30 a.m., the station confession at about 3:40 a.m.), and Kucyk specifically informed her that she was in custody (in direct contrast to being told that the officers would leave if asked). Thus, unlike the suspect’s latter statement in Seibert, Coomer’s police station confession was “sufficiently disconnected from the prior written statement[.]” (Id. at 138.) Furthermore, the substantial similarity between Coomer’s voluntary oral confession in her home and the oral confession at the police station makes it questionable whether the intervening, improper written confession could have had any causal effect on the voluntariness of the subsequent police house statement. Cf. United States v. Perdue, 8 F.3d 1455, 1469 (10th Cir. 1993) (examining whether later confessions were the “involuntary products” of an earlier, improper confession). That the state courts admitted Coomer’s police station confession thus was not unreasonable. Coomer argues that “the District Court clearly erred in applying the facts of this case to the multi-factor test” set out in Elstad and Seibert. (Appellant’s Br. at 38.) However, we review not whether the District Court erred, but whether the state court decisions constituted unreasonable or contrary applications of Supreme Court precedent. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d); Williams, 529 U.S. at 413. For the foregoing reasons, we cannot find that they were. It was not an unreasonable determination of the facts to conclude that Coomer’s waiver was knowing and voluntary when made, nor an unreasonable or contrary application of Supreme Court precedent to hold that her second confession was sufficiently disconnected from the taint of Coomer’s excluded written confession.