Opinion ID: 789984
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fifth Amendment Violation: Qualified Immunity

Text: 15 In undertaking a qualified immunity analysis, we must first determine whether the plaintiff has suffered a violation of his constitutional rights and, if so, whether a reasonable official should have known that he was violating the plaintiff's constitutional rights. 9 The district court held that, under these narrow circumstances — an eleven-year-old child is removed from her home, housed at a private shelter by the State for three days, interrogated there for hours by two seasoned investigators to the point of confession without an adult or advocate present to represent her interests, and is convicted largely on the strength of that confession — the child may, after the conviction is overturned on the grounds that the confession was inadmissible, sue under § 1983 for damages she suffered as a result of the violation of her constitutional rights. 10 On appeal, the defendants insist that, even if LaCresha's right against self-incrimination was violated, § 1983 does not, or at least should not, provide her with a remedy. We hold that, because LaCresha cannot demonstrate that defendants acted unreasonably, in that their actions did not proximately cause the damages that she suffered, she may not maintain a Fifth Amendment cause of action against them under § 1983.
16 It is axiomatic that a criminal defendant's constitutional rights have been violated if his conviction is based, in whole or in part, on an involuntary confession, regardless of its truth or falsity. 11 The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination is a fundamental trial right which can be violated only at trial, even though pre-trial conduct by law enforcement officials may ultimately impair that right. 12 The constitutional privilege against self-incrimination adheres in juvenile court proceedings just as it does in ordinary criminal court. 13 In fact, states must take greater care to protect juveniles against coerced confessions during police interrogations, because children are more likely to be induced to confess, and their confessions are less likely to be reliable. 14
17 An individual's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is implicated only during a custodial interrogation. 15 The Supreme Court defines custodial interrogation as questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody. 16 A suspect is in custody for these purposes either (1) when he is formally arrested or (2) when a reasonable person in the position of the suspect would understand the situation to constitute a restraint on freedom of movement to the degree that the law associates with formal arrest. 17 We review de novo the question whether an interrogation was custodial. 18 18 The district court relied heavily on the reasoning of the Texas Court of Appeals in determining whether LaCresha was in the custody of the State during her interrogation. The Texas appellate court's initial determination whether LaCresha was in custody, though addressing the federal constitutional standard for custodial interrogations, was undertaken solely for the purposes of the Texas law requiring that, if so, she should have been taken before a magistrate before the police questioned her. 19 This inquiry is apposite but not determinative of our de novo federal constitutional inquiry regarding in custody, i.e., whether a reasonable person in LaCresha's position would have understood that his liberty was constrained to the extent associated with formal arrest. 19 On the latter issue, the Texas appellate court held, in contrast to the Texas trial court, that LaCresha's interrogation was custodial, adopting and applying a reasonable child standard. The court asked whether, under these circumstances, a reasonable child of eleven would have believed that her freedom of movement was constrained to the degree associated with formal arrest. 20 The appellate court emphasized that LaCresha was involuntarily removed from her home by the State and placed in a children's shelter pursuant to emergency provisions of section 262 of the Texas Family Code. 21 The state appellate court agreed with the state trial court that, for purposes of evaluating whether LaCresha was in custody for purposes of Texas state law, the Texas Baptist Children's home was not a jail or detention facility. 22 The appellate court diverged from the trial court, however, in ruling that (1) because the shelter assumed all duties of care and control over children residing there, it was a place of confinement; and (2) practically speaking, LaCresha was not free to leave, as she would have had to run away from the shelter, and she had no means of returning to her home. 23 Although the determination that the shelter was a place of confinement under Texas state law is not directly relevant to the question whether LaCresha was in custody during the ensuing interrogation, the state appellate court's underlying determinations regarding the degree of restriction over LaCresha's movement imposed by the state is relevant to whether she would have felt her liberty to be constrained. 20 The defendants protest that we ought not consider a suspect's age in evaluating whether he was in custody for purposes of a Fifth Amendment violation. Rather, they assert, we must use an objective test, asking only whether a reasonable person, not a reasonable child, would have concluded that his liberty was constrained. 24 The Supreme Court has endorsed this approach when confronted with an interrogation of a seventeen-year-old suspect, but the Court's conclusion rested on the assertion that the custody inquiry states an objective rule designed to give clear guidance to the police, while consideration of a suspect's individual characteristics — including his age — could be viewed as creating a subjective inquiry. 25 Justice O'Connor wrote separately to emphasize that [t]here may be cases in which a suspect's age will be relevant to the Miranda `custody' inquiry but that in Yarborough, the defendant was almost eighteen years old and it would be difficult to expect police to recognize that a suspect is a juvenile when he is so close to the age of majority. 26 21 The case of an eleven-year-old is different. The police should have no difficulty recognizing that their suspect is a juvenile and adjusting their determination whether the suspect would understand his freedom of movement to be constrained accordingly. In any event, even if we were to ignore LaCresha's age at the time of her interrogation, we would still conclude that a reasonable individual of any age who is removed involuntarily from his home, housed by the State for three days, not informed that he is free to leave, and questioned by two police detectives in a closed interrogation room, would believe that his liberty was constrained to the degree associated with formal arrest. 27 We hold that LaCresha was in custody for purposes of evaluating her interrogation.
22 Next, we must determine whether the statement that LaCresha gave while in custody was involuntary, making its introduction at her criminal trial violative of her Fifth Amendment rights. Although LaCresha's statement was taken in violation of Texas law, this alone did not automatically produce a violation of her Fifth Amendment rights. 28 Once we have concluded that a juvenile's interrogation was custodial, we determine whether such a suspect's confession is coerced or involuntary by examining the totality of the circumstances surrounding the child's interrogation. 29 In addition to the fact that the interrogation was conducted in violation of state law, our examination includes consideration of the juvenile's age, experience, education, background, and intelligence, and into whether he has the capacity to understand the warnings given him, the nature of his Fifth Amendment rights, and the consequences of waiving those rights. 30 The Supreme Court has admonished that the police are required to take special care to ensure the voluntariness of a minor suspect's confession: 23 If counsel was not present for some permissible reason when an admission was obtained, the greatest care must be taken to assure that the admission was voluntary, in the sense not only that it was not coerced or suggested, but also that it was not the product of ignorance of rights or of adolescent fantasy, fright or despair. 31 24 Every factor weighed in our analysis militates against the conclusion that LaCresha's statement was voluntary. At eleven years of age, she was far younger than the fifteen-year-old juvenile suspect whom we held to have voluntarily confessed in Gachot v. Stadler. 32 She had no experience with the criminal justice system, had been held in the custody of the State for three days, was unaccompanied by any parent, guardian, attorney, or other friendly adult, and was found to have below-normal intelligence by the court-appointed psychiatrist prior to her criminal trial, also in contrast to the Gachot defendant. 33 25 LaCresha cannot be held to have knowingly and voluntarily waived her rights to be represented by counsel and to remain silent. 34 Other than having LaCresha sign a Miranda card, and briefly explaining her rights to her at the outset of the interrogation, the police took no precautions to ensure the voluntariness of her statement, let alone special care. The police made no effort to contact LaCresha's adoptive parents, and the shelter, which had assumed responsibility for her care, sent no representative with her to the interrogation. LaCresha was never told that she was free to leave or that she could call her adoptive parents or any other friendly adult. In addition, the police officers represented to LaCresha that they had already talked to everyone in her family, that everyone knew what happened, and that she could help her family only by telling the truth. We hold that LaCresha's statement was involuntary, and that its admission at trial violated her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
26 To overcome a claim of qualified immunity, a plaintiff must establish that the right an official is alleged to have violated was clearly established, i.e., sufficiently clearly defined that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. 35 Although there need not be prior case law directly on point for a constitutional right to be clearly established, the state of the law must be such that a reasonable officer would be on notice that his actions could violate a constitutional right. 36 Defendants argue that, even assuming arguendo that clearly established law should have put them on notice that their interrogation of LaCresha was custodial and that her statement was not made voluntarily, no clearly established law put them on notice that their actions could violate her Fifth Amendment rights. 27 Defendants assert that a reasonable officer would not have understood that his actions could have violated LaCresha's Fifth Amendment rights because, as we discussed above, such a violation requires that (1) officials coerce an involuntary statement from a suspect and (2) this statement later be introduced against her at trial. 37 Therefore, because an officer cannot contemporaneously interrogate a suspect unlawfully and violate a suspect's Fifth Amendment rights, we must determine whether clearly established law should have alerted a reasonable official that his pre-trial conduct, although perhaps a but-for cause of the violation of the plaintiff's trial rights, could proximately cause a violation of her Fifth Amendment rights. 28 In a perfect world, trial courts protect defendants' Fifth Amendment rights by excluding improperly obtained confessions or statements. 38 In this real-world case, however, the trial court failed to protect LaCresha's rights. It is true that the officers wrongfully elicited LaCresha's confession during her interrogation and that this confession was later wrongfully admitted at trial and used against her, and ultimately resulted in her conviction; yet a trial judge twice heard all the evidence concerning the circumstances surrounding LaCresha's confession and twice admitted it into evidence. The defendants thus insist that, inasmuch as the decision whether to admit a criminal defendant's statement lies within the discretion of the presiding judge at trial, that judge's decision to admit LaCresha's confession was an independent, superseding cause of the violation of her Fifth Amendment rights. 39 Therefore, contend the defendants, because their improper questioning could not have caused the violation of LaCresha's Fifth Amendment rights, they should not be held liable for the violation. 40 29 Section 1983 does require a showing of proximate causation, which is evaluated under the common law standard. 41 In cases like this one, we read § 1983 against the background of tort liability that makes a person liable for the natural consequences of his actions. 42 A corollary of these background tenets of tort law relieves tortfeasors from liability if there exists a superseding cause, or an act of a third person or other force which by its intervention prevents the actor from being liable for harm to another which his antecedent wrongful act was a substantial factor in bringing about. 43 Defendants advance that the trial judge's decision to admit LaCresha's statement into evidence constitutes such a superseding cause, and that, absent any allegation or proof that they endeavored to mislead the judge into admitting an involuntary statement at trial, they cannot have acted unreasonably according to clearly established law for purposes of § 1983 liability. 30 Albeit in dicta, the Supreme Court has intimated that this argument should not hold sway, at least with respect to false arrest claims. Although the Court in Malley v. Briggs conceded that the appellant police officer's argument that he could not have proximately caused a defendant's unlawful arrest by filing an affidavit unsupported by probable cause was not before it on appeal, the Court stated that it would not have been receptive to this contention. 44 Malley states that § 1983 should be read against background tort law, which recognizes the liability of individuals for the consequences of their acts: 31 Petitioner has not pressed the argument that in a case like this the officer should not be liable because the judge's decision to issue the warrant breaks the causal chain between the application for the warrant and the improvident arrest. It should be clear, however, that the District Court's no causation rationale in this case is inconsistent with our interpretation of § 1983. As we stated in Monroe v. Pape, 365 U.S. 167, 187, 81 S.Ct. 473, 5 L.Ed.2d 492 (1961), § 1983 should be read against the background of tort liability that makes a man responsible for the natural consequences of his actions. 45 32 One year after Malley, we implicitly endorsed this approach in United States v. Burzynski Cancer Research Institute , holding that Malley required us to reject a police officer's superseding cause arguments and examine only whether a reasonably well-trained officer would have known that his warrant application was unsupported by probable cause. 46 The following year, however, we decided Hand v. Gary, a false arrest case in which we held that, when a neutral intermediary, such as a justice of the peace, reviews the facts and allows a case to go forward, such an act breaks the chain of causation. 47 We qualified our holding by stating that the chain of causation is broken only where all the facts are presented to the grand jury, or other independent intermediary where the malicious motive of the law enforcement officials does not lead them to withhold any relevant information from the independent intermediary. 48 This holding in Gary was consistent with other circuit precedent, 49 yet we made no mention of Burzynski or of the Supreme Court's proximate cause footnote in Malley. 33 The rule of Hand v. Gary has since prevailed in this circuit for almost two decades. 50 Even though Burzynski appears to contradict Hand 's holding on the issue of superseding cause, the earlier decision did not address the issue in depth, and we are unwilling to disregard firmly ensconced circuit precedent in favor of such a cursory analysis of Malley 's dicta. A review of other circuits' case law addressing proximate cause when a plaintiff's injury results from an independent decision-maker's ruling also reveals a fundamental tension between these primary tenets of tort law: (1) An individual is liable for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his actions, and (2) an intervening decision of an informed, neutral decision-maker breaks the chain of causation. 51 34 In this circuit, it was not well-established at the time of LaCresha's interrogation that an official's pre-trial interrogation of a suspect could subsequently expose that official to liability for violation of a suspect's Fifth Amendment rights at trial. We hold that, as in the analogous context of Fourth Amendment violations, an official who provides accurate information to a neutral intermediary, such as a trial judge, cannot cause a subsequent Fifth Amendment violation arising out of the neutral intermediary's decision, even if a defendant can later demonstrate that his or her statement was made involuntarily while in custody. 52 35 LaCresha has not identified, and we have not found, any evidence in the record to indicate that the state judge who presided over her juvenile trial failed to hear (or was prevented from hearing) all of the relevant facts surrounding her interrogation before deciding to admit her confession into evidence. Armed with all those facts, that judge nevertheless concluded that LaCresha was not in custody for purposes of Miranda or Texas law governing the interrogation of minors, and ruled that her statement to the police was voluntary and admissible. 53 Like the state appellate court, we disagree with the trial court's ruling, yet we are constrained to hold that it constituted a superseding cause of LaCresha's injury, relieving the defendants of liability under § 1983. This holding pretermits our consideration whether she suffered a violation of a constitutional right that was clearly established at the time, and whether a reasonable official should have known that he was violating that right. Accordingly, we reverse the district court's denial of qualified immunity for the defendants on LaCresha's Fifth Amendment claim.