Opinion ID: 1375029
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Denying Motion to Suppress Confession

Text: Defendant's pretrial litigation strategy focused mainly on an in limine motion, brought under Evidence Code section 402, to suppress his confession because coerced by threats and inducements following invocation of his rights to counsel and to silence. Defendant testified on his own behalf for purposes of the motion to suppress. He testified that during the interrogations at the South Gate jail, Officer Carter made clear that he would get answers to his questions, pointed to the muscular Officer Greene, asked him whether he thought he could beat Officer Greene in a fight, and told him if a fight began Officer Greene literally would kill me if somebody didn't stop him. He also testified that the police showed him a depression in a wall of the interrogation room that could have been made by the impact of a human head and suggested that his head might be used to enlarge it if he failed to reveal what he knew about Carter's disappearance. In sum, he was terrified of Greene and the situation.... Moreover, he testified, the police told him that if he should be imprisoned for the murders he would be unlikely to survive. Defendant introduced (in the context of his Pitchess motion, discussed infra, at pp. 829-832) the testimony of his own counsel, Michael C. Carney, that when he was a prosecutor he learned the police had received a letter complaint that Officer Greene had used excessive force during a drunk-driving arrest. At the time, Officer Greene also told Carney that he had broken a citizen's jaw and received a restrictive-duty assignment as a result. There was also evidence that a letter complaint might be treated by the police as minor and never be placed in a personnel record for the officer later to discover. Indeed, after Carney's testimony, Officer Greene testified that his file contained no complaint. Defendant also called his counsel from the prior trial, Peter L. Williams, who testified that another client, Angelina Nasca, told him that Officer Greene forced her to confess to a trumped-up charge of burglary because he took her in the interview room in the South Gate jail and hit her, driving her tooth through her cheek, and threatened to put her head through a hole in the wall of the interview room of the South Gate jail. Williams also testified that defendant told the public defender's office about the wall on the morning after his arrest. The court considered Nasca's testimony from the prior trial, as well as that of Michael Bridges. Both claimed to have been bullied and beaten by Officer Greene while under arrest. Nasca said that Officer Greene threatened to push my head through that hole in the interrogation room wall the same way he did someone else's. Bridges also testified that Officer Greene threatened him with a shotgun. When Bridges was in the South Gate jail's interrogation room, he filled out a card indicating that he wanted a lawyer and did not want to talk. Another member of the police department tore it up and Officer Greene beat him again. Bridges denied knowing defendant. Louis Moreno testified that he was roughed up by the South Gate police in October or November of 1978 when they arrested him on a fugitive warrant for armed robbery. The court found that his description of the assertedly offending police officers did not match those who had testified in the hearing. There was testimony that for three or four years the local public defender had not received a single request to appear at the South Gate jail in response to an invocation of the right to counsel. As stated, defendant also testified that the police offered him an inducement to confess. It was my understanding that [Officer Carter] was promising that if I cooperated with him and told him whatever it was he wanted to hear that he would send me back to Atascadero ..., that there wouldn't be any charges filed.... That was in the form of a promise. Defendant further testified that he was never read his Miranda rights ( Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436 [16 L.Ed.2d 694, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 10 A.L.R.3d 974]) and that when he demanded to see a lawyer Officer Carter refused, responding did I want to talk to him or did I want to fight, something to that effect. [N]obody told me why I wasn't read my rights. I was told ... something to the effect that they had already done a number of things improperly and that he [Officer Carter] probably couldn't make a case hold up in court anyway. The prosecution produced numerous witnesses to support its assertion that his confessions were made voluntarily. Officer Sims testified that defendant was neither threatened nor offered an inducement for his statements: he responded freely and voluntarily and his demeanor was somewhat nervous, but was also relaxed.... Officer Carter, who conducted the key interrogation, also testified that defendant's demeanor was normal, maybe a little emotionally upset; neither Officer Carter nor any other member of the South Gate Police Department threatened him or offered any inducement or benefit other than coffee and cigarettes. Officer Greene was not flexing his muscles or making threatening gestures; rather, he was very quiet that evening and seemed to be real remorseful if anything. Indeed, when Mr. Memro started telling us about picking up the boy and what he had done to the boy, ... Greene became quite emotional and appeared as though he couldn't take it and he went over and sat in the corner. After an hour of general conversation to make defendant feel comfortable, Officer Carter testified, he confessed to the Carter murder. At that time he became extremely emotionally upset and ... seemed to be very remorseful. He started crying very heavily.... Officer Carter gave him a few minutes to calm down and then invited him to unburden himself of any other criminal activity. Defendant told him that the murders of Fowler and Chavez had weighed on his mind for a long time, and he confessed to them. Officer Carter agreed that there was a slight, six- to eight-inch-wide impression in one plaster wall of the interrogation room. Anthony Cornejo, a fellow jail inmate, testified that defendant told him that he had lied about his confession being coerced. He admitted making the statements freely to the police. And he said  the quote was, `That was the only thing I had going for me on my appeal was to say that I was beat up and coerced and had the statements beat out of me.' On cross-examination, Cornejo was impeached as a notorious jailhouse informant who had repeatedly testified about fellow inmates' statements in jail for the prosecution in state and federal court. Cornejo was a convicted murderer, robber and burglar who, the cross-examination suggested, would hope for lenity from the parole board. And another informer had written Cornejo about defendant's case. Defendant also called Theodore Frank  presumably the defendant in People v. Frank (1985) 38 Cal.3d 711 [214 Cal. Rptr. 801, 700 P.2d 415], following retrial People v. Frank (1990) 51 Cal.3d 718 [274 Cal. Rptr. 372, 798 P.2d 1215]  who testified that defendant was very reticent about his case: he would never answer questions or volunteer any information about it. South Gate Police Officer Walter R. Carter drove defendant back to the police station from the site where Carter's body was recovered. He testified that Lloyd Carter told him not to bother to handcuff him, but that he (Walter Carter) insisted that he should be restrained. On the way to the station, defendant told him that he didn't understand how anyone could treat him so fairly and so nice when he had done such a terrible thing. Defendant conceded that he was never physically harmed, that he had studied karate in 1972, that he was attending judo classes before his arrest, that he was in good physical condition, and that he had wrestled in school  evidently high school  and also played football there. The court also heard evidence that while in jail defendant was fed and was allowed to make two phone calls. He called Linda Brundige, a reserve deputy sheriff who knew him because, as she testified at trial after the court had ruled the confession voluntary, he was one of my assistant instructors in a judo class I taught for the city of Huntington Park. Brundige also explained that defendant had been trained by somebody that was good with martial arts and that he was good within his skill level in a form of karate. The court denied the motion to suppress the confession. Based upon the totality of the evidence, it declared, the court finds beyond a reasonable doubt the confession was free and voluntary. It further declared that the totality of the circumstances clearly point to the credibility of the prosecution witnesses and against the credibility of the defense witnesses, and I find the statement to be free and voluntary.
(8a) Defendant contends that the court erred in finding beyond a reasonable doubt that his confession was given voluntarily and that his witnesses were not credible. He asserts that this ruling was inherently implausible and is unsupported by substantial evidence given his testimony regarding his interrogation and that of witnesses who testified that the South Gate police department behaved brutally toward arrestees, particularly while interrogating them. He is wrong: substantial evidence supported the ruling. (9) The parties agree on the applicable burden of proof regarding the claim of involuntary confession. Because the crimes charged occurred before the adoption of article I, section 28, subdivision (d) of the California Constitution in 1982, state law required the prosecution to show beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant's statements were made voluntarily. ( People v. Anderson (1990) 52 Cal.3d 453, 470 [276 Cal. Rptr. 356, 801 P.2d 1107].) Federal law requires the prosecution to make the same showing by a preponderance of the evidence. ( People v. Morris (1991) 53 Cal.3d 152, 200 [279 Cal. Rptr. 720, 807 P.2d 949].) On appeal, the determination of a trial court as to the ultimate issue of the voluntariness of a confession is reviewed independently in light of the record in its entirety, including `all the surrounding circumstances  both the characteristics of the accused and the details of the interrogation' [citations].... [¶] The trial court's determinations concerning whether coercive police activity was present, whether certain conduct constituted a promise and, if so, whether it operated as an inducement, are apparently subject to independent review as well. ( People v. Benson (1990) 52 Cal.3d 754, 779 [276 Cal. Rptr. 827, 802 P.2d 330].) However, the trial court's findings as to the circumstances surrounding the confession  including `the characteristics of the accused and the details of the interrogation' [citation]  are clearly subject to review for substantial evidence. The underlying questions are factual; such questions are examined under the deferential substantial-evidence standard [citation].... ( Ibid. ) (8b) Applying the foregoing law to the record before us, we conclude that the confession was voluntary. (10) What the Constitution permits to be admitted in evidence is the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice ... to confess. ( Schneckloth v. Bustamonte (1973) 412 U.S. 218, 225 [36 L.Ed.2d 854, 862, 93 S.Ct. 2041] (lead opn.); accord, id. at p. 249 [36 L.Ed.2d at pp. 875-876] (conc. opn. of Blackmun, J.) and p. 250 [36 L.Ed.2d at p. 876] (conc. opn. of Powell, J.).) The question is whether defendant's choice to confess was not essentially free because his will was overborne. ( Id. at pp. 225-226 [36 L.Ed.2d at pp. 861-862].) The inquiry is essentially factual. In determining whether a defendant's will was overborne in a particular case, the Court has assessed the totality of all the surrounding circumstances  both the characteristics of the accused and the details of the interrogation. ( Id. at p. 226 [36 L.Ed.2d at p. 862].) (8c) The police testified that defendant was not threatened, was offered no inducement, and waived his rights to counsel and to remain silent. There was thus substantial evidence before the court that the interrogation was free of any taint that might make it involuntary. The court believed the testimony of the police and rejected that of defendant's witnesses. We must accept its evaluation of the facts when substantial evidence supports it, as the testimony does. ( People v. Benson, supra, 52 Cal.3d at p. 779.) Doing so, independently resolving the legal question whether the confession was voluntary is a simple task: it was.