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

Heading: The Oral Confession at Coomer’s Apartment

Text: The state trial court permitted Coomer’s oral confession at her apartment to be admitted at trial. It reasoned that Coomer “was in her own apartment in the presence of another individual known to her,” and that the “questioning was minimal and brief.” (JA at 179.) It concluded that a reasonable person would not have felt like he or she was in custody, and thus, the police were not required to issue a Miranda warning. The Michigan Court of Appeals reached the same conclusion: The evidence showed that defendant permitted the police officers to enter her apartment building and permitted [them] to enter her apartment. . . . The officers did not display weapons, and Kucyk indicated that he informed defendant several times that she was not under arrest. Kucyk also told defendant that if she wanted them to leave, they would go. . . . Defendant proceeded to give a statement, largely in narrative form, with little police questioning. She fully acknowledged that she was not compelled or coerced to give a statement. (JA at 137.) Thus, the court held that “the totality of the circumstances indicates that Coomer was not in custody at her apartment.” (JA at 137.)
We begin by determining the relevant, clearly established law. We must ascertain, de novo, whether the state court decisions concerning Coomer’s first oral statement were contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, Supreme Court precedent. For purposes of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), clearly established law as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States “refers to the holdings, as opposed to the dicta, of this Court’s decisions as of the time of the relevant state-court decision.” Williams, 529 U.S. at 412. No. 06-1235 Coomer v. Yukins Page 7 The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that “[n]o person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself[.]” U.S. Const. amend. V. In the seminal case of Miranda v. Arizona, the Court held that pre-interrogation warnings are required in the context of custodial interrogations given “the compulsion inherent in custodial surroundings.” 384 U.S. 436, 458 (1966). The Court defined “custodial interrogation” to include any circumstance where a suspect “deprived of his freedom by the authorities in any significant way and is subjected to questioning[.]” Id. at 478. However, the Court did not have occasion to apply that test to a set of facts. In succeeding cases, the Court has fleshed out the relevant law concerning the circumstances under which a suspect may be considered in custody. In Berkemer v. McCarty, the Court instructed that “the only relevant inquiry is how a reasonable man in the suspect’s position would have understood his situation.” 468 U.S. 420, 442 (1984). “A policeman’s unarticulated plan has no bearing on the question [of] whether a suspect was ‘in custody’ at a particular time[.]” Id. The Court elaborated further in Stansbury v. California, which was cited and relied upon by the Michigan Court of Appeals in this case. 511 U.S. 318 (1994). In Stansbury, the Supreme Court explained that “the initial determination of custody depends on the objective circumstances of the interrogation, not on the subjective views harbored by either the interrogating officers or the person being questioned.” Id. at 323. Subsequent to Stansbury, the Supreme Court framed the proper inquiry as involving two essential questions: “[F]irst, what were the circumstances surrounding the interrogation; and second, given those circumstances, would a reasonable person have felt he or she was not at liberty to terminate the interrogation and leave.” Thompson v. Keohane, 516 U.S. 99, 112 (1995). The Court directed that “[o]nce the scene is set and the players’ lines and actions are reconstructed, the court must apply an objective test to resolve the ultimate inquiry: was there a formal arrest or restraint on freedom of movement of the degree associated with a formal arrest.” Id. The Sixth Circuit added further guidance on the custody determination in United States v. Salvo, where this Court explained that courts should consider the following factors: (1) the purpose of the questioning; (2) whether the place of the questioning was hostile or coercive; (3) the length of the questioning; and (4) other indicia of custody such as whether the suspect was informed at the time that the questioning was voluntary or that the suspect was free to leave or to request the officers to do so; whether the suspect possessed unrestrained freedom of movement during questioning; and whether the suspect initiated contact with the police or voluntarily admitted the officers to the residence and acquiesced to their requests to answer some questions. 133 F.3d 943, 950 (6th Cir. 1998).
For the following reasons, we conclude that the state court decisions were not unreasonable, and that Coomer’s oral confession in her apartment was properly admitted. Examining the totality of the circumstances, and mindful of the Salvo factors, the evidence at trial showed that a reasonable person would not have ultimately felt that his or her freedom was restrained in a manner associated with a formal arrest. At the outset, we recognize that some facts could support a custodial determination. For instance, Coomer testified that the police arrived at a late hour; that police cars blocked her vehicle on her driveway; that up to eleven officers, uniformed and plain-clothed, came to Coomer’s building; and that the purpose of the police questioning was, as Coomer alleges, to focus the investigation on Coomer herself. However, that the police did not already have probable No. 06-1235 Coomer v. Yukins Page 8 cause to arrest Coomer is immaterial to our analysis here, because “any inquiry into whether the interrogating officers have focused their suspicions upon the individual being questioned (assuming those suspicions remain undisclosed) is not relevant for purposes of Miranda.” Stansbury, 511 U.S. at 326. More importantly, no one factor is “dispositive of the custody issue.” Id. at 325. Other material facts support the state courts’ decisions. First, Coomer voluntarily allowed the police into her apartment building and was questioned in her own home. While an interrogation in one’s home is not determinative alone of the custodial inquiry, it is usually indicative of the absence of the isolation inherent in custodial interrogations. See Beckwith v. United States, 425 U.S. 341, 346 n.7, 347 (1976) (finding that the suspect, who was questioned in his home, “hardly found himself in the custodial situation described by the Miranda Court as the basis for its holding[,]” because Miranda concerned “the principal psychological factor” of “isolating the suspect in unfamiliar surroundings ‘for no purpose other than to subjugate the individual to the will of his examiner’”) (quoting Miranda, 384 U.S. at 457). Second, Coomer’s confession lasted only thirty minutes, taking the form primarily of a narrative and prompted by little police questioning. This fact suggests that Coomer was relieved to discuss her role in a murder after more than six months of avoiding the authorities. The trial court also noted that Coomer’s teary demeanor reinforced the impression that Coomer exuded remorse, and we add that the merely intermittent police questioning and Coomer’s narrative confession suggest an act born of free will, not an act born of coercion. In other words, if Coomer was coerced, it was not by the police, but by her conscience. Third, and perhaps most significantly, Kucyk testified that he told Coomer several times that she was not under arrest and that the police would leave if asked. See Salvo, 133 F.3d at 951 (acknowledging that one of the most important factors in the custody inquiry is whether an officer explicitly informs a suspect that he or she is not under arrest). The state court’s adjudication cannot be unreasonable where “no governing precedent of the Supreme Court or . . . court of appeals [decision] that can be located . . . holds that a person was in custody after being clearly advised of his freedom to leave or terminate questioning.”3 United States v. Czichray, 378 F.3d 822, 826 (8th Cir. 2004); see also United States v. Brown, 441 F.3d 1330, 1347 (11th Cir. 2006) (“[A]dvising a defendant that he is free to leave and is not in custody is a powerful factor in the mix, and generally will lead to the conclusion that the defendant is not in custody[.]”) (emphasis in original); Salvo, 133 F.3d at 950 (recognizing that a statement by an officer to a suspect that he was “free to leave at any time . . . is an important factor in finding that the suspect was not in custody.”). To be sure, Coomer testified that her subjective belief was that she was not free to leave, but the Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed courts to dismiss a suspect’s subjective thoughts. See, e.g., Stansbury, 511 U.S. at 323. At the same time, Coomer conceded at trial that her confession was not coerced or compelled. (JA at 420.) Coomer moved freely around her apartment, offered the officers refreshments, and told the officers to stay quiet out of respect for her sleeping son. These 3 At oral argument, Coomer’s counsel stressed the distinction between a suspect being told that she is “free to leave,” and a suspect being told that the officers would leave if asked. Coomer’s novel distinction is one without a difference. Of course, when the officers are present in a suspect’s home, the more appropriate inquiry is not whether the suspect feels free to leave, per se, but rather, whether the police will terminate questioning if asked to leave, as the Czichary court suggests. See 378 F.3d at 826 (“That a person is told repeatedly that he is free to terminate an interview is powerful evidence that a reasonable person would have understood that he was free to terminate the interview.”) (emphasis added); see also Salvo, 133 F.3d at 950 (impressing that one factor for a court to consider in the custody inquiry is whether a suspect was “free to leave or to request the officers to do so”) (emphasis added); United States v. Macklin, 900 F.2d 948, 951 (6th Cir. 1990) (“[The Officer] repeatedly told the defendants that they were not under arrest and that they were free to cut off his questioning at any point.”) (emphasis added). Similarly, that Coomer was told repeatedly that the police would leave if asked is powerful evidence that a reasonable person would have understood that she was free to ask the police to leave and terminate the questioning. No. 06-1235 Coomer v. Yukins Page 9 facts imply that Coomer exercised control over her surroundings in her own home, not that she was controlled by her interrogators, as was the concern in Miranda. See Miranda, 384 U.S. at 457. Viewing the totality of the circumstances, we find that the state courts’ decisions that a reasonable person would not have felt in custody in Coomer’s situation were not unreasonable applications of the relevant, clearly established law. Coomer argues that this Court should proceed directly to a harmless error analysis because she presupposes that she was in custody prior to her first confession. She contends that the District Court “held that Ms. Coomer was in custody at the time of the first half of her initial confession, and therefore in violation of Miranda[,]” but that despite this violation, the court found the error harmless because, in the District Court’s words, it did not have a “‘substantial and injurious’ effect” on the jury’s verdict. (Appellant’s Br. at 44 (quoting JA at 85).) Coomer profoundly misconstrues the District Court’s holding. The District Court held that “[t]he question of custody is a close one, and the state courts’ conclusions were not entirely unreasonable.” (JA at 83.) However, Coomer appears to be relying on dicta set forth earlier in the District Court’s ruling, where it wrote that “[t]he objective circumstances of the interrogation lead the Court to conclude that Petitioner was in custody and should have been advised of her constitutional rights before she made her first statement.” (Id.) To the extent that the District Court opined that Coomer was in custody during her first statement, this Court does not share that perspective for the purposes of our limited review under AEDPA. As the Supreme Court has explained, and the District Court below accurately echoed, “a federal habeas court may not issue the writ simply because that court concludes in its independent judgment that the state-court decision applied [the law] incorrectly.” Woodford v. Visciotti, 537 U.S. 19, 24-25 (2002) (per curiam); see also Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63, 75 (2003) (“It is not enough that a federal habeas court, in its independent review of the legal question, is left with a firm conviction that the state court was erroneous.”) (internal quotations omitted). The standard of review is limited to determining whether, “after the closest examination of the state-court judgment, a federal court is firmly convinced that a federal constitutional right has been violated,” Williams, 529 U.S. at 389, by virtue of a state court’s “objectively unreasonable” application of Supreme Court precedent, Bell v. Cone, 535 U.S. 685, 699 (2002). The state courts’ decisions finding that Coomer’s first oral confession was not obtained in violation of Miranda were not unreasonable applications of Supreme Court precedent. No governing Supreme Court decision has held that a defendant in Coomer’s circumstances – where she was told that she was not under arrest and that the police would leave if asked – was in custody for purposes4 of Miranda. We affirm the District Court’s holding concerning Coomer’s first oral confession.