Opinion ID: 4018584
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Officers violated Miranda by continuing to

Text: interrogate Jones after he invoked his right to remain silent The Supreme Court has made clear that once a person being questioned “indicates in any manner that he does not wish to be interrogated, the police may not question him.” Miranda, 384 U.S. at 445. “The mere fact that he may have answered some questions or volunteered some statements on his own does not deprive him of the right to refrain from answering any further inquiries.” Id. To make sure that we understood this procedure, the Court repeated it: “If the individual indicates in any manner, at any time prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease.” Id. at 473–74. “[A]ny statement taken after the person invokes his privilege cannot be other than the product of compulsion, subtle or otherwise.” Id. at 474. Once a person has “exercise[d] . . . his option to terminate questioning[,] he can control the time at which questioning occurs, the subjects discussed, and the duration of the interrogation. . . . [T]he admissibility of statements obtained after the person in custody has decided to remain silent depends under Miranda on whether his right to cut off questioning was scrupulously honored.” Mosley, 423 U.S. at 103–04 (internal quotation marks omitted). 1 Because we reverse on Miranda grounds, we need not reach Jones’s alternative argument that his statements to police were involuntary. See Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428, 433–34 (2000). JONES V. HARRINGTON 15 The Supreme Court has left us with no doubt that this prohibition on continued questioning is a “bright-line” rule, “a prophylactic safeguard whose application does not turn on whether coercion in fact was employed.” Id. at 98, 99 n.8. “[C]onjecture and hair-splitting” is what “the Supreme Court wanted to avoid when it fashioned the bright-line rule in Miranda.” Anderson, 516 F.3d at 790; cf. Davis, 512 U.S. at 461 (noting that the benefit of a bright-line rule is the “clarity and ease of application” that “can be applied by officers in the real world . . . without unduly hampering the gathering of information” by forcing them “to make difficult judgment calls” with a “threat of suppression if they guess wrong”). Here, there is no doubt officers violated Miranda. Certainly, Jones saying he “did not want to talk no more” qualifies as “indicat[ing] in any manner that he does not wish to be interrogated.” Miranda, 384 U.S. at 445 (emphasis added). And there is no real dispute that officers continued interrogating Jones. Officers knew well that he was invoking his right, but continued to push him for more answers: “I understand that but—.” No fairminded jurist could reasonably interpret this statement to be “ceasing” the interrogation. Id. 2. Jones’s invocation was not ambiguous under Berghuis v. Thompkins The Supreme Court recently added another layer to the Miranda inquiry: Whether the suspect invoked his right to remain silent unambiguously. Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. 370, 381 (2010). Up until Thompkins, the right to remain silent could be invoked in “any manner.” Miranda, 384 U.S. at 445. On the other hand, the right to counsel could be invoked only “unambiguously.” Thompkins, 560 U.S. at 16 JONES V. HARRINGTON 381. In Thompkins, the Court clarified that the requirement that the right to counsel be invoked “unambiguously” would now be applied with respect to requests to remain silent. Id. Because we must now apply the rules from right to counsel cases to right to silence cases like Jones’s, we first walk through the right to counsel caselaw. In Miranda, the Court held that the right to remain silent could be invoked “in any manner” and that the interrogation must then “cease.” Miranda, 384 U.S. at 445. By contrast, with respect to the right to counsel, Miranda announced a slightly different rule: “If the individual states that he wants an attorney, the interrogation must cease until an attorney is present.” 384 U.S. at 474 (emphasis added). The scope of the two rights was thus not coextensive—the Court in Miranda was unequivocal on what officers must do when an accused invoked his right to silence; it was not as clear what they had to do when the right to counsel was invoked. From there the caselaw diverged into two lines: One addressing invocations of the right to silence, the other addressing invocations of the right to counsel. In Michigan v. Mosley, 423 U.S. 96 (1976), with respect to the right to silence, the Court clarified that Miranda did not mean that “once a person has indicated a desire to remain silent, questioning may be resumed only when counsel is present,” id. at 104 n.10, but repeated what Miranda had said: the suspect’s “right to cut off questioning” must be “fully respected,” id. at 104. In Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477 (1981), the Court continued to develop the requirements for invocations of the right to counsel. It held that “when an accused has invoked his right to have counsel present during custodial JONES V. HARRINGTON 17 interrogation, a valid waiver of that right cannot be established by showing only that he responded to further police-initiated custodial interrogation even if he has been advised of his rights.” Id. at 484 (footnote omitted). This was a change—a strengthening of the accused’s rights—in the right to counsel: “Edwards established a new test for when . . . waiver would be acceptable once the suspect had invoked his right to counsel: the suspect had to initiate subsequent communication.” Solem v. Stumes, 465 U.S. 638, 646 (1984). See id. at 648. This was different than the test for the right to silence, which allowed police to continue questioning after some delay. Mosley, 423 U.S. at 118. Right to counsel cases then addressed the requirement at issue in this case: How we determine that “the suspect [has] unambiguously request[ed] counsel.” Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452, 459 (1994). This development in the right to counsel context makes sense. Suspects can invoke their right to remain silent in many ways. They may invoke their right by simply remaining silent, or they may indicate in other ways—including by words—that they do not want to talk with police. By contrast, invoking the right to counsel cannot be accomplished by silence or pantomime, but requires the suspect to articulate specifically that she wants counsel. This line of cases explained that an “ambiguous or equivocal” request for counsel does not require police questioning to end and places no limits on how the interrogation can be used later. Id. But the Court also held that the standard for invoking the right to counsel unambiguously was not a demanding one. A suspect need only invoke his rights “sufficiently clearly that a reasonable police officer in the circumstances would understand the statement to be [such] a request.” Id. at 459. 18 JONES V. HARRINGTON He need not specifically reference his constitutional rights, nor need he use any specific terminology. Id. The Court clarified that in determining whether an invocation of the right to counsel is ambiguous, “[u]nder Miranda and Edwards, . . . an accused’s post request responses to further interrogation may not be used to cast doubt on the clarity of his initial request for counsel.” Smith, 469 U.S. at 92. Allowing the government to use these postrequest statements to “cast retrospective doubt” on prior unambiguous invocations would give officers an incentive to ignore invocations in the hopes that a suspect may be persuaded to talk anyway. Id. at 100. “No authority, and no logic, permits the interrogator to proceed . . . on his own terms and as if the defendant had requested nothing, in the hope that the defendant might be induced to say something casting retrospective doubt on his initial statement . . . .” Id. at 99. Construing a person’s unambiguous invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights by “looking to [his] subsequent responses to continued police questioning” and whether “considered in total, [his] statements were equivocal” is “unprecedented and untenable.” Id. at 97 (emphasis removed). Accordingly, “under the clear logical force of settled precedent, an accused’s postrequest responses to further interrogation may not be used to cast retrospective doubt on the clarity of the initial request itself. Such subsequent statements are relevant only to the distinct question of waiver.” Id. at 100.2 2 The dissent argues that we have unfairly attributed “sweeping propositions” to Smith. But we and the dissent seem to agree on Smith’s propositions. The dissent characterizes Smith’s holding as: “[O]nce a suspect clearly invokes his right to counsel, officers may not continue to question him.” Dissenting Op. at 36. Indeed, this is the same holding we JONES V. HARRINGTON 19 Finally, in Thompkins, the Court noted it had “not yet stated” whether the rules about ambiguity it had developed in the context of invocations of the right to counsel should also apply in the context of invocations of the right to silence. Thompkins, 560 U.S. at 381. The Court held “there is no principled reason to adopt different standards for determining when an accused has invoked the Miranda right to remain silent and the Miranda right to counsel as issue in Davis.” Id. Thus, the Court held that the same “standards” about rely on from Miranda: Once an “individual indicates in any manner, at any time prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease.” Miranda, 384 U.S. at 473–74. Both cases stand for the simple proposition that officers must stop questioning a suspect once he unambiguously invokes his right to silence—and if they do not—the suspect’s statements can no longer be used against him. But the dissent appears to suggest something quite different. The dissent argues for a standard that would permit officers to ask some threshold number of questions before we find that officers have indeed not “ceased” “interrogating.” The dissent makes much out of the fact that “Detective Jolivette did not even get out a complete sentence.” Dissenting Op. at 37. The dissent says that this is nothing like Smith where the officers interrogated the suspect “at length” after his invocation. But the dissent is suggesting we create a gray area about how much interrogation is interrogation enough. And that is exactly what the Supreme Court told us not to do when it made Miranda a “bright-line” rule. Smith, 469 U.S. at 99 n.8. There can be no serious dispute that officers did not “cease” their interrogation of Jones once he had unambiguously told them he wanted to remain silent. And there the Miranda analysis must end. The dissent also says our decision “would have sweeping consequences for police officers.” Dissenting Op. at 38. But this parade of horribles is baseless. The rule governing interrogations is the same after this case as it was before—it comes straight from Miranda: If a suspect unambiguously states he wants to remain silent, the officers must stop interrogating. Full stop. 20 JONES V. HARRINGTON ambiguity it had developed in Davis and its progeny should now apply to invocations of the right to silence. Id. The government and the dissent urge us to require that Jones’s statements be “unambiguous” in light of Thompkins, despite that this case came out long after the California Supreme Court’s decision. Dissenting Op. at 26, 31. Thompkins’s holding is nominally a new holding, see id. at 10–11, but in this context it is a holding in the government’s favor because it clarified that invocations of the right to remain silent must also be unambiguous. Under the circumstances, we will apply Thompkins’s directive that the same standards for finding ambiguity in the right to counsel context should also apply to finding ambiguity in the right to silence context. But Thompkins does not change much: No fairminded jurist could determine that Jones’s invocation was ambiguous. First, Jones’s initial request to remain silent was unambiguous on its face, and nothing about the prior context of the statement made it ambiguous or equivocal. Jones stated: “I don’t want to talk no more”; in other words, he did not want to talk anymore. See Garcia v. Long, 808 F.3d 771, 773–74 (9th Cir. 2015) (holding that a suspect answering “no” to the question “[d]o you wish to talk to me?” was an unambiguous request to remain silent under Miranda). Jones did not equivocate by using words such as “maybe” or “might” or “I think.” See Anderson, 516 F.3d at 788; cf. Smith, 469 U.S. at 96–97 (holding that nothing in the statement “Uh, yeah. I’d like to do that” suggested equivocation). Nor did anything Jones did or said leading up to this statement make it ambiguous. During the interrogation leading up to this point, Jones spoke little. Most of the interrogation consisted of detectives repeatedly asking JONES V. HARRINGTON 21 Jones questions, and Jones giving short, often one-word answers. In any event, the fact that Jones spoke to officers for a while before invoking his right to remain silent makes no difference. The California Court of Appeal’s decision is simply “contrary to” and “an unreasonable application” of Miranda. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1); Miranda, 384 U.S. at 473–74 (holding that the right to remain silent can be invoked “any time prior to or during questioning”). The only statements that could cast any ambiguity on Jones’s initial invocation were statements he made after the fact. Indeed, the California Court of Appeal relied largely on Jones’s statement made after officers continued interrogating him, reasoning that because Jones made a follow-up statement after only a single clarifying comment from officers, his initial invocation was ambiguous. But it was clearly established, when determining whether the invocation of a constitutional right is ambiguous, that the California courts could not look to post-invocation statements to “cast retrospective doubt on the clarity of [Jones’s] initial request itself.” Smith, 469 U.S. at 98–99.3 Officers continued to 3 The dissent argues that Smith v. Illinois, 469 U.S. 91 (1984), cannot serve as “clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (d)(1), because Smith rested on Miranda’s invocation of the right to counsel, not on Miranda’s invocation of the right to silence. Dissenting Op. at 33–35. See Smith, 469 U.S. at 98-99 (discussing “the request for counsel”). The dissent contends that only recently, in Thompkins, did the Supreme Court declare the right to silence should be treated the same as the right to counsel. According to the dissent, since Thompkins post-dates the California decisions in this case, it cannot serve as the “clearly established Federal law” required by AEDPA. Dissenting Op. at 34. With respect, we think the dissent is wrong. The dissenting opinion begins by quoting Thompkins. Dissenting Op. at 26; see also id. at 31. 22 JONES V. HARRINGTON interrogate Jones after he had unambiguously asked to remain silent. When Jones said “I don’t want to talk no more,” the officer responded: “I understand that but—.” That means the government cannot rely on Jones’s later statements to establish that his earlier statement was ambiguous. And the California court’s allusion to the fact that officers only interrogated Jones briefly after his invocation is of no matter. Even one question was one question too many. When an “individual indicates in any manner, at any time prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease.” Miranda, 384 U.S. at 473–74 (emphasis added). Nor does it matter, as the California court and federal district court seemed to suggest, that Jones did not repeat his request to remain silent later in the interrogation: “Under Miranda, the onus [is] not on [the suspect] to be persistent in [his] demand to remain silent. Rather, the responsibility f[alls] to the law enforcement officers to scrupulously respect The dissent insists that we apply Thompkins to ensure that Jones invoked his right to remain silent “unambiguously,” but the dissent doesn’t want us to consider the Supreme Court’s earlier cases describing what constitutes an ambiguous or unambiguous invocation. The dissent can’t have it both ways. Either we apply Thompkins—and with it prior cases such as Davis, Smith, Solem, Edwards, and Miranda on which it builds—or we must ignore it. What we cannot do is say we are going to apply Thompkins and then ignore the standard Thompkins tells us to apply (the standards created in its right to counsel cases). If we ignore cases such as Davis and Smith, what standards for ambiguity are we to apply? Some new standard? That is exactly what Thompkins told us the Court would not do: “there is no principled reason to adopt different standards for determining when an accused has invoked the Miranda right to remain silent and the Miranda right to counsel at issue in Davis.” Thompkins, 560 U.S. at 381. JONES V. HARRINGTON 23 [his] demand.” United States v. Lafferty, 503 F.3d 293, 304 (3d Cir. 2007). Relying on the fact that “[i]t was the defendant, not the interrogators, who continued the discussion,” “ignores the bedrock principle that the interrogators should have stopped all questioning. A statement taken after the suspect invoked his right to remain silent ‘cannot be other than the product of compulsion, subtle or otherwise.’” Anderson, 516 F.3d at 789–90 (quoting Miranda, 384 U.S. at 474). Although we give considerable deference to the state courts, “AEDPA deference is not a rubber stamp.” Id. at 786 (citing Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. 231, 240, 265 (2005)). The California Court of Appeal’s determination that Jones’s statement “I don’t want to talk no more” was ambiguous based on his responses to further questioning, was either “an unreasonable determination of the facts,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(2), or an “unreasonable application” of Miranda, id. § 2254(d)(1). By continuing to ask questions, the officers failed to “scrupulously honor” Jones’s simple request. We accordingly hold that 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) does not bar habeas review of Jones’s Miranda claim, and we conclude, on de novo review, that Jones’s constitutional rights were violated when his interrogation was used at trial.