Court Opinion

ID: 9538034
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 07:28:48.143875+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:57:22.293008
License: Public Domain

Springer, J.,
with whom Young, C. J., agrees,
dissenting:
I dissent because it is clear to me from Nevada and federal case law that the prosecution is not allowed to use a coerced1 confession as affirmative evidence in the state’s case.
*726The issue has already been decided. Walker v. State, 102 Nev. 290, 720 P.2d 700 (1986). Under Walker this kind of confession cannot be used as independent evidence.2
The Walker rule and what should be the rule in this case is in harmony with federal constitutional law which also holds that statements taken in violation of Miranda can be properly considered “only in passing on [the defendant’s] credibility and not as evidence of guilt.” Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420, 430 (1984) (our emphasis). Our ruling in Walker and the rulings of the United States Supreme Court on the point are consistent with the long history of Anglo-American jurisprudence which forbids the introduction of forced evidence of a crime from the mouth of the accused. The state, here, as in any criminal case, has the burden of proving its case with competent and legal evidence. In this case, the state relied on illegal and inadmissible evidence in its case-in-chief. The Supreme Court of the United States forbids such practice, and so should we. “Whereas the goal of the fourth amendment’s3 exclusionary rule is to deter unlawful police con*727duct, ... the goal of the fifth amendment’s exclusionary rule is to assure trustworthy evidence.” United States v. Sangineto-Miranda, 859 F.2d 1501, 1518 (6th Cir. 1988) (citations omitted); see Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U.S. 433, 448 (1974). The truth or falsity of a statement is not the determining factor in making the decision as to whether to exclude it. Statements which have been obtained in violation of the right not to be compelled to testify against oneself have been regarded as untrustworthy, and a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the confession will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system relying on independent investigation. Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. 368, 388-89 (1964).
In cases of statements made without the benefit of Miranda warnings, the presumption of coercion is unrebuttable. See United States v. Patterson, 812 F.2d 1188, 1193 (9th Cir. 1987), cert. denied, 485 U.S. 922, 108 S.Ct. 1093 (1988). In harmony with Allan v. State, 103 Nev. 512, 746 P.2d 138 (1987), I have no quarrel with the Harris rule. I agree that “[t]he shield provided by Miranda cannot be perverted into a license to use perjury by *728way of a defense, free from the risk of confrontation with prior, inconsistent utterances.” Under Harris and Walker, one who takes the stand may be impeached by the use of an illegally obtained confession; but to allow a criminal conviction to be based on a coerced statement of the accused would be to allow a criminal conviction to be based on untrustworthy, illegally obtained evidence. Such a procedure would violate both the federal and Nevada constitutions.
I would hold that use of the confession was reversible error and would also reverse the conviction on the plea of guilty because it is inextricably tied to the perjury conviction.
One final note: Aside from the established legal and constitutional impermissibility of using coerced confessions4 as affirmative evidence in perjury prosecutions arising out of the confessed crime, I have another reason to question the wisdom of the decision reached by the majority. Here we have the state incapacitating its own prosecutorial processes by virtue of coerced confessions and the mentioned deliberate and blatant disregard of “fundamental fairness.” (See footnote 1). The majority opinion seems to allow the state to absolve itself of previous sins and to procure a perjury conviction against the same defendant using the illegal confession that could not have been admitted in the burglary prosecution. I am afraid that this case sends a message to state’s attorneys that if they lose a criminal case because of the exclusion of an unlawfully obtained confession, they will be able to use the excluded confession anyway simply by filing a later perjury charge against the same defendant. This seems like subterftige to me. This kind of procedure may never be followed, but the invitation to do so is given by this opinion. The use of coerced confessions and engagement by the state in “deliberate” and “blatant” disregard of fundamental fairness for an accused person may be too high a price to pay for putting a burglar behind bars.

 Failure to give the required warnings affords a “bright-line legal presumption of coercion, requiring suppression of all unwarned statements.” Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 306-07 n.1 (1985) (our emphasis). There is no doubt of the illegality of the confession used in this case. McGee was first prosecuted for burglary and convicted by a jury. In the burglary trial the Washoe County prosecutor “deliberately and repeatedly sought to discredit [McGee’s] post-arrest silence,” which prosecutorial misconduct, this court held, constituted a “blatant disregard for well-established and frequently *726stated principles of fundamental fairness.” McGee v. State, 102 Nev. 458, 461, 725 P.2d 1215, 1217 (1986). After this court set aside the burglary conviction by reason of the stated deliberate and blatant disregard of fundamental fairness, the Washoe County prosecutor decided to pursue a perjury charge against McGee based on the charge that McGee lied during the burglary trial and used the coerced confession as a basis for this prosecution.

 We noted in Walker that “Walker’s constitutional rights were violated” in a case in which “[n]ot only did Walker not testify, [but also] there is nothing inherently contradictory about the statement. . . .” The majority makes much of the fact that both the defendant’s not taking the stand and the noncontradictory nature of the statement makes Walker inapplicable to the present case. To this it must be said that the reliance in Walker on Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222 (1971) (in which the United States Supreme Court held that a coerced confession could be constitutionally employed for impeachment purposes when a defendant takes the witness stand) and our preoccupation in Walker with federal constitutional rights belies any interpretation of Walker that would permit coerced confessions to be used as affirmative evidence. The fact that we relied both on constitutional grounds and on the ground that the two statements did not appear contradictory does not change this.

 The majority suggests that other courts have approved the use of illegal evidence at collateral trials for crimes other than the crimes which led to the illegal actions of the police in obtaining the evidence. Without exception, the cases cited by the majority are inapposite to the case at bar. In each of those cases, evidence obtained in violation of the fourth amendment was used in criminal trials totally unrelated to the criminal investigations that led to the illegal police activity. The issue that primarily concerned the courts in these cases was whether, at the time of the illegal activity, it was foreseeable that the defendant would commit additional crimes related to the seized evidence. All but one of those cases considered whether illegally obtained physical evidence should be excluded at a subsequent trial. Finally, with one exception, the collateral crimes involved were prosecuted by federal authorities after state authorities had obtained physical evidence illegally. See United *727States v. Raftery, 534 F.2d 854 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 862 (1976) (state authorities illegally seized drugs and drug paraphernalia; the evidence was later used in a federal prosecution for perjury before a federal grand jury); United States v. Paepke, 550 F.2d 385 (7th Cir. 1977) (money unlawfully seized by state authorities in narcotics investigation was admitted as evidence in a federal prosecution for tax fraud committed months after the illegal seizure); United States v. Lopez-Martinez, 725 F.2d 471 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 837 (1984) (post-arrest statement allegedly taken in violation of the fourth amendment made by defendant in prosecution for possession of marijuana was admitted to show intent in a prosecution eight years later for possession of heroin where the sole defense was that defendant thought the heroin in his possession was marijuana); United States v. Finucan, 708 F.2d 838 (1st Cir. 1983) (documents seized illegally by state officials in automobile fraud case could not be used in a federal prosecution for mail fraud arising from the same conduct, but could be used in a subsequent federal prosecution for perjury alleged to have been committed after the evidence was seized); United States v. Turk, 526 F.2d 654 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 823 (1976) (state officials illegally seized the contents of a tape recording; the tape recording and evidence obtained as a result of the illegal seizure was admitted at a federal perjury trial of an individual identified on the tape recording after the individual testified before a federal grand jury with full knowledge that the federal authorities were in possession of the tape recording); People v. Drain, 535 N.E.2d 630 (N.Y. 1989) (money and checkbook illegally seized by police officer upon suspicion of theft used in perjury trial after defendant allegedly testified falsely concerning entries in the checkbook). In none of these cases was a testimonial admission of guilt taken in flagrant violation of the accused’s fifth amendment rights used as substantive evidence in support of a subsequent perjury charge. See Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U.S. 433, 448 (1974); United States v. Sangineto-Miranda, 859 F.2d 1501, 1518 (6th Cir. 1988) (distinguishing between non-testimonial physical evidence and alleged confessions of guilt).

 The confession in this case is rather interesting. Police officer Kuzemchak claims that he interrogated McGee in jail (without Miranda warnings) and that McGee admitted to him that he committed the burglary in order to pay off three traffic citations issued by the officer to McGee on the day of the burglary. Kuzemchak did not make a record of this confession and did not, according to the district attorney’s office, call the matter to the state’s attention until the day of the burglary jury trial. (McGee denies ever meeting Kuzemchak until the day of the burglary and says that although he received three traffic citations from Kuzemchak on the day of the burglary, he could not have gotten fifteen others claimed to have been issued to him by Kuzemchak because he was not living in the State of Nevada during the time in question.)