Court Opinion

ID: 9463872
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:18:43.651306+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:19.894160
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
This is a very close case, and the result which the majority reaches in one with which I am not in very vigorous disagreement. All the same, I have been unable to persuade myself to concur and so must voice a brief dissent. The holding of the court is that Ms. McCain should have received Miranda warnings before she was interrogated while in custody.
I doubt she was interrogated by Agent Korzeniowski. She was rather warned— granted in a manner most frightening — of the risk she was running by carrying drugs internally. But the warning called for no response, and she knew when she received it that she had nothing more to fear from a strip search: she had already passed one. And though the response she made was certainly one not entirely unlikely, it seems to me that a more likely one was that she, having successfully braved the inspection so far, would simply depart and heed Korzeniowski’s warning by ridding herself of the contraband as speedily and as carefully as she could.
As I have said, the question is close, but I entertain grave, doubts about extending Brewer v. Williams, supra, a Sixth Amendment case, to this Fifth Amendment problem. My reading of that opinion inclines me to believe that its center of gravity rests on breach of the promise to counsel that his client would not be tampered with in his absence. There was, of course, nothing of that kind done here. Once we begin to equate warnings and environments with interrogation, I fear we have unnecessarily opened another Pandora’s Box of ease-by-case evaluations.1 This I am loath to do without some indication from the Court that Brewer transcends its Sixth Amendment context.
I also doubt McCain was in custody. Certainly the search of her person has been completed and she was not under formal *257arrest. She was merely waiting while her luggage was re-checked. Persons in such circumstances — waiting while their luggage is cheeked at the border — are not “in custody.” And this is true even though, like McCain, they may well be arrested if contraband appears in their luggage. It is true she was in a private room, talking to the inspector. But so was Carl Mathiason [Oregon v. Mathiason, 429 U.S. 492, 97 S.Ct. 711, 50 L.Ed.2d 714 (1977)] and so was Bertha Barfield [Barfield v. Alabama, 552 F.2d 1114 (5th Cir. 1977) (1977)], and neither was held to have been in custody. Barfield, indeed, had been told she could not leave— as McCain was not. And though it is true McCain had just been subjected to the repellant indignity of a strip-search, that was over and, distasteful as such procedures are, it is precisely such behavior as McCain’s that necessitates them.
As I have said, the case is close. But I would affirm, and since the majority does not, I respectfully dissent.

. Suppose, for example, the booklet of newspaper clippings had simply been lying on a table and had been idly picked up and perused by McCain and that thereafter Korzeniowski had precipitated her admission by merely remarking, “Pretty scary, eh? I hope you aren’t doing anything like that.” Interrogation? Sadly, the imaginable variations on these themes are legion.