Court Opinion

ID: 9843039
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:24:53.881311+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:14:26.342383
License: Public Domain

NORRIS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
As I read Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985), it reaffirms the rebuttable presumption that an initial confession, even if voluntary, has a coercive effect tending to undermine *827the voluntariness of subsequent confessions as articulated by the Supreme Court in United States v. Bayer, 331 U.S. 532, 67 S.Ct. 1394, 91 L.Ed. 1654 (1947). Because the presumption of coerciveness arising from Medeiros’ initial confession was not rebutted by any significant intervening events, I respectfully dissent.
The voluntariness inquiry in this case requires us to revisit the “cat out of the bag” doctrine as applied to successive confessions in light of Elstad. Elstad first incriminated himself in response to police interrogation at his parents’ home. After being read his Miranda rights an hour later at the police station, he gave and signed a full confession. As in this case, the state trial court suppressed Elstad’s first statement on the ground it was obtained in violation of Miranda, but rejected Elstad’s argument that the first statement, in letting the cat out of the bag, undermined the voluntariness of his later confession because it created the impression that his fate was already sealed. On appeal, the Oregon Court of Appeals held that the second confession must also be suppressed because its voluntariness was “tainted” by the first confession. Citing Bayer, the Court of Appeals reasoned that the first confession “let the eat out of the bag” and that there was not a “sufficient break in the stream of events between [the first] statement and the written confession to insulate the latter statement from the effect of what went before.” Oregon v. Elstad, 61 Or.App. 673, 658 P.2d 552, 554 (1983).
The Supreme Court granted certiorari to “decide whether an initial failure of law enforcement officers to administer [Miranda warnings], without more, ‘taints’ subsequent admissions made after a suspect has been fully advised of and has waived his Miranda rights.” Elstad, 470 U.S. at 300, 105 S.Ct. at 1288. The Court held that when, as in the instant case, an initial confession was not actually coerced in violation of due process even though obtained in violation of Miranda, the traditional “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine of Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963) and its progeny is inapplicable. Elstad, 470 U.S. at 304-09, 105 S.Ct. at 1290-93. Rather, “the admissibility of any subsequent statement should turn in these circumstances solely on whether it is knowingly and voluntarily made.” Id. at 309, 105 S.Ct. at 1293. See generally United States v. Wauneka, 770 F.2d 1434, 1439-40 (9th Cir.1985).
The Supreme Court then considered the Oregon Court of Appeals’ decision that El-stad’s second confession was rendered involuntary by “a subtle form of lingering compulsion, the psychological impact of the suspect’s conviction that he has let the cat out of the bag and, in so doing, has sealed his own fate.” Elstad, 470 U.S. at 311,105 S.Ct. at 1294. The Supreme Court did not question the Oregon court’s point that an initial confession has a psychologically coercive impact on later confessions, nor did the Court repudiate Bayer and its progeny establishing the “cat out of the bag” doctrine.1 Indeed, the Court endorsed Bayer’s original explanation of this phenomenon:
[o]f course, after an accused has once let the cat out of the bag by confessing, no matter what the inducement, he is never thereafter free of the psychological and practical disadvantages of having confessed. He can never get the cat back in the bag. The secret is out for good. In *828such a sense, a later confession always may be looked upon as a fruit of the first.
Id. (quoting Bayer, 331 U.S. at 540-41, 67 S.Ct. at 1398).
I acknowledge that some ambiguous comments in Elstad, read in isolation, appear to cast some doubt on the continuing vitality of the “cat out of the bag” doctrine. The Court said that “[i]t is difficult to tell with certainty what motivates a suspect to speak,” id. 470 U.S. at 314, 105 S.Ct. at 1296, and that “absent deliberatively coercive or improper tactics in obtaining the initial statement, the mere fact that a suspect has made an unwarned admission does not warrant a presumption of compulsion.” Id. However, a close reading of the Court’s opinion indicates that these statements do not purport to challenge the continuing vitality of of Bayer’s presumption that an initial confession has a coercive impact that tends to undermine the volun-tariness of later confessions. Rather, the Court’s statements merely make the point that Bayer’s presumption of psychological coercion is rebuttable.
The Court in Elstad articulated this understanding by repeating the qualification in Bayer that “[t]his Court has never gone so far as to hold that making a confession under circumstances which preclude its use, perpetually disables a confessor from making a usable one after those conditions have been removed.” Id. (quoting Bayer, 331 U.S. at 541, 67 S.Ct. at 1398 (emphasis added)); see also Elstad, 470 U.S. at 311-12, 105 S.Ct. at 1294 (“the Court has assumed that the coercive effect of the [initial] confession could, with time, be dissipated”). Far from rejecting the “cat out of the bag” doctrine and holding that “the fact that the first statement was made is completely irrelevant” to the volun-tariness inquiry, as did the district court below, Order at 7, Elstad simply clarified that the Bayer presumption is a rebuttable one. The Court in Elstad therefore reaffirmed its previous rule that once officials induce a suspect to let the cat out of the bag, the voluntariness of a subsequent confession is presumed to have been undermined by the first unless some significant intervening event sufficiently attenuates the psychologically coercive impact of the initial admission of guilt.
In Elstad, the presumption that the coercive effect of Elstad’s first confession undermined the voluntariness of his second confession was rebutted by the administration and waiver of Miranda warnings prior to the second. The Supreme Court explained that the warnings created an environment in which “the suspect [was] free to exercise his own volition in deciding whether or not to make a statement to the authorities.” Elstad, 470 U.S. at 309, 105 S.Ct. at 1293. It appears to me that the Court believed the warnings dispelled the psychologically coercive effect of Elstad’s first confession because he could reasonably infer from the warnings that his cat was not irretrievably out of the bag after all. While the traditional Miranda warnings do not expressly inform a suspect that a prior confession obtained in violation of Miranda cannot be used against him,2 they implicitly suggest this result. See, e.g., United States v. Schmidt, 573 F.2d 1057, 1064 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 881, 99 S.Ct. 221, 58 L.Ed.2d 194 (1978) (“The Miranda warnings [the suspect] received also carry the implicit statement of this fact [that a prior illegal confession would be inadmissible].”). Because the warnings implicitly suggest that the suspect’s fate has not yet been sealed, “[a] subsequent administration of Miranda warnings to a suspect who has given a voluntary but unwarned statement ordinarily should suffice to remove the conditions that precluded admission of the earlier statement.” Elstad, 470 U.S. at 314, 105 S.Ct. at 1296.3 *829Coupled with the fact that “the exchange of words [Elstad] had with his father” between the first and second confessions might have prompted Elstad to confess at the police station even had he not already let the cat out of the bag at his parents’ home, id., the Court concluded that “[certainly], in [Elstad’s] case, the causal connection between any psychological disadvantage created by his [initial] admission and his ultimate decision to cooperate is speculative and attenuated at best.” Id. at 313-14, 105 S.Ct. at 1295-96.
Elstad’s focus on the administration of Miranda warnings and Elstad’s conversation with his father as intervening events sufficient to rebut the presumption that Elstad’s first confession had a lingering coercive effect reinforces my conclusion that Elstad did not repudiate Bayer’s “cat out of the bag” doctrine. Rather, the Court in Elstad simply found under the circumstances that the presumption of psychological coercion was effectively rebutted: “We hold today that a suspect who has once responded to unwarned yet un-eoercive questioning is not thereby disabled from waiving his rights and confessing after he has been given the requisite Miranda warnings.” 470 U.S. at 318, 105 S.Ct. at 1298 (emphasis added). Indeed, rather than undermine Bayer, Elstad follows directly from it. In Bayer, the first confession was suppressed, not because it was actually coerced in violation of due process, but because it was obtained in violation of the rule of McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 63 S.Ct. 608, 87 L.Ed. 819 (1943), that confessions obtained in violation of congressionally-prescribed interrogation procedures must be suppressed pursuant to the federal courts’ supervisory powers. Bayer, 331 U.S. at 540-41, 67 S.Ct. at 1398. Because the first confessions in both Bayer and Elstad were suppressed due to noncompliance with noncon-stitutional prophylactic rules (congressionally-mandated procedures in Bayer and judicially-fashioned Miranda rules in El-stad), both cases establish that the volun-tariness of a suspect’s second confession is presumptively undermined by a prior one, even when the first one was entirely voluntary and not extracted through coercive interrogation techniques. Moreover, in both Bayer and Elstad the Supreme Court concluded that the psychologically coercive effect of the first confession had dissipated before the second one primarily because the suspect had been warned before the second one that any incriminating statements might be used against him.4 The only salient difference is that in Bayer the second confession was given six months, as opposed to one hour, after the first. Far from rejecting Bayer’s analytical framework, therefore, Elstad simply applied the same analysis to a similar set of facts and reached the same conclusion — intervening events including administration of Miranda (or functionally equivalent) warnings served to dissipate the cat’s coercive effect.
It is clear then, that Elstad reaffirms Bayer’s rebuttable presumption that an initial, voluntary confession has a coercive effect tending to undermine the voluntariness of subsequent confessions. Therefore, the next step in our inquiry should be to determine whether the presumption has been rebutted in this case by the presence of any significant intervening events.5
*830Medeiros’ second confession followed his first by just one-half hour. He was never outside the immediate company of police officers from his roadside arrest to the Pawaa Annex; he was heavily intoxicated during this entire period; and his only conversations were with his various police escorts. Because the State of Hawaii has failed to identify any significant intervening event during the one-half hour interval that might have dissipated the coercive psychological impact of Medeiros’ first confession, the presumption that Medeiros’ first confession undermined the voluntariness of his second one has not been rebutted.
Medeiros was not informed, through proper administration of Miranda warnings or otherwise, that his first confession might not be usable against him. Officer Silva commented during the middle of Me-deiros’ second confession that he “shouldn’t give any statements at this time.” R.T. at 236. However, in contrast to the Miranda warnings in Elstad and the equivalent in Bayer, Officer Silva’s cautionary statement cannot fairly be construed as suggesting to Medeiros that his first confession might not be usable against him.6 See supra at 828-830. Officer Silva’s comment therefore could not serve to diminish the psychologically coercive effect of the first confession in the same manner as did the warnings in Bayer and Elstad.
The majority reasons that, because (1) The Pawaa annex is not a coercive location, (2) Medeiros was not interrogated at the Pawaa annex, (3) Officer Silva told Medei-ros he should not give a statement there, and (4) the officers did not “exploit” the first confession to induce the second,7 Me-deiros’ second confession should be characterized as voluntary. I cannot agree.
Of course Medeiros’ argument that his second confession was involuntary would be strengthened if he could point to additional sources of coercion, but I fail to see how the absence of additional coercive action by the officers could have the effect of dissipating the coercive impact of his prior confession.8
The change in the particular identity of the officers and the location of the confessions likewise did nothing to dissipate the coercive effect of Medeiros’ first confession. While a change of officers and location is relevant to determining the ongoing coercive effect of any interrogation techniques previously used,9 the majority fails *831to explain how this change operated to rebut Bayer’s presumption that Medeiros’ answers to the initial interrogation undermined the voluntariness of his second confession. Under both Bayer and Elstad, even a voluntary initial confession tends to undermine the voluntariness of later confessions, see swpra at 830, and I fail to see how a change in identity of officers and location operates to dispel a suspect’s perception that his fate has already been sealed. In Elstad, the Supreme Court did not find it significant that Elstad’s second confession was given at a different location from the first and with an additional officer present. The Court mentioned only the administration of Miranda warnings and Elstad’s conversation with a family member, both not present here, as events which dissipated the coercive effect of Elstad’s first confession.
The essence of the majority’s argument is that absent coercive police conduct at the Pawaa annex or coercion carrying over from Officer Trela’s unwarned questioning, the psychologically coercive effect of Medeiros’ first confession is simply not enough by itself to undermine the volun-tariness of his second confession. This argument renders the “cat out of the bag” doctrine a hollow shell and is contrary to Bayer and Elstad. Bayer and Elstad teach that the coercive effect of the initial confession is sufficient to require suppression of a later confession absent some tangible intervening event that dissipates that coercive effect. In holding that Me-deiros’ second confession was voluntary, the majority turns a deaf ear to this teaching.
I conclude that in the circumstances of this case — the second confession followed the first by a mere half hour, Medeiros was continually in the immediate presence of police officers, the second confession was preceded by neither Miranda warnings nor consultation with family or counsel, and there was no other intervening event — Me-deiros’ second confession was not voluntary. Accordingly, I would hold that the district court erred in denying Medeiros’s petition for writ of habeas corpus.

. See, e.g., Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 605 n. 12, 95 S.Ct. 2254, 2262 n. 12, 45 L.Ed.2d 416 (1975) ("The fact that Brown had made one statement, believed by him to be admissible, ... bolstered the pressures for him to give the second, or at least vitiated any incentive on his part to avoid self-incrimination."); Darwin v. Connecticut, 391 U.S. 346, 350-51, 88 S.Ct. 1488, 1490-91, 20 L.Ed.2d 630 (1968) (Harlan, J., concurring and dissenting) ("A principal reason why a suspect may make a second or third confession is simply that, having already confessed once or twice, he might think he has little to lose by repetition.”); Beecher v. Alabama, 389 U.S. 35, 36 n. 2, 88 S.Ct. 189, 190 n. 2, 19 L.Ed.2d 35 (1967) (per curiam) (existence of earlier illegal confession "is of course vitally relevant to the voluntariness of petitioner's later statements”); 4 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 11.4(c), at 404 (1987) ("the realization that the ‘cat is out of the bag' plays a significant role in encouraging the suspect to speak").

. The Court held that it would be "neither practicable nor constitutionally necessary” to require officers seeking to interrogate a suspect to tell him that previous admissions obtained in violation of Miranda would not be admissible against him. 470 U.S. at 316, 105 S.Ct. at 1296.

. The Court was careful to note that, while administration of Miranda warnings rebuts the presumption that a second confession was involuntary, it does not by itself guarantee that the second confession is voluntary. While the "fact that a suspect chooses to speak after being informed of his rights is, of course, highly proba*829tive” of voluntariness, the court still "must examine the surrounding circumstances and the entire course of police conduct with respect to the suspect in evaluating the voluntariness of his statements.” Elstad, 470 U.S. at 318, 105 S.Ct. at 1298.

. Of course, today's Miranda requirements were not in effect at the time of the Bayer decision. However, the Court in Bayer explained that the defendant’s interrogator expressly "warned him his statement might be used against him” before asking the defendant to repeat his earlier confession. Bayer, 331 U.S. at 540, 67 S.Ct. at 1398. See also id. at 541, 67 S.Ct. at 1391 (second confession was “given after fair warning").

. The State of Hawaii does not dispute that Medeiros' response to Officer Trela’s initial unwarned interrogation let the cat out of the bag. Indeed, Medeiros’ response let more of the cat out of the hag than did Elstad's initial response. When initially questioned about his involvement in a neighborhood burglary, Elstad responded simply that "I was there.” This statement, by itself, does not admit involvement in the crime. In contrast, Medeiros admitted much more than just that "he was there” at the *830Wonder Bar; he admitted that he also shot a patron. See supra at 827 & n. 2. Hence the psychological effect of the first confession in this case is arguably much stronger than it was in Elstad, as Medeiros had even greater reason to believe that he had nothing to lose and perhaps leniency to gain by confessing again.

. For example, Officer Silva's cursory statement that Medeiros "shouldn’t give any statements at this time” could easily be understood as meaning simply that Officer Silva felt it would be inconvenient to take a full confession at the Pawaa Annex. This plausible understanding of Officer Silva's comments would not .lead Medei-ros to believe that perhaps his first confession could not be used against him. Moreover, given Medeiros' intoxicated state at this time, his ability to assess clearly the potential disadvantages of repeating his confession was compromised.

. Neither Officer Silva nor Officer Miyashiro knew that Medeiros had already confessed without being warned to the Wonder Bar shooting in response to Officer Trela’s roadside custodial interrogation.

. The majority’s conclusion that the “cat out of the bag” argument can be successfully invoked to suppress a second confession only when the second confession is elicited by police questioning is clearly inconsistent with Bayer and El-stad. If the police attempted to elicit a second confession without administering Miranda warnings, then the confession would be suppressed directly under Miranda with no need to advert to the "cat out of the bag” doctrine. If the police attempted to elicit a second confession after administering Miranda warnings, then the second confession would be presumptively admissible under Elstad. If, as the State suggests, the "cat out of the bag" doctrine's applicability as restricted to situations involving police pressure to confess a second time, the doctrine would no longer serve any independent function. Given that the Supreme Court clearly indicated in Elstad that defendants can still invoke the doctrine, the Court must intend it to be applicable in situations when a second confession is not directly elicited by police questioning.

.No matter how properly a second interrogation is conducted, a suspect is likely to continue associating in his mind the identical interrogators and location with any unconstitutional physical or psychological tactics that were used *831to coerce his initial confession. Therefore, "[w]hen a prior statement is actually coerced, ... the change in place of interrogations[ ] and the change in identity of the interrogators all bear on whether that coercion has carried over into the second confession." Elstad, 470 U.S. at 310, 105 S.Ct. at 1293.