Court Opinion

ID: 9711241
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:27:20.965573+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:03.113858
License: Public Domain

POMEROY, Justice,
dissenting.
I agree that appellant’s arrest was premature and that at the time the police lacked sufficient reliable information to establish probable cause for a warrantless arrest. In my view, however, this fact alone is not decisive as to whether appellant’s inculpatory statement must be suppressed. Hence this dissent.
It is true, of course, that courts have a duty to deter police activity which is in violation of a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights and it is also true that occasionally the promulgation of an exclusionary rule is the only effective means to curb illegal police activity. Equally important, however, is the societal interest in seeking to detect, prevent and punish criminal activity through the use of confessions which are voluntarily and intelligently made. As I noted in the case of Betrand Appeal, 451 Pa. 381, 394, 303 A.2d 486, 492 (1973) (concurring opinion of Pomeroy, J.):
“A sensible and workable accommodation as between these often conflicting interests seems to me to have been *49achieved by the draftsmen of the American Law Institute’s Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure, still in process of consideration. Section 9.02 of the proposed Model Code provides:
Statements Made After an Illegal Arrest.
If a law enforcement officer, acting without a warrant, arrests a person without the reasonable cause required by Section 3.01, and the court determines that such arrest was made without fair basis for the belief that such cause existed, no statement made by such person after such arrest and prior to his release, unless it is made in the presence of or upon consultation with counsel, shall be admitted in evidence against such person in a criminal proceeding in which he is the defendant. (Emphasis supplied). As the commentary to this section makes clear, before a court even considers whether a ‘fair basis for the belief that [probable] cause existed’ for the arrest, it must conclude that proper warnings were given and that the statement was otherwise free of coercion.” (Footnotes omitted.)
Applying the Model Code’s approach to the facts of this case, it would be my view that the police did in fact have a fair basis for concluding that probable cause existed to arrest the appellant on a charge of murder and that therefore the confession, assuming it to be voluntary, should be admissible against appellant in his subsequent trial. See Commonwealth v. Richards, 458 Pa. 455, 469, 327 A.2d 63, 69 (1974) (dissenting opinion of Pomeroy, J.). Thus I think the proper disposition of this case is to reverse the order of the trial court ordering suppression of the statement and remand the case to that court for a determination as to the voluntariness of the statement. If voluntariness is found, the judgment of sentence should be affirmed.