Court Opinion

ID: 9853165
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:43:43.365696+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:41.908804
License: Public Domain

MOSK, J.
I dissent.
All the progeny of People v. Dorado (1965) 62 Cal.2d 338 [42 Cal.Rptr. 169, 398 P.2d 361], have made it abundantly clear that four circumstances must concur in order to compel exclusion of a defendant’s extrajudicial incriminating statement: (1) the investigation must have passed the stage of a general inquiry into an unsolved crime and be focused on a particular suspect; (2) the suspect must be either in custody or under the restraint of official detention; (3) the interrogation carried out by law enforcement officers must lend itself to eliciting incriminating statements from the suspect; and (4) the suspect must not have been effectively informed of his constitutional rights or, if so informed, he must not have knowingly and intelligently waived such rights. (In re Lopez (1965) 62 Cal.2d 368, 371-372 [42 Cal.Rptr. 188, 398 P.2d 380].)
As indicated above, the first requirement for application of Dorado inhibitions is that the law enforcement authorities progress beyond general inquiry into an unsolved crime. Obviously this presupposes knowledge of the existence of a crime. At the time of defendant’s interview with the deputy district attorney on June 4, 1964, the authorities were in the process of a general investigation, not to ascertain who committed a certain crime, but to determine whether or not a crime had in fact been committed. While the autopsy report of May 21, 1964, revealed the medical cause of the child’s death, no conclusion was yet reached that the physical condition had been induced by a criminal agency. The finger, of suspicion could not focus on defendant as a criminal suspect prior to determination that a crime had been committed.
Thus condition number one for invoking Dorado fails. Even more significant, however, is absence of custody, the second qualification.
*453In People v. Furnish (1965) 63 Cal.2d 511 [47 Cal.Rptr. 387, 407 P.2d 299], this court explained (at p. 516) that while formal arrest is not essential to the advent of the accusatory stage, the circumstances must indicate “pressures short of arrest which the police exert to detain the suspect.” (Italics' added.) In no case, however, has this court gone so far as to hold that the Dorado rule becomes effective when no detention —actual or constructive, overt or subtle—is exercised. In Lopez (at pp. 372-373 of 62 Cal.2d) this court said that “we believe that the United States Supreme Court in Escobedo sought primarily to prevent police tactics which, in the past, have spawned involuntary confessions.” Admittedly custody plays a role in the totality of coercive circumstances. If the freedom of motion of an individual is circumscribed or if he is involuntarily detained it is clear that he is at the very least a suspect and perhaps about to be east in the role of a prospective defendant. The lesson of Escobedo, Dorado, and similar cases, is that this invokes pressures that may impel one to choose means not thoughtfully conceived in order to extricate himself. On the other hand, it is equally well settled “that not all questioning will constitute forbidden interrogation even under the most expansive reading of Miranda.” (Graham, Custodial Interrogation (1966) 14 U.C.L.A. L.Rev. 59, 96.)
This defendant was not in custody at the time of the June 4 interview with the deputy district attorney. No compulsion or threat of compulsion was exercised. She was not under arrest, and no hint of arrest had been made. She came by invitation, and she could have declined to appear. No police officer picked her up, and no police car was used to transport her. The interview was in an office under comfortable circumstances, and not in the jailhouse. No police officer, matron or uniformed personnel were present. The deputy district attorney made it clear that he was merely investigating and told the defendant simply that “you understand we have to look into this cause of death.” No “trickery” was employed, as expressly forbidden in Miranda (384 U.S. at p. 476). It is irrefutable that the defendant could have left at any time during the interview, and indeed she did leave without incident when the interview was concluded. After the interview took place on June 4, 1964, the defendant retained her freedom and was not charged with a crime until an indictment was returned by the grand jury on July 14, 1964, some 40 days later.
Under these circumstances, it is indisputable that the *454defendant was neither in custody nor in any type of constructive detention before, during, or after she freely and voluntarily went to the district attorney’s office upon invitation and discussed the circumstances of her daughter’s death. Indeed, interviews of this type are a familiar and reasonable aspect of preliminary law enforcement investigations into unusual occurrences, and have no such sinister significance as the majority attribute to them.
The defendant urges an anachronistic and impractical “subjective” concept in seeking to exclude her statements not because she was in custody but because she later testified that she thought she was in custody. Approval of this mere ipse cKxit declaration of her thought processes—and rejecting all the objective evidence that no detention was contemplated or effected—is a giant departure from all accepted concepts of police restraint. The only way to avoid abuse is to adhere to our previously enunciated rule of requiring either actual or constructive custody or detention in fact. This court rejected a subjective test for interrogators in People v. Stewart (1965) 62 Cal.2d 571, 579 [43 Cal.Rptr. 201, 400 P.2d 97], affd. sub nom. Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436 [16 L.Ed.2d 694, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 10 A.L.R.3d 974], A subjective test sans the slightest factual corroboration is equally untenable for an interviewee.
In view of the fact that the defendant was interviewed during the investigatory stage of the proceedings when the prosecutor had not as yet ascertained that a crime had been committed, and that the interview took place when she was not in custody or otherwise detained, I would hold that the statement of the defendant was properly received in evidence.
The judgment should be affirmed.
McComb, J., and Burke, J., concurred.
Respondent’s petition for a rehearing was denied May 24, 1967. Mosk, J., and Burke, J., were of the opinion that the petition should be granted.