Court Opinion

ID: 9758444
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:31:10.798299+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:51.758370
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Justice,
with whom NICHOLS, Justice, joins, concurring.
I join the opinion of the court in its entirety. I write separately to express my view that we are bound by the decisions of the Supreme Court in Harris v. New York, 401 U.S. 222, 91 S.Ct. 643, 28 L.Ed.2d 1 (1971) and United States v. Havens, 446 U.S. 620, 100 S.Ct. 1912, 64 L.Ed.2d 559 (1980) and to agree with our dissenting colleague that those decisions erode the exclusionary rule.
Although we are free to accord a defendant greater protection under state law than required by the United States Constitution, we are not confronted in this case with the use for impeachment of a statement obtained in violation of a Maine constitutional rule as was the statement in State v. Collins, 297 A.2d 620 (Me.1972). Rather, the statement was found by the trial court to have been voluntary, but obtained in violation of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). Had we previously adopted as a matter of Maine constitutional law the Miranda requirements or were we to do so now, I would agree that we could reject the Harris-Havens principle. We have not adopted Miranda and I do not advocate that we do so. I am, therefore, in agreement with the Court’s opinion.
Until an appropriate occasion arises for us to consider the use for impeachment of evidence excluded upon state grounds, I am not prepared to endorse the Harris-Havens rationale. There is merit in the observation of the dissenting justice that the use for impeachment of the fruits of police misconduct provides too great an incentive for such misconduct. We should avoid a return to the “good old days” when law enforcement was occasionally as “lawless” as the subject of its investigations.