Court Opinion

ID: 9481068
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:06:51.901984+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:04.644994
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring, joined by Circuit Judge RYAN.
Like Chief Judge Merritt, I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that suppression of the tainted portions of the appellant’s confession would have made no difference in the vote of any member of the jury. My doubt extends to the jury’s resolution of both the question whether the appellant was guilty of premeditation and the question whether he should be sentenced to death.
The untainted evidence against the appellant was very strong, as the dissents of Judges Kennedy and Krupansky persuasively demonstrate, and if this had not been a capital case, I would have been quite willing to invoke the harmless error rule.1 Death eases can be different for jurors as well as for judges, however, and it seems to me that a jury that wanted to know whether the appellant could be sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole (an option not available under Kentucky law) might very well have settled for life imprisonment with a possibility of parole had it not been for the emotional impact of the appellant’s written statement.
That statement, as read to the jury during the Commonwealth’s case-in-chief, strikes me as significantly more damaging, forensically, than an account of the unexceptionable portion of the preceding interrogation would have been. Early in the interrogation, for example, the appellant said, among other things, that “something snapped,” that he “didn’t know what was happening” when the customer came into the store, that he didn’t realize what was happening until “too late,” and that he was “scared shitless.” None of this was in the written statement, which simply said that the appellant aimed at the victims’ heads and fired “so that they wouldn’t get up.” At a rational level, perhaps, the stark phraseology of this admission ought not to have made any difference. But at an emotional level — and jurors do have emotions — I think it could have tipped the scales. I therefore concur in the conclusions announced in Parts II and III of the majority opinion. I also concur in the disposition of the miscellaneous claims dealt with in Part V.
As to whether the appellant gave his written statement under compulsion, I have no quarrel with the suggestion in Part IV of the majority opinion that we need not decide the question. The appellant having invoked his right to cut off questioning before he gave the written statement, Miranda and its progeny, including Michigan v. Mosley, 423 U.S. 96, 96 S.Ct. 321, 46 L.Ed.2d 313 (1975), teach that the interrogation should have been stopped forthwith; that taking even a voluntary statement thereafter was improper; and that habeas corpus proceedings may be used to set aside a conviction and sentence obtained through use of a voluntary statement taken subsequent to a request that questioning be cut off. See Martin v. Wainwright, 770 F.2d 918, 922-24 (11th Cir.1985), modified, 781 F.2d 185 (11th Cir.), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 909, 107 S.Ct. 307, 93 L.Ed.2d 281 (1986) (right to cut off questioning not “scrupulously honored” when questioning was continued after suspect said “Can’t we *1134wait until tomorrow;” voluntary confession obtained later that day held inadmissible.)
If the appellant’s written confession was not “compelled” in a constitutional sense, however, I do not believe it is accurate to suggest, as the majority opinion does at several points, that there was a violation of constitutional norms. The Supreme Court has made it clear that Miranda’s exclusionary rule “sweeps more broadly than the Fifth Amendment itself.” Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 306, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 1292, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985). “The Fifth Amendment prohibits use by the prosecution in its case in chief only of compelled testimony,” id. at 306-07, 105 S.Ct. at 1291-92 (emphasis in original), while Miranda prohibits that and more. I have joined in the court’s judgment in this case not because I think the Constitution says I must, but because I think the Supreme Court says I must.
To an observer from almost any foreign country — including England and other jurisdictions that follow the same common law tradition we do — the conclusion that the Kentucky trial court was required to exclude the appellant’s written confession even if the confession was voluntary might well seem odd. Given the circumstances of the interrogation that led to the confession, there is a large part of the civilized world in which the wisdom of suppressing the confession probably would not be considered self-evident.
To begin with, before any questions at all were put to the appellant the police told him — twice—that he had a right to remain silent. They told him — twice—that he had a right to talk to a lawyer before any questions were asked, and that he had a right to have a lawyer with him during any questioning to which he might consent. They told him — twice—that if he could not afford a lawyer, one would be appointed for him, if he wished, before questioning began. And they told him — twice—that if he decided to answer questions without a lawyer present, he would still have the right to stop answering at any time.
The appellant said at the outset that he understood these rights. He stated both orally and in writing that he did not want a lawyer and was willing to make a statement and answer questions. In the questioning that followed, the appellant repeatedly demonstrated that he really did understand his right to remain silent; many of the questions were met with complete silence, the appellant saying nothing at all and simply waiting for another question to be put.
The appellant’s exercise of his right to remain silent produced no untoward consequences at all. There was no exercise of physical force, no threat of physical force, no hint of physical force. The verbatim transcript of the interrogation does not suggest that the police ever lost their tempers, or even so much as raised their voices. If I had been a prosecutor in this case, I daresay I would have been quite content to have a videotape of the questioning shown in open court.
At no point did the police try to get the appellant to shade the truth in any way. After the appellant said that he was the one who pulled the trigger, for example, the questioner said “Don’t jack us[;] if you didn’t [do it,] tell us[;] if you did[,] tell us.” There is no reason at all to doubt the sincerity of the appellant’s response, which was “Sir, I did it, I told you.” This is simply not a case where the police were trying to browbeat a suspect into confessing to a crime that he might not have committed.
The interrogation was not prolonged unreasonably; the verbatim transcript takes less than 40 typewritten pages, with a new line for the start of each question and each answer. There is no indication that the appellant was deprived of food or drink or bathroom privileges. When he wanted a cigarette, he was given a cigarette. When he asked for an exercise break, he was given an exercise break. This is a long way indeed from the rubber hose or the rack and thumbscrew.
It is true that in what proved to be a successful attempt to persuade the appellant to continue talking after he had indicated that he preferred to stop, the questioners played on the appellant’s concern *1135that the three “girls” with whom he had spent the preceding night not be taken into custody or otherwise “hassled” by the Cincinnati police. This kind of psychological pressure does not necessarily render a confession involuntary, see Martin v. Wainwright, 770 F.2d at 926-27, and I suspect that prior to Miranda, few American judges would have considered the use of such a ploy impermissible. The appellant having asked that the questioning be ended, Miranda makes it clear that the police did go too far; it is not at all clear that they went too far under the Constitution itself.
Be that as it may, we are obviously bound to follow the decisions of the Supreme Court unless the Court (or Congress, where Congress has power to act) instructs us otherwise. There were strong reasons for the Supreme Court’s decision to adopt the prophylactic rules that were put into place with Miranda, and perhaps even the outer limits of those rules — which is all we are dealing with here — are immutable. If the Supreme Court is concerned about the practical effect of the more far-reaching of the non-constitutional parts of the Miranda rules, however, this case might be an appropriate one for further scrutiny.
With respect to Part III of Judge Kennedy’s opinion and Part VI of Judge Merritt’s opinion, both of which deal with the constitutionality of the Commonwealth’s refusal to provide the psychiatric expert the appellant says he wanted, it is my understanding that the funding problem that existed at the time of trial has now been resolved. Because it appears that a psychiatric expert will be provided on retrial, I do not think it is necessary for us to decide the issue — and the present record contains some factual idiosyncrasies which suggest to me that it would be prudent for us to steer clear of it.
As to the proposed jury instruction regarding unanimity on mitigating circumstances, I concur in Part IV of Circuit Judge KENNEDY’S opinion.

. One fact of potentially devastating significance — that the appellant told his psychiatrist that he killed someone else the day before he killed Mr. Allen — was never made known to the jury. If the jury had understood that there were two robbery-related homicides, committed a day apart, it would obviously be harder for us to conclude that the inadmissible portions of the confession could have affected any juror's vote. But it is undisputed that the prejudicial effect of the appellant’s account of the single killing for which he was placed on trial must be analyzed in light of what the jury was told in the trial that actually occurred, and not what another jury might be told in a trial yet to come.