Court Opinion

ID: 9744686
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 22:12:39.469393+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:51.015678
License: Public Domain

KINGSLEY, J.
I concur: The rules developed in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) 378 U.S. 478 [84 S.Ct. 1758, 12 L.Ed.2d 977], in People v. Dorado (1965) 62 Cal.2d 338 [42 Cal.Rptr. 169, 398 P.2d 361], and in the cases applying those decisions, are designed to effect that compromise between conflicting social ends which the application of constitutional principles always involves.
On the one side, as the Supreme Court has pointed out most recently in People v. Cotter (1965) 63 Cal.2d 386 [46 Cal.Rptr. 622, 405 P.2d 862], is the need to permit full police investigation and to encourage the frequent desire of a guilty man to confess. On the other side is the realization that the processes of police investigation and interrogation may result *642in statements which fall short of complete truth and which may involve an innocent man in such a tangle of lies and equivocations as to make it impossible for him later to escape, with the result that an unjust conviction follows. It is a traditional function of counsel to see that this kind of error does not occur and that an arrestee is not tricked—intentionally or innocently—into making statements which he should not make.
The dilemma has been resolved by admitting statements, clearly voluntary, where no possible stimulus from police interrogation appears, and by admitting statements made while the police were still in the investigatory stage and in a mood to accept exculpatory statements if they carried persuasive force or were verifiable. But, once police activity has reached the point of taking a definite suspect into custody and the officers are seeking, by interrogation, not to solve a possible crime but to secure confirmation of their suspicions, then the suspect must be warned affirmatively that he need not provide that confirmation out of his own mouth and that he may consult with an independent professional advisor as to the potential effect of any statement. Absent evidence not before us on this record, we may not speculate as to how far a statement, made at this point in the process >of police activity, was induced by the interrogation; nor am I inclined to engage in a scholarly discussion over the meaning of the word “elicit”; constitutional rights should not depend on semantics.
For these reasons, I cannot accept the argument of our dissenting colleague. Defendant had been interrogated and he knew that he had been taken to the main police station and placed in an interrogation room at that station for the purpose of continuing that interrogation. The fact that he decided, during a lull in the over-all process, to obviate the need for further questioning by making a full confession does not make that confession any the less the product of the interrogation already begun and clearly still in process.
The admission of that confession violated the rules set forth in Justice Jefferson’s opinion and above discussed; a reversal is compelled.