Court Opinion

ID: 9432076
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:34:09.244868+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:32.184074
License: Public Domain

Chief Justice Rehnquist,
with whom Justice White, Justice Blackmun, and Justice Stevens join, concurring in part, concurring in the result in part, and dissenting in part.
I join Parts I, II, III-A, and IV of the Court’s opinion. In addition, although I agree with the conclusion in Part III-C that the seven “booking” questions should not be suppressed, I do so for a reason different from that of Justice Brennan. I dissent from the Court’s conclusion that Muniz’s response to the “sixth birthday question” should have been suppressed.
The Court holds that the sixth birthday question Muniz was asked required a testimonial response, and that its admission at trial therefore violated Muniz’s privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. The Court says:
“When Officer Hosterman asked Muniz if he knew the date of his sixth birthday and Muniz, for whatever reason, could not remember or calculate that date, he was confronted with the trilemma [i. e., the ‘“trilemma” of truth, falsity, or silence,’ see ante, at 597]. . . . Muniz was left with the choice of incriminating himself by admitting that he did not then know the date of his sixth birthday, or answering untruthfully by reporting a date that he did not then believe to be accurate (an incorrect guess would be incriminating as well as untruthful).” Ante, at 598-599.
As an assumption about human behavior, this statement is wrong. Muniz would no more have felt compelled to fabricate a false date than one who cannot read the letters on an eye chart feels compelled to fabricate false letters; nor does a wrong guess call into question a speaker’s veracity. The Court’s statement is also a flawed predicate on which to base its conclusion that Muniz’s answer to this question was “testimonial” for purposes of the Fifth Amendment.
*607The need for the use of the human voice does not automatically make an answer testimonial, United States v. Wade, 388 U. S. 218, 222-223 (1967), any more than does the fact that a question calls for the exhibition of one’s handwriting in written characters. Gilbert v. California, 388 U. S. 263, 266-267 (1967). In Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757 (1966), we held that the extraction and chemical analysis of a blood sample involved no “shadow of testimonial compulsion upon or enforced communication by the accused.” Id., at 765. All of these holdings were based on Justice Holmes’ opinion in Holt v. United States, 218 U. S. 245 (1910), where he said for the Court that “the prohibition of compelling a man in a criminal court to be witness against himself is a prohibition of the use of physical or moral compulsion to extort communications from him, not an exclusion of his body as evidence when it may be material.” Id., at 252-253.
The sixth birthday question here was an effort on the part of the police to check how well Muniz was able to do a simple mathematical exercise. Indeed, had the question related only to the date of his birth, it presumably would have come under the “booking exception” to Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966), to which the Court refers elsewhere in its opinion. The Court holds in this very case that Muniz may be required to perform a “horizontal gaze nystagmus” test, the “walk and turn” test, and the “one leg stand” test, all of which are designed to test a suspect’s physical coordination. If the police may require Muniz to use his body in order to demonstrate the level of his physical coordination, there is no reason why they should not be able to require him to speak or write in order to determine his mental coordination. That was all that was sought here. Since it was permissible for the police to extract and examine a sample of Schmerber’s blood to determine how much that part of his system had been affected by alcohol, I see no reason why they may not examine the functioning of Muniz’s mental processes for the same purpose.
*608Surely if it were relevant, a suspect might be asked to take an eye examination in the course of which he might have to admit that he could not read the letters on the third line of the chart. At worst, he might utter a mistaken guess. Muniz likewise might have attempted to guess the correct response to the sixth birthday question instead of attempting to calculate the date or answer “I don’t know.” But the potential for giving a bad guess does not subject the suspect to the truth-falsity-silence predicament that renders a response testimonial and, therefore, within the scope of the Fifth Amendment privilege.
For substantially the same reasons, Muniz’s responses to the videotaped “booking” questions were not testimonial and do not warrant application of the privilege. Thus, it is unnecessary to determine whether the questions fall within the “routine booking question” exception to Miranda Justice Brennan recognizes.
I would reverse in its entirety the judgment of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. But given the fact that five members of the Court agree that Muniz’s response to the sixth birthday question should have been suppressed, I agree that the judgment of the Superior Court should be vacated so that, on remand, the court may consider whether admission of the response at trial was harmless error.