Court Opinion

ID: 9650062
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 15:22:20.149474+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:17.720685
License: Public Domain

McAULIFFE, Judge,
dissenting.
I.
When Maurice M. was three months old he was admitted to Francis Scott Key Medical Center for treatment of a fractured left leg. X-rays disclosed that he had previously suffered fractures of the right humerus, right scapula, and glenoid. Examination disclosed a right arm weakness, possibly attributable to a brachial plexus injury. Hospital birth records showed no indication of birth trauma. Nurses and others observing Maurice’s mother at the hospital reported behavior changes, as well as inappropriate conduct toward the child, including shaking him and dropping him into his *410crib when he was in a spica cast. The Baltimore City Department of Social Services (DSS) was notified of the suspected child abuse and, after investigation, filed a petition with the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, sitting as the juvenile court (the juvenile court), alleging that Maurice was a child in need of assistance (CIÑA). The juvenile court promptly ordered continuing shelter care, and granted DSS authority to place Maurice in foster care. Six months later the court found that Maurice was a CIÑA and placed him under an order of protective supervision with DSS. DSS, acting pursuant to specific authority granted by the juvenile court and pursuant to authority granted it under the order of protective supervision of the child, placed Maurice with his mother under a carefully structured agreement. Among other things, the mother agreed to cooperate with DSS, attend parenting classes, utilize the assistance of a parent aide provided by DSS, and refrain from corporal punishment of the child.
Eight months later, on April 18, 1988, DSS informed the court that the mother had ceased cooperating with it, had failed to make appropriate use of the parent aide, and had failed to attend parenting classes as required. Additionally, DSS informed the court that Maurice’s father had been killed, and that the mother refused to produce the child or tell DSS representatives where he was. DSS feared for the safety of the child because of the above facts, the history of child abuse in the case, the mother’s known use of drugs and current threats to kill herself, and the fact that Maurice had last been seen on March 23, 1988, and could not be located by either DSS or the police. Accordingly, DSS asked the court to immediately order the mother to produce the child. The DSS petition and a show cause order were served on the mother, but she did not appear for the scheduled hearing. The court issued an attachment for the person of the mother, and she was taken into custody. In answer to questions of the court psychiatrist, and in an unsworn statement made in open court, the mother said she had sent Maurice to Texas for a visit with the mother’s *411sister. At the hearing of April 28, the mother refused to produce the child or to inform anyone in authority of his whereabouts. She was thereupon held in contempt and ordered confined in the Baltimore City Jail until she purged the contempt by “either producing the [child] before the court, or revealing to the court1 his exact whereabouts.”
The majority holds that under these circumstances the mother cannot be required to produce the child. I respectfully disagree.
II.
The thrust of the juvenile court’s order was to require the mother to produce the child. That the order also contained alternative methods by which the mother could purge the civil contempt does not serve to implicate the Fifth Amendment if it is not implicated by the order to produce the child. As the juvenile judge made clear on several occasions, the juvenile court had determined that the child must be returned to shelter care,2 and the mother was being ordered to produce and surrender the child for that purpose. The other methods of compliance offered by the court provided the mother with alternatives conceivably more convenient for her, but they were in no way compulsory. The mother could have purged, and can now purge, the contempt and secure her release by producing, or publicly or privately arranging for the production of, the child. Thus, it is the order to produce the child that is at issue here, and without discussing whether the result would be different if the order contained only a command to divulge the whereabouts of the child, I examine the impact of the Fifth Amendment upon the judicial command to produce the child.
*412III.
As the majority opinion makes clear, the proper reach of the privilege against compelled self-incrimination extends beyond the spoken word. A person acceding to a court order to produce his records makes a silent statement when he does so: “these are my records, and I have sufficient current control or dominion over them to bring about their production.” See Doe v. United States, 487 U.S. -, 108 S.Ct. 2341, 101 L.Ed.2d 184 (1988) (Doe II); Braswell v. United States, 487 U.S. -, 108 S.Ct. 2284, 101 L.Ed.2d 98 (1988); United States v. Doe, 465 U.S. 605, 104 S.Ct. 1237, 1243 n. 13, 79 L.Ed.2d 552 (1984) (Doe I); Marchetti v. United States, 390 U.S. 39, 88 S.Ct. 697, 19 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). By publicly producing a child in response to the court order to produce Maurice, his mother would implicitly represent that: 1) the child produced is Maurice, and 2) she currently has sufficient control and dominion over Maurice to be able to produce him. Each of these implicitly asserted facts might be used against the mother in a criminal prosecution if the physical person of Maurice shows evidence of additional abuse. However, not all testimonial communications rise to a level of Fifth Amendment significance. An implicit assertion that communicates information may, under the circumstances of a particular case, represent little more than a “foregone conclusion,” or may be “self-evident,” or “a near truism,” and therefore be of “minimal testimonial significance.” Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 411-12, 96 S.Ct. 1569, 1581, 48 L.Ed.2d 39 (1976)3.0 In discussing the problem of testimonial assertions implicit in the compelled production of documents, Professors Whitebread and Slobogin have observed:
The act of producing documents should always be seen as “testimony” concerning the existence and location of *413the documents, even if only “minimally” so, because it provides information beyond mere identification. Whether the Fifth Amendment can be asserted to bar their production should depend solely upon how incriminating these admissions are____ [T]his determination should entail an assessment of the extent to which the facts of existence and location (and, if relevant, authenticity and possession) are “foregone conclusions” which could be proven without using the implied admissions.
C. Whitebread and C. Slobogin, Criminal Procedure, § 15.06 at 354.
In determining whether the protections of the Fifth Amendment are implicated in the compelled production of this child, it is important to bear in mind that potentially incriminating information may come from two sources. First, there is the information that may be obtained from an examination of the person of the child. That information, which may turn out to be powerfully incriminating if there is evidence of recent abuse, is simply not within the protection of the Fifth Amendment — it is real and physical evidence and not testimonial evidence. United States v. Mara, 410 U.S. 19, 93 S.Ct. 774, 35 L.Ed.2d 99 (1973); United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1, 93 S.Ct. 764, 35 L.Ed.2d 67 (1973); Gilbert v. California, 388 U.S. 263, 87 S.Ct. 1951, 18 L.Ed.2d 1178 (1967); United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218, 87 S.Ct. 1926, 18 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1967); Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 86 S.Ct. 1826, 16 L.Ed.2d 908 (1966).
Second, there is testimonial evidence in the form of assertions implicit in the act of production; and it is these assertions, as potentially protected communications, which we must examine in light of the particular facts of this case. The first of these is the identification of the child. Under the facts here present, it is virtually certain that proof of identity exists and can be readily presented by the State without the necessity of any implied voucher by the mother. Putting aside the question of identification by modern scientific comparison techniques, or the probable *414identification by neighbors or photographs,4 it can hardly be doubted that positive identification could be established by comparison of current and previous x-rays. The number of documented fracture sites in the body of this two-year old child virtually guarantees identification. The potentially incriminating authentication becomes a matter of minimal importance in the context of this case.
The second and final testimonial assertion is that the mother currently has sufficient dominion and control over the child to be able to produce him. This, she says, could incriminate her should there be evidence of recent abuse. Again, I think the potential for incrimination5 is more theoretical than real, and may not rise to the level of constitutional significance within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment.
The criminal charges reasonably feared in this case are child abuse, and possibly murder or manslaughter. Proof that the mother had actual dominion or control over the child at the time he was produced furnishes no evidence of who had physical custody of the child when criminal acts were committed, or who committed them. Moreover, it is self-evident that the mother had the right of day-to-day control over Maurice from the time he was placed with her by DSS until shelter care was again ordered. Although the establishment of control at the time of production might furnish a fact of assistance in the creation of a permissive inference of continuous control, that is not an essential element of proof in the criminal charges which might rea*415sonably be predicted. Additionally, the mother had on at least two occasions freely admitted her continuing control of the child at the very times she was required to produce him. Given these admissions, at least one of which was made through her attorney, it is difficult to see how evidence of control resulting from the production of the child would have much, if any, incriminating value.
IV.
I would not, however, rest the decision in this case upon a determination that the actual incriminatory value of the testimonial assertions implicit in production of the child is so limited as to be outside the protection of the constitutional privilege as a matter of law. Rather, having identified the limited testimonial assertions involved, and having distinguished them from the potentially powerful but constitutionally unprotected incriminating physical facts that may accompany production, I would weigh the incriminatory value of the implicit assertions against the State’s legitimate and nonprosecutorial interest in the welfare of the child to determine whether the assertions rise to the level of constitutional protection. Put another way, in evaluating the true incriminatory weight of the implicit assertions to determine whether they are constitutionally significant, I would consider all relevant circumstances, including the significant societal interest in the welfare of the child.
Factoring the matter of societal interest into the equation for determining whether the testimonial effects of a compelled production shall be deemed to be within the protection of the Fifth Amendment is not a new concept. In Albertson v. SACB., 382 U.S. 70, 86 S.Ct. 194, 15 L.Ed.2d 165 (1965), the Supreme Court compared the compulsion involved in completing an income tax return as discussed in United States v. Sullivan, 274 U.S. 259, 47 S.Ct. 607, 71 L.Ed. 1037 (1927), with the compulsion involved in filing a registration statement as a member of the Communist Party:
*416In Sullivan the questions in the income tax return were neutral on their face and directed at the public at large, but here they are directed at a highly selective group inherently suspect of criminal activities. Petitioners’ claims are not asserted in an essentially noncriminal and regulatory area of inquiry, but against an inquiry in an area permeated with criminal statutes, where response to any of the form’s questions in context might involve the petitioners in the admission of a crucial element of a crime.
Albertson, 382 U.S. at 79, 47 S.Ct. at 199.
The following analysis and parsing of that language of Albertson is. instructive:
This passage announces three inquiries to be made in determining whether a statutory request for information compels incrimination contrary to the respondent’s Fifth Amendment rights:
(1) Is the statute directed at a selective group?
(2) Is that group inherently suspect of criminal activity?
(3) Does the statute deal with an area of the law permeated with criminal statutes?
C. Whitebread and C. Slobogin, Criminal Procedure, § 15.05 at 341.
Understandably, the Albertson test has been applied narrowly. See, e.g. Haynes v. United States, 390 U.S. 85, 88 S.Ct. 722, 19 L.Ed.2d 923 (1968); Grosso v. United States, 390 U.S. 62, 88 S.Ct. 709, 19 L.Ed.2d 906 (1968); Marchetti v. United States, supra. In California v. Byers, 402 U.S. 424, 91 S.Ct. 1535, 29 L.E.2d 9 (1971), Chief Justice Burger stated in the plurality opinion that:
Whenever the Court is confronted with the question of a compelled disclosure that has an incriminating potential, the judicial scrutiny is invariably a close one. Tension between the State’s demand for disclosures and the protection of the right against self-incrimination is likely to give rise to serious questions. Inevitably these must be *417resolved in terms of balancing the public need on the one hand, and the individual claim to constitutional protections on the other; neither interest can be treated lightly. 402 U.S. at 427, 91 S.Ct. at 1537.
Justice Harlan, concurring in the judgment, and particularly addressing the question of whether a grant of use immunity was required to constitutionally compel the completion and filing of income tax returns, wrote:
Considering the noncriminal governmental purpose in securing the information, the necessity for self-reporting as a means of securing the information, and the nature of the disclosures involved, I cannot say that the purposes of the Fifth Amendment warrant imposition of a use restriction as a condition on the enforcement of this statute. To hold otherwise would, it seems to me, embark us on uncharted and treacherous seas. There will undoubtedly be other statutory schemes utilizing compelled self-reporting and implicating both permissible state objectives and the values of the Fifth Amendment which will render this determination more difficult to make. 402 U.S. at 458, 91 S.Ct. at 1553.
More recently, in Braswell v. United States, supra, the Court grappled with the impact of the Fisher — Doe II recognition of potentially protected testimonial assertions in the production of documents upon the earlier line of cases which generally removed documents of collective entities from Fifth Amendment protection. Recognizing that the act of production by a named officer of the corporation would necessarily produce implicit testimonial assertions of authenticity and control, and that such assertions had some potential to incriminate, the Court weighed a number of factors to determine whether the assertions were entitled to constitutional protection. In deciding that the assertions would be “deemed not to constitute self-incrimination,” the Court considered the effect that a contrary decision would have upon the Government’s strong interest in prosecuting certain criminal activity:
*418We note further that recognizing a Fifth Amendment privilege on behalf of the records custodians of collective entities would have a detrimental impact on the Government’s efforts to prosecute “white-collar crime,” one of the most serious problems confronting law enforcement authorities, (footnote omitted). Braswell, 108 S.Ct. at 2294.
Applying the teaching of Albertson and its progeny to the facts of this case persuades me that the statutory requirement of production, rooted as it is in the strongest possible public policy in favor of protecting children, clearly outweighs the limited cost of denying the application of the privilege to the testimonial assertions flowing from the act of production in this case. Section 3-814(c) of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article, Maryland Code (1974,1984 Repl.Vol.), which deals generally with children taken into custody, mandates the production of the child in these words:
If a parent, guardian, or custodian fails to bring the child before the court when requested, the court may issue a writ of attachment directing that the child be taken into custody and brought before the court. The court may proceed against the parent, guardian, or custodian for contempt.
Although this portion of the statute may constitute no more than a declaration of the implicit or inherent authority of a juvenile court with regard to children who have been taken into custody and then placed with parents or others during continued court jurisdiction,6 its existence gives clear notice to those who accept placement of children under such circumstances.
Although § 3-814(c) fairly may be said to be directed at a selective group, i.e., parents, guardians, and custodians who accept placement of juveniles in custody, that group clearly is not “inherently suspect of criminal activity.” Nor does *419the statute deal with an area of the law “permeated with criminal statutes” within the meaning of Albertson and Byers. Certainly, there are criminal statutes dealing with child abuse and with contributing to the delinquency of minors, but the thrust of the juvenile laws of this State is not criminal, but protective. Maurice was taken into custody for his protection. Every effort of the juvenile court and DSS has been to further the best interests of the child and, if possible, to reunite him with his mother. Even in the face of evidence of child abuse, no criminal charges were brought. Viewing the entire history of this case in perspective, it cannot rationally be suggested that the motive of DSS in seeking a court order for the production of Maurice was to gain evidence for use in a criminal prosecution. Make no mistake, if Maurice’s condition suggests he has been the victim of additional abuse, the State will no doubt conduct a full investigation, and if warranted, prosecute the offender. But there are two entirely different matters involved here. This is not a case of a request for production that is simply part of a criminal investigation. This is an order for production issued by the juvenile court as a necessary part of an ongoing child protection case. Criminal prosecution, if it occurs at all, would be entirely collateral to that major objective.
The gist of the Albertson — Byers principle is that a common-sense approach to the application of even the most important constitutional rights is appropriate. In a case like the one before us, where the incriminatory value of the testimonial component of production is, in light of all the circumstances and known facts, slight, and the statutory mandate for production is strong and deeply rooted in important and traditional state interests, it does no violence to the Fifth Amendment to require the mother to produce the child.
V.
As an alternative ground for affirming the action of the juvenile court, I would hold that the mother waived her right to exercise the privilege as to the testimonial compo*420nent of production when she assumed custody of the child from the State.
In Braswell, the Court quoted from Justice Brennan’s concurring opinion in Fisher that “one in control of the records of an artificial organization undertakes an obligation with respect to those records foreclosing any exercise of his privilege.” 108 S.Ct. 2292. The Braswell Court, at 108 S.Ct. 2291 and 2289, also quoted from Wilson v. United States, 221 U.S. 361, 31 S.Ct. 538, 55 L.Ed 771 (1911):
[B]y virtue of their character and the rules of law applicable to them, the books and papers are held subject to examination by the demanding authority, the custodian has no privilege to refuse production although their contents tend to criminate him. In assuming their custody he has accepted the incident obligation to permit inspection. Wilson, 221 U.S. at 382, 31 S.Ct. at 545.
* ajc * >Js # *
The [State’s] reserved power of visitation would seriously be embarrassed, if not wholly defeated in its effective exercise, if guilty officers could refuse inspection of the records and papers of the corporation.. No personal privilege to which they are entitled requires such a conclusion____ [T]he visitatorial power which exists with respect to the corporation of necessity reaches the corporate books without regard to the conduct of the custodian.
Id. at 384-85, 31 S.Ct. at 546.
If the visitatorial rights of the State with respect to the records of a corporation are sufficiently important to require that a person assuming custody over them does so with knowledge that the State’s right of access will overcome the- custodian’s privilege regarding the act of production, how much greater must the State’s rights be with respect to a child over whom it is exercising control? Moreover, the waiver of the right to avoid production, implicit in the case of custodians of collective entity records, was much more explicit here. The State had demonstrated *421its interest in, and power over, the child by taking him from the mother and imposing continuing protective custody. The State “placed” the child with the mother, reserving protective supervision and imposing specific conditions on the placement, including the express agreement of full cooperation. I have no hesitancy in concluding that this mother, as would any other person assuming conditional custody of a child from a state under these circumstances, waived her right to claim the privilege as to testimonial assertions implicit in the act of production of the child, and may not now frustrate return of the child to the State’s protective custody.
CONCLUSION
I would affirm the judgment of the juvenile court. Although the period of confinement that the State may impose upon the mother for a constructive civil contempt is subject to limitation by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and perhaps as well by the Due Process Clauses of the federal and state constitutions, no suggestion has been made that the constitutional limitation has been exceeded in this case.
RODOWSKY, J., joins in Parts I through IV of this opinion.

. A later paragraph in the order provided that furnishing information of Maurice’s whereabouts to DSS or to the Baltimore City Police Department would also serve to purge the contempt.

. As a result of the hearing of April 20, 1988, at which the mother did not appear, and on recommendation of the juvenile master, shelter care was ordered to DSS. No appeal was taken from that order.

. Compare the earlier language of Albertson v. SACB, 382 U.S. 70, 81, 86 S.Ct. 194, 200, 15 L.Ed.2d 165 (1965), that "[t]he judgment as to whether a disclosure would be ‘incriminatory’ has never been made dependent on an assessment of the information possessed by the Government at the time of interrogation----"

. The record discloses that the State possesses at least one photograph of Maurice.

. The child’s attorney argues that the mother has it within her power to gain her release without publicly producing Maurice, thereby avoiding the implication of recent control. By arranging to have information of Maurice’s whereabouts conveyed anonymously to DSS or to the police, Maurice could be located, and upon Maurice's appearance, the mother would have to be released. Because I prefer to address the question of the impact of this testimonial implication head-on, I make no comment on the validity of this argument.

. I need not, and expressly do not, consider whether the legislature intended § 3-814(c) to have a broader reach.