Court Opinion

ID: 9493657
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:14:19.119341+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:57.079773
License: Public Domain

O’SCANNLAIN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the result.
I join Part A. “Statements in the car” of the majority opinion. I write separately to explain why I concur in the result reached in Part B. “Statements Made at the Postal Inspection Service Office” of the opinion, even though its analysis is based on a flawed interpretation of Supreme Court precedent.
I
The issue in Part B. is whether the statements Orso made in the office, after receiving the Miranda warnings, were admissible. The majority concluded that they were not. What the majority did not say, however, is that its opinion is based on a very controversial reading, and in my view an erroneous extension, of the Supreme Court’s decision in Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985).
In Elstad, the police elicited a confession from a suspect prior to giving him the *443Miranda warnings, but then, after receiving the Miranda warnings, he confessed a second time. The question there, as here, was whether the second confession was inadmissible because it was the fruit of the tainted first confession. The court concluded that, even if the first confession were voluntary but elicited in violation of Miranda, then the second confession was admissible so long as it was voluntary as well. See id. at 314, 105 S.Ct. 1285 (“A subsequent administration of Miranda warnings to a suspect who has given a voluntary but unwarned statement ordinarily should suffice to remove the conditions that precluded admission of the earlier statement.”), 318, 105 S.Ct. 1285 (“[T]here is no warrant for presuming coercive effect where the suspect’s initial inculpatory statement, though technically in violation of Miranda, was voluntary. The relevant inquiry is whether the second statement was voluntarily made.”). By my reading of Elstad, the Court thus held that only if the first confession were involuntary must one decide “whether that coercion has carried over into the second confession” by considering “the time that passes between confessions, the change in place of interrogations, and the change in identity of the interrogators.... ” Id. at 310, 105 S.Ct. 1285.
The majority opinion takes a different view. It holds that a second confession can be excluded if the first confession is either involuntary or the result of deliberately improper police tactics. See ante at 440-41. Given the breadth and depth of case law on the question of voluntariness, the majority could hardly write an opinion that held that Orso’s first confession was involuntary; exclusion could only be premised on the police’s having used improper tactics.
Of course, the majority’s interpretation is not entirely implausible. In addition to involuntariness, the Supreme Court refers to “coercion” and “improper tactics” throughout Elstad. See, e.g., Elstad, 470 U.S. at 309 (“It is an unwarranted extension of Miranda to hold that a simple failure to administer the warnings, unaccompanied by any actual coercion or other circumstances calculated to undermine the suspect’s ability to exercise his free will, so taints the investigatory process that a subsequent voluntary and informed waiver is ineffective for some indeterminate period.” (emphasis added)), 314, 105 S.Ct. 1285 (“[Ajbsent deliberately coercive or improper tactics in obtaining the initial statement, the mere fact that a suspect has made an unwarned admission does not warrant a presumption of compulsion.” (emphasis added)). Thus, if one strained hard enough, one could perhaps read Elstad to create a new category of behavior called “improper tactics,” separate and distinct from police conduct rendering confessions involuntary, which might trigger the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine in the Miranda context.
Nonetheless, the better interpretation of Elstad is one that views the Supreme Court’s references to “coercion” and “improper tactics” as examples of when police conduct could render the first confession involuntary. See id. at 317, 105 S.Ct. 1285 (“[N]or do we condone inherently coercive police tactics or methods offensive to due process that render the initial admission involuntary and undermine the suspect’s will to invoke his rights once they are read to him.” (emphasis added)), 317-18, 105 S.Ct. 1285 (disagreeing with a “handful of courts” that have “applied our precedents relating to confessions obtained under coercive circumstances to situations involving wholly voluntary admissions, requiring a passage of time or break in events before a second, fully warned statement can be deemed voluntary” (emphasis added)). As the First Circuit cogently concluded:
This argument focuses on some admittedly imprecise language in Elstad while ignoring the Court’s emphasis on volun-tariness throughout the opinion. Although the Court did not explicitly define “deliberately coercive or improper tactics,” it used several more detailed *444phrases that in context are synonymous with that term: “actual coercion or other circumstances calculated to undermine the suspect’s ability to exercise his free will,” id. at 309, 105 S.Ct. 1285; “physical violence or other deliberate means calculated to break the suspect’s will,” id. at 312, 105 S.Ct. 1285; and “inherently coercive police tactics or methods offensive to due process that render the initial admission involuntary and undermine the suspect’s will to invoke his rights once they are read to him,” id. at 317, 105 S.Ct. 1285. Contrary to Esquilin’s argument that there are “improper tactics” that can raise a presumption of compulsion without regard to voluntariness, the Elstad Court held that “there is no warrant for presuming coercive effect where the suspect’s initial inculpatory statement, though technically in violation of Miranda, was voluntary.” Id. at 318, 105 S.Ct. 1285. If we read Elstad as a coherent whole, it follows that “deliberately coercive or improper tactics” are not two distinct categories, as Esquilin would have it, but simply alternative descriptions of the type of police conduct that may render a suspect’s initial, unwarned statement involuntary.
United States v. Esquilin, 208 F.3d 315, 320 (1st Cir.2000). In fairness to the majority, the language in Elstad is sufficiently “imprecise” to have apparently created a Circuit split on the question of whether “improper tactics” is a separately actionable category of behavior from involuntariness. Compare Esquilin, 208 F.3d at 320 and U.S. v. Rith, 164 F.3d 1323, 1333 (10th Cir.1999) (“The Perdue court expressly declined to apply Elstad because the defendant’s first confession in Perdue was involuntary. ... Perdue is relevant here only if Rith’s pr e-Miranda incriminating statements were involuntary; otherwise, Elstad applies and Rith may not avail himself of the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree argument.”) until United States v. Carter, 884 F.2d 368, 373 (8th Cir.1989) (“Assuming arguendo that the first, unwarned, confession was voluntary, we find that the circumstances of this case do not warrant admission of the second, warned, confession.”).
II
Despite the fact that I disagree with the majority’s reading of Elstad, I concur in the result because a previous Ninth Circuit decision appears to have adopted the controversial reading of Elstad employed by the majority in this case. In Pope v. Zenon, 69 F.3d 1018 (9th Cir.1995), we held that “[t]he conduct of the police in this case is precisely what the Supreme Court had in mind in [.Elstad ] when it exempted ‘deliberately coercive or improper tactics in obtaining the initial statement’ from the ordinary rule that subsequent statements are not to be measured by a ‘tainted fruit’ standard, but by whether they are voluntary.”1 Id. at 1024. The pre-Miranda warning conduct by the police in Pope was nothing more than truthfully advising the defendant of the evidence against him. If that is sufficient to amount to “coercive” tactics under Elstad, then, a fortiori, the tactics in this case, which consisted of lying to the defendant about the evidence *445against her, are sufficient as well. Accordingly, Orso’s statements in the police station are inadmissible.
While I specially concur in the result as to Part B., I continue to have misgivings that our reading of Elstad is sound.

. It should be noted that the facts of Pope are somewhat different from the facts of this case and the facts of Elstad. In Elstad and in this case, the police improperly asked questions of a defendant prior to reading the Miranda warnings, and these questions led to incriminating statements by the witness prior to those warnings. By contrast, in Pope, the police improperly asked questions of a defendant prior to reading the warnings, but the witness did not say anything until after the warnings had been read. See Pope, 69 F.3d at 1021-22. The threshold question in Pope, which was glossed over by that panel, is how the Elstad rule, which makes the admissibility of post-Miranda warning statements dependent upon the voluntariness of pr e-Miranda warning statements, operates in a context where there are no pre-warning statements at all. The only application of Elstad in such a context that makes any sense is one that would make the post-Miranda warning statements inadmissible if the pre-Miranda police tactics would have rendered any pr e-Miranda warning statements involuntary, had such pre-warning statements been made.