Court Opinion

ID: 9494894
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:49:28.677628+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:41.326324
License: Public Domain

RILEY, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
In all respects but one, I concur in the Court’s well-reasoned opinion. My disagreement, which does not affect the ultimate resolution of this case, concerns whether the arresting officers violated Fellers’s right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment.
Because Fellers was under indictment at the time of his arrest, he had a constitutional right to the presence of counsel during police interrogation. Massiah v. United States, 377 U.S. 201, 205-06, 84 S.Ct. 1199, 12 L.Ed.2d 246 (1964). For purposes of this right, an interrogation takes place when agents of law enforcement deliberately attempt to elicit incriminating information from the indicted defendant. See id. at 206, 84 S.Ct. 1199. Although the officers in this case did not ask Fellers any questions, they deliberately elicited inerim-*727mating information by telling Fellers they wanted to discuss his involvement in the use and distribution of methamphetamine. This post-indictment conduct outside the presence of counsel violated Fellers’s right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. See United States v. Henry, 447 U.S. 264, 270-71, 100 S.Ct. 2183, 65 L.Ed.2d 115 (1980); Brewer v. Williams, 430 U.S. 387, 399-401, 97 S.Ct. 1232, 51 L.Ed.2d 424 (1977); cf. Rhode Island v. Innis, 446 U.S. 291, 300-02 & 300 n. 4, 100 S.Ct. 1682, 64 L.Ed.2d 297 (1980).
Nevertheless, I do not believe this constitutional violation takes Fellers’s case outside the rationale of Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985). The Supreme Court “has never held that the psychological impact of voluntary disclosure of a guilty secret ... compromises the voluntariness of a subsequent informed waiver.” Id. at 312, 105 S.Ct. 1285. Fellers knowingly and voluntarily waived his Sixth Amendment rights at the jail, and his subsequent statements were thus admissible at his criminal trial. Accordingly, I concur in the judgment of the Court.