Court Opinion

ID: 9613286
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:15:57.298772+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:27.429278
License: Public Domain

Justice Powell
concurred, making the plurality, on the basis that the exclusionary rule should not be further extended.9
It is arguable that we should adopt an earlier point, e.g., the arrest, by which to define the commencement of “all prosecutions” as that term is used in Article I, section 11, of the Oregon Constitution, but we conclude that the formal charge is the legal event which commences the obligation of the state to provide counsel. Functionally, there are no legal procedures for the appointment of counsel for indigents prior to a formal charge being brought and, as we observed in Scharf, 288 Or at 456 n 4, the decision to commence criminal rather than administrative proceedings is commonly not made until after a breathalyzer test is refused or taken and the result known. See Prideaux v. State Dept. of Public Safety, 310 Minn 405, 247 NW2d 385, 388-389 (1976). Hence, under Article I, section 11, we concur in the reasoning of Kirby that the right to counsel “in all criminal prosecutions” includes critical *805stages of the prosecution subsequent to indictment or other formal charge. Because this defendant had not been charged, no right to counsel under either constitutional provision had yet attached.
C. Liberty
Finally, if any right or interest was denied defendant by the discouragement of his request for counsel, it was that to which we referred in Scharf as “the long established and well-known right of any arrested person to call an attorney,” 288 Or at 460. To know the extent of that personal right and the limitation imposed upon the state by its existence, and in order to determine the effect of that right in individual cases, it is necessary to identify its theoretical basis. However “long established and well-known” the right of an arrested person to a phone call may be, a survey of the caselaw and authorities fails to yield any helpful discussion of the right other than in the context of helpful discussion of the right other than in the context of evidence gathering or representation during the prosecution as we discussed above. Nor have counsel been able to articulate a source of such a right. Yet any practice so traditionally and rigorously observed must have roots deep in the law. This case is unusual in that there may be an evidentiary effect to defendant’s request to call a lawyer and hence we are called upon to give some definition to the rights of communication of an arrested person for application to this case.
The usual analytical focus on a right to counsel is misleadingly narrow. The ultimate issue in this case is one of liberty, not safeguards. It is axiomatic from our organic concept of constitutioal government that every person’s liberty is complete except as the people have granted to themselves collectively (i.eto the government) the power to restrict individual liberty. The idea is as fundamental as the Social Contract and it is embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which forbids states to “deprive any person of * * * liberty * * * without due process of law.” Thus, for example, we are free to cross streets at will, but that freedom is subject to lawful governmental restriction as to time and place to serve public safety and traffic needs because we, the people, have given police power to the government to regulate liberty in *806such ways as have a reasonable tendency to accomplish those social objectives.
Our constitutionally assured liberty is not limited to the rights itemized in the Bill of Rights such as those we discussed above. Rather, the liberty referred to by the Fourteenth Amendment, in the absence of lawful governmental restriction, is general in scope and variety. Justice Harlan expressed the idea well:
“ * * *[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This ‘liberty’ is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impostions and purposeless restraints * * * and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment. * * *” Poe v. Ullman, 367 US 497, 543, 81 S Ct 1752, 61 Ed 2d 989 (1961) (opinion of Harlan, J., dissenting from dismissal of appeal) (citations omitted).10
We believe that analysis to be sound and to be applicable to this case. Defendant’s freedom to call a lawyer before deciding to submit to breathalyzer testing was not safeguarded in this situation by the Sixth or Fourth Amendments, but, under the Fourteenth Amendment, his freedom to do so could not be foreclosed or deferred unless *807the police were authorized to do so. Defendant’s liberty to communicate as he chose was to be free from “purposeless restraints,” but subject to lawful restraints. Therefore, we look next to the magnitude and nature of the liberty and to whether the record discloses a lawful purpose for the denial of that liberty.
The opportunity of an arrested person to promptly communicate beyond confinement is not necessarily of the same magnitude of liberty as marital and procreational privacy which the United States Supreme Court held could only be restricted for “compelling” public interests, see Griswold and Roe, supra n 10. Neither, however, is it a minimal thing beneath the notice of the law. The everyday freedom to communicate with others takes on greater importance when one is in the enforced isolation of police custody. Communication may be the means to security release, advice, reassurance of one’s family or associates, or professional assistance. For at least these reasons, allowance of a telephone call following arrest has become traditional and incommunicado incarceration is regarded as inconsistent with American notions of ordered liberty. Freedom of an arrested person to communicate is a significant and substantial liberty which may only be officially restricted if there is legal authority to do so.
As we observed above, the authority of the police to enforce the traffic laws carries with it the authority to do all things which have a reasonable tendency to accomplish that responsibility which are not otherwise prohibited by law. Executive actions such as traffic control, detention for license checks, arrests, searches, jailing, etc., necessarily restrict some aspect of personal liberty to the degree reasonably required for the performance of that lawful act, but they are nevertheless permissible if they are within the lawful authority of the police agency to enforce the traffic laws.
The police may lawfully restrict the freedom of an arrested person to communicate to the degree reasonably required for the performance of their duties. For example, where the police are authorized to seize “highly evanescent evidence,” see Heintz, 286 Or at 248, and delay caused by an attempt to call counsel would impair their ability to *808effectively do so, they may require that the arrested person’s exercise of the freedom to call be deferred until after completion of the seizure.
Here, there was no showing that the time required to make a call would have reduced the efficacy of the breathalyzer test. Indeed, the police allowed about two hours to transpire between the arrest and the breathalyzer request, which suggests a lack of urgency. Moreover, Oregon Administrative Rule 333-13-020 (1972), which regulates the manner of breathalyzer testing, requires that the person be under observation for 15 minutes prior to the test. The record discloses no reason why a call on an available telephone during the observation period would impair the evidence gathering process, assuming the arrested person did not object to observation during the call. Nor is there evidence of the existence of what we referred to in State v. Haynes, 288 Or 59, 70, 602 P2d 272 (1979), as “the practical necessities of custody” which might have justified deferring defendant’s call to counsel. Moreover, in the absence of any such circumstances, the absolute advice on the Oregon State Police form that “[a]ny request for a delay [to have a lawyer present] will constitute a refusal,” see n. 1, supra, was not legally correct in this case. In sum this record provides no support for a holding that the police were authorized in the performance of their duties to restrict defendant’s freedom by threatening adverse consequences if defendant telephoned counsel.
We emphasize that our holding is based upon an unauthorized restriction of personal liberty, and not upon the denial or violation of a specific right enumerated in the Bill of Rights. That distinction is material. A denial of a right, e.g., the right to counsel at a critical stage of the prosecution, may occur if there is no advice, provision for the indigent, or express, knowing and voluntary waiver of that right. Freedom from interference with liberty, however, is different from entitlement to a right. The state is barred from unlawfully restricting liberty, but it is not obliged to itemize to a person all the actions he is free to take nor to provide an indigent person with the means to exercise his freedom as a precondition to the state’s taking action. Here there was no failure of the police to perform *809any obligation to protect defendant’s right to counsel; rather, under these circumstances, there was only an unauthorized restriction of defendant’s freedom to call counsel.
III. EXCLUSION
We observed in the context of self-incrimination in State v. Haynes, 288 Or at 71:
“ * * * No one so far has suggested that interference with an arrested person’s access to a lawyer, however improper and subject to other remedies, would itself lead to a reversal of a subsequent conviction if defendant in fact said nothing and no evidence was obtained as a result nor other harm done to his eventual defense. Thus it is not a generalized right to counsel that the decisions we have quoted enforce but, more concretely, the derivative right to the benefit of counsel’s efforts to forestall involuntary and incriminating disclosures. * *
Exclusion of evidence is a practical device intended to deter agents of the state from acting beyond constitutional limitations. As we recently observed in State v. Quinn, 290 Or 383, 397, 623 P2d 630 (1981):
“* * * The device of excluding trustworthy evidence from the factfinding process in order to serve higher purposes ‘is a needed, but grudgingly taken medicament; no more should be swallowed than is needed to combat the disease.’ Amsterdam, Search, Seizure, and Section 2255, 112 U Pa L R 378, 389 (1964).”
We have often applied the exlusionary rule in the context of denials of rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but this case is our first occasion to consider exclusion for deprival of liberty assured by the Due Process Clause.
 We decline to require exclusion of the evidence for reasons arising from this record and also for reasons which transcend this particular case. This record is insufficient to establish the fact of a causal (rather than merely sequential) relationship between the request to call a lawyer and the obtaining of the breath sample. Defendant’s request for an opportunity to talk to a lawyer was general. There is no evidence that he had a lawyer or that lawyer was available, or of any other fact from which it can be inferred that if defendant had been given an opportunity, it was reasonably likely to have been fruitful. The evidence shows no *810indication that if defendant had been given the telephone and a few minutes to use it, he would have secured legal advice and, if so, whether the advice would be to take the test or not.11 A causal relationship between the official impropriety and the giving of evidence must be established by one who seeks to exclude the evidence on the ground that it is a result of that impropriety. State v. Quinn, supra, and Wong Sun v. United States, 371 US 471, 83 S Ct 407, 9 L Ed 2d 441 (1963). This record, at best, would allow us to do no more than speculate as to whether an opportunity to call a lawyer would have caused an evidentiary result.
On the broader issue, we find no case requiring or not requiring exclusion for deprival of constitutionally protected liberty interests. We begin our scratch analysis by observing that there is not just an exclusionary rule, there are several exclusionary rules, each with its own purposes and requirements. As we said in Scharf:
“Decisions on admitting or excluding improperly obtained evidence are not instances of a single ‘exclusionary rule.’ Rather, they depend on whether the premise of the impropriety was a law addressed to the manner of obtaining or using the evidence or a law protecting some unrelated interest. * * *” 288 Or at 461, n 10.
Although the rules differ, it is appropriate to review them briefly to discern principles which may guide us in determining whether exclusion of evidence obtained following a restriction of liberty must be excluded.
The exclusionary rule is applied absolutely to the fruits of violation of the Fifth Amendment. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436, 86 S Ct 1602, 16 L Ed 2d 694 (1966). This is so because one’s right not to be convicted upon one’s own compelled testimony is absolute. It is not subject to moderation due to competing policies, situational variables or considerations of reasonableness. Because liberty interests are not absolute, see Section II C, above, Fifth Amendment law does not provide an apt analogy.
*811Nor is Sixth Amendment law, as it applies to evidence gathering, particularly apt. Massiah v. United States, supra, a Sixth Amendment case regulating interrogation in the absence of counsel, may now be subsumed in post-Miranda Fifth Amendment law, see e.g., Brewer v. Williams, 430 US 387, 398, 97 S Ct 1232, 51 LEd2d 424 (1977). Moreover, the lineup cases, Wade and Gilbert, supra, limit exclusion to evidence obtained solely during critical stages as an aspect of the right to confront witnesses. See also Kirby v. Illnois, supra. The reasons for exclusion in these cases do no exist here.
Fourth Amendment cases are based on principles of reasonableness and competing policy considerations. Hence they are of greater analogical significance in this case. The source of the federal exclusionary rule was Weeks v. United States, 232 US 383, 34 S Ct 341, 58 LEd 652 (1914), in which the United States Supreme Court declined to be a party to Fourth Amendment violation by allowing use of evidence obtained. By the time of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 US 643, 81 S Ct 1684, 6 LEd2d 1081 (1961), the underlying theory of exclusion had changed somewhat. The court took a pragmatic, rather than analytical, approach. It observed from the cases over the years that violations of privacy were common, that the states had found no alternative method of deterring such violations and that exclusion was therefore required for that purpose.
Since Mapp, judicial emphasis has varied somewhat, but the United State Supreme Court adheres to the view that deterrence is the dominant purpose of the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule, but that the rule need not be applied so as to achieve maximum possible deterrence. Indeed, in United States v. Salvucci, 448 US 83, 100 S Ct 2547, 65 L Ed 2d 619 (1980), the court opted for a narrow application of the exclusionary rule because a broader application was not necessary to achieve deterrence. This theory may allow for narrowing the rule by non-exclusion where the police violate privacy rights despite their good faith intent to comply with the Fourth Amendment, United States v. Williams, 622 F2d 830, 840-848 (5th Cir 1980).
Prior to Mapp, this court never had occasion to adopt an exlusionary rule because it had never found a *812search or seizure to be unlawful. In dicta, the court stated that if the occasion ever arose, it would probably apply the federal rule for the federal reasons, State v. Laundy, 103 Or 443, 204 P 958, 206 P 290 (1922), see also State v. Hoover, 219 Or 288, 347 P2d 69 (1959), but it did not formulate a separate or alternative theory which should guide our hand today.
Subsequent to Mapp, this court has purported to apply and adopt federal search and exclusionary law. See, e.g., State v. Florance, 270 Or 169, 527 P2d 1202 (1974). It has also excluded evidence for violation of a statute which protects privacy, State v. Valdez, 277 Or 621, 561 P2d 1006 (1977), but not for violation of statutes which promote safety and accountability in search and seizure procedures, State v. Valentine/Darroch, 264 or 54, 60, 504 P2d 84 (1972), and State v. Cortman, 251 Or 566, 571, 446 P2d 681 (1968), cert den 394 US 951 (1969). These cases provide no analytical help beyond what is found in federal caselaw.
The empirical and pragmatic approach in Mapp v. Ohio is consistent with an approach expressed in State v. Shipley, 232 Or 354, 375 P2d 237 (1962). There we reconsidered whether to adopt the federal McNabb-Mallory rule12 which holds that statements obtained during a period of noncompliance with the statutory requirement that an arrested person be brought promptly before a magistrate, must be suppressed even though voluntarily given. In Shipley, we concluded that the statute requiring a hearing without delay had been violated and that a voluntary confession had been elicited during the delay. We declined to adopt a rule of suppression, however, because the statute did not require it and because the confession was voluntary. Two judges dissented. Of significance, however, and most similar to the rationale in Mapp, was the observation of Goodwin, J., concurring, that we should not automatic ally adopt an exclusionary rule. Rather, if the event were repeated and became a practice, we would reconsider adopting an exclusionary rule in order to deter future violations of law. As he put it:
*813“If those primarily charged with the duty of enforcing the law are unwilling or unable to discharge their duty in this respect, then the courts should not shrink from their duty. * * *” 232 Or at 366.
There are parallel considerations in this situation. The trustworthiness of the evidence is unaffected by the police conduct. The form used by the police implies an improper pattern of past conduct, but we may reasonably suppose that the form is the result of a good faith misunderstanding of the law rather than from an official intention to evade the law’s requirements or to hold arrested drivers incommunicado.13 We may expect that the clarification of law in this opinion will be sufficient to cause a change in police practice and deter future similar conduct without the necessity of creating a new exclusionary rule. If repeated violation occurs, then as the United States Supreme Court did in Mapp and Justice Goodwin warned in Shipley, we may consider resort to the exclusionary rule as a necessary means to deter future violations. For now, however, as we phrased it in Quinn, the disease is not so advanced that we need to swallow more of the “ ‘grudgingly taken medicament.’ ” The order of suppression is reversed, and the evidence of defendant’s breath test may be used at trial.
Reversed and remanded for trial.

 The Washington Supreme Court in Fitzsimmons, supra, cited Kirby for the definition of “critical stage,” but disregarded the principal holding of Kirby that the concept is limited to confrontations after a formal charge is laid. Moreover, the Fitzsimmons opinion was preliminarily based on a judicial rule requiring police to promptly allow an arrested person a telephone call. Fitzsimmons also relies on United States v. Wade, supra, but the opinion is inconsistent with this dicta in Wade which is applicable to breathalyzer submission once Schmerber is taken into account:
“The Government characterizes the lineup as a mere preparatory step in the gathering of the prosecution’s evidence, not different — for Sixth Amendment purposes — from various other preparatory steps, such as systematized or scientific analyzing of the accused’s fingerprints, blood sample, clothing, hair, and the like. We think there are differences which preclude such stages being characterized as critical stages at which the accused has the right to the presence of his counsel. Knowledge of the techniques of science and technology is sufficiently available, and the variables in techniques few enough, that the accused has the opportunity for a meaningful confrontation of the Government’s case at trial through the ordinary processes of cross-examination of the Government’s expert witnesses and the presentation of the evidence of his own experts. The denial of a right to have his counsel present at such analyses does not therefore violate the Sixth Amendment; they are not critical stages since there is minimal risk that his counsel’s absence at such stages might derogate from his right to a fair trial.” United States v. Wade, 388 US at 227-28.

 Recent holdings of the United States Supreme Court are consistent with this view, although they are less persuasively reasoned. For example, the court has essentially revived substantive due process as a protective doctrine for marital and procreational liberty. In Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479, 85 S Ct 1678, 14 L Ed 2d 510 (1965), the court invalidated statutes prohibiting use of contraceptives because they violated a zone of personal privacy found in the Ninth Amendment and in the “penumbras” of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. In Roe v. Wade, 410 US 113, 93 S Ct 705, 35 L Ed 2d 147 (1973), after a cursory discussion of those amendments, their penumbrae, and of the Fourteenth Amendment, 410 US at 152, the court barred the states from prohibiting early abortions because they are within a “right of privacy * * * founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action * * 410 US at 153. That shorthand rationale implies adoption of Justice Harlan’s conceptualization. See opinion of Stewart, J., concurring, 410 US at 169.

 The request alone may be sufficient in a Fifth Amendment or Sixth Amendment context, cf. Miranda v. Arizona, supra n 8, but here we are considering only a restriction of liberty, not a denial of rights.

 McNabb v. United States, 318 US 332, 63 S Ct 608, 87 LEd 819 (1943); Mallory v. United States, 354 US 449, 77 S Ct 1356, 1 LEd2d 1479 (1957).

 Cf. State v. Jones, 279 Or 55, 60, 566 P2d 867 (1977), in which we required suppression of a blood test due to unethical prosecutorial conduct in obtaining it.