Court Opinion

ID: 9522168
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:18:49.381324+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:02:21.251972
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE KAPALA, specially concurring: I agree with the majority’s conclusion that the State failed to carry its burden of establishing by a preponderance of the evidence that the inculpatory statements defendant made at the hospital were voluntary under the fifth amendment. Thus, those statements are inadmissible. I also agree that there was insufficient attenuation to break the causal chain, such that defendant’s subsequent station house inculpatory statements came from the “exploitation of that illegality” and not “by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the primary taint” (Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 488, 9 L. Ed. 2d at 455, 83 S. Ct. at 417). Thus, those statements were also inadmissible. I write separately because I do not concur in the majority’s analysis of the Quarles public safety exception to the rule stated in Miranda. In my view, such analysis is unnecessary to the resolution of this appeal. Failure to administer the prophylactic Miranda warnings results in a presumption that unwarned statements are involuntary and does not carry the same consequence as actual police infringement of an individual’s constitutional privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. This concept was made clear in Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 84 L. Ed. 2d 222, 105 S. Ct. 1285 (1985): “If errors are made by law enforcement officers in administering the prophylactic Miranda procedures, they should not breed the same irremediable consequences as police infringement of the Fifth Amendment itself. 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. Though Miranda requires that the unwarned admission must be suppressed, the admissibility of any subsequent statement should turn in these circumstances solely on whether it is knowingly and voluntarily made.” Elstad, 470 U.S. at 309, 84 L. Ed. 2d at 232, 105 S. Ct. at 1293. In short, it is the fruits of a violation of a constitutional right (not just of the prophylactic standards set forth in Miranda) that are suppressed under the “fruits” doctrine. In this case, once we conclude that the State failed to demonstrate that the statements defendant made at the hospital were voluntary under the fifth amendment, we need not concern ourselves with any purported violation of the rule stated in Miranda. The fifth amendment violation, together with a lack of sufficient attenuation, supports the suppression of the statements at the hospital as well as the statements made at the police station. A Miranda violation would support the suppression of only the statements defendant made at the hospital and not the statements he made at the police station. Thus, the majority’s analysis of the Quarles exception to Miranda is unnecessary to reach our conclusion that all of defendant’s statements should have been suppressed. Moreover, the majority’s fruits-doctrine analysis does not distinguish between an illegality in the form of a violation of a constitutional right and an illegality in the form of a violation of Miranda. As a result, the majority opinion could serve to confuse the bench and the bar by improperly suggesting that a Miranda violation can serve as the poisonous tree, the fruit of which, absent sufficient attenuation, is inadmissible at trial. For the foregoing reasons, I would reverse defendant’s convictions and remand for a new trial under the exclusive rationale that the inculpatory statements defendant made at the hospital were inadmissible under the fifth amendment and the inculpatory statements he made thereafter were the inadmissible fruit of that constitutional violation.