Court Opinion

ID: 9426727
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:46.697717+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.706816
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
dissenting.
The result in this case ought to be intolerable in any society which purports to call itself an organized society. It con*416tinues the Court—by the narrowest margin—on the much-criticized course of punishing the public for the mistakes and misdeeds of law enforcement officers, instead of punishing the officer directly, if in fact he is guilty of wrongdoing. It mechanically and blindly keeps reliable evidence from juries whether the claimed constitutional violation involves gross police misconduct or honest human error.
Williams is guilty of the savage murder of a small child; no member of the Court contends he is not. While in custody, and after no fewer than five warnings of his rights to silence and to counsel, he led police to the concealed body of his victim. The Court concedes Williams was not threatened or coerced and that he spoke and acted voluntarily and with full awareness of his constitutional rights. In the face of all this, the Court now holds that because Williams was prompted by the detective’s statement—not interrogation but a statement— the jury must not be told how the police found the body.
Today’s holding fulfills Judge (later Mr. Justice) Cardozo’s grim prophecy that someday some court might carry the exclusionary rule to the absurd extent that its operative effect would exclude evidence relating to the body of a murder victim because of the means by which it was found.1 In so ruling *417the Court regresses to playing a grisly game of “hide and seek,” once more exalting the sporting theory of criminal justice which has been experiencing a decline in our jurisprudence. With Justices White, Blackmun, and Rehnquist, I categorically reject the remarkable notion that the police in this case were guilty of unconstitutional misconduct, or any conduct justifying the bizarre result reached by the Court. Apart from a brief comment on the merits, however, I wish to focus on the irrationality of applying the increasingly discredited exclusionary rule to this case.

The Court Concedes Williams’ Disclosures Were Voluntary

Under well-settled precedents which the Court freely acknowledges, it is very clear that Williams had made a valid waiver of his Fifth Amendment right to silence and his Sixth Amendment right to counsel when he led police to the child’s body. Indeed, even under the Court’s analysis I do not understand how a contrary conclusion is possible.
The Court purports to apply as the appropriate constitutional waiver standard the familiar “intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right or privilege” test of Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U. S. 458, 464 (1938). Ante, at 404. The Court assumes, without deciding, that Williams’ conduct and statements were voluntary. It concedes, as it must, ibid., that Williams had been informed of and fully understood his constitutional rights and the consequences of their waiver. Then, having either assumed or found every element necessary to make out a valid waiver under its own test, the *418Court reaches the astonishing conclusion that no valid waiver has been demonstrated.
This remarkable result is compounded by the Court’s failure to define what evidentiary showing the State failed to make. Only recently, in Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S. 218, 238 n. 25 (1973), the Court analyzed the distinction between a voluntary act and the waiver of a right; there Mr. Justice Stewart stated for the Court:
“[T]he question whether a person has acted ‘voluntarily’ is quite distinct from the question whether he has ‘waived’ a trial right. The former question, as we made clear in Brady v. United States, 397 U. S. [742,] 749, can be answered only by examining all the relevant circumstances to determine if he has been coerced. The latter question turns on the extent of his knowledge.”
Similarly, in McMann v. Richardson, 397 U. S. 759, 766 (1970), we said that since a guilty plea constituted a waiver of a host of constitutional rights, “it must be an intelligent act ‘done with sufficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely consequences.’” If the Court today applied these standards with fidelity to the Schneckloth and McMann holdings it could not reach the result now announced.
The evidence is uncontradicted that Williams had abundant knowledge of his right to have counsel present and of his right to silence. Since the Court does not question his mental competence, it boggles the mind to suggest that Williams could not understand that leading police to the child’s body would have other than the most serious consequences. All of the elements necessary to make out a valid waiver are shown by the record and acknowledged by the Court; we thus are left to guess how the Court reached its holding.
One plausible but unarticulated basis for the result reached is that once a suspect has asserted his right not to talk without the presence of an attorney, it becomes legally impossible *419for him to waive that right until he has seen an attorney. But constitutional rights are personal, and an otherwise valid waiver should not be brushed aside by judges simply because an attorney was not present. The Court’s holding operates to “imprison a man in his privileges,” Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269, 280 (1942); it conclusively presumes a suspect is legally incompetent to change his mind and tell the truth until an attorney is present. It denigrates an individual to a nonperson whose free will has become hostage to a lawyer so that until the lawyer consents, the suspect is deprived of any legal right or power to decide for himself that he wishes to make a disclosure. It denies that the rights to counsel and silence are personal, nondelegable, and subject to a waiver only by that individual.2 The opinions in support of the Court’s judgment do not enlighten us as to why police conduct—whether good or bad—should operate to suspend Williams’ right to change his mind and “tell all” at once rather than waiting until he reached Des Moines.3
In his concurring opinion Me. Justice Powell suggests that the result in this case turns on whether Detective Leaming’s remarks constituted “interrogation,” as he views them, or whether they were “statements" intended to prick the conscience of the accused. I find it most remarkable that a murder case should turn on judicial interpretation that a statement becomes a question simply because it is followed by an *420incriminating disclosure from the suspect. The Court seems to be saying that since Williams said he would “tell the whole story” at Des Moines, the police should have been content and waited; of course, that would have been the wiser course, especially in light of the nuances of constitutional jurisprudence applied by the Court, but a murder case ought not turn on such tenuous strands.
In any case, the Court assures us, ante, at 405-406, this is not at all what it intends, and that a valid waiver was possible in these circumstances, but was not quite made. Here, of course, Williams did not confess to the murder in so many words; it was his conduct in guiding police to the body, not his words, which incriminated him. And the record is replete with evidence that Williams knew precisely what he was doing when he guided police to the body. The human urge to confess wrongdoing is, of course, normal in all save hardened, professional criminals, as psychiatrists and analysts have demonstrated. T. Reik, The Compulsion to Confess (1972).
(2)

The Exclusionary Rule Should Not be Applied to Non-egregious Police Conduct

Even if there was no waiver, and assuming a technical violation occurred, the Court errs gravely in mechanically applying the exclusionary rule without considering whether that Draconian judicial doctrine should be invoked in these circumstances, or indeed whether any of its conceivable goals will be furthered by its application here.
The obvious flaws of the exclusionary rule as a judicial remedy are familiar. See Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388, 411 (1971) (Burger, C. J., dissenting); Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465, 498-502 (1976) (Burger, C. J., concurring); Oaks, Studying the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure, 37 U. Chi. L. Rev. 665 (1970); Williams, The Exclusionary Rule Under Foreign Law—Eng*421land, 52 J. Crim. L. 272 (1961). Today’s holding interrupts what has been a more rational perception of the constitutional and social utility of excluding reliable evidence from the truth-seeking process. In its Fourth Amendment context, we have now recognized that the exclusionary rule is in no sense a personal constitutional right, but a judicially conceived remedial device designed to safeguard and effectuate guaranteed legal rights generally. Stone v. Powell, supra, at 482; United States v. Janis, 428 U. S. 433, 443-447 (1976); United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338, 347-348 (1974); see Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165, 174—175 (1969). We have repeatedly emphasized that deterrence of unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful police conduct is the only valid justification for excluding reliable and probative evidence from the criminal factfinding process. Stone v. Powell, supra, at 485-486; United States v. Janis, supra, at 446, 458-459, n. 35; United States v. Peltier, 422 U. S. 531, 536-539 (1975).
Accordingly, unlawfully obtained evidence is not automatically excluded from the factfinding process in all circumstances.4 In a variety of contexts we inquire whether ap*422plication of the rule will promote its objectives sufficiently to justify the enormous cost it imposes on society. “As with any remedial device, the application of the rule has been restricted to those areas where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served.” United States v. Calandra, supra, at 348; accord, Stone v. Powell, supra, at 486-491; United States v. Janis, supra; Brown v. Illinois, 422 U. S. 590, 606, 608-609 (1975) (Powell, J., concurring in part); United States v. Peltier, supra, at 538-539:
This is, of course, the familiar balancing process applicable to cases in which important competing interests are at stake. It is a recognition, albeit belated, that “the policies behind the exclusionary rule are not absolute,” Stone v. Powell, supra, at 488. It acknowledges that so serious an infringement of the crucial truth-seeking function of a criminal prosecution should be allowed only when imperative to safeguard constitutional rights. An important factor in this amalgam is whether the violation at issue may properly be classed as “egregious.” Brown v. Illinois, supra, at 609 (Powell, J., concurring in part). The Court understandably does not try to characterize the police actions here as “egregious.”
Against this background, it is striking that the Court fails even to consider whether the benefits secured by application of the exclusionary rule in this case outweigh its obvious social costs. Perhaps the failure is due to the fact that this case arises not under the Fourth Amendment, but under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966), and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The Court apparently perceives the function of the exclusionary rule to be so different in these varying contexts that it must be mechanically and uncriti*423cally applied in all cases arising outside the Fourth Amendment.5
But this is demonstrably not the case where police conduct collides with Miranda's procedural safeguards rather than with the Fifth Amendment privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. Involuntary and coerced admissions are suppressed because of the inherent unreliability of a confession wrung from an unwilling suspect by threats, brutality, or other coercion. Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S., at 242; Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U. S. 618, 638 (1965); Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S., at 496-497 (Burger, C. J., concurring) ; Kaufman v. United States, 394 U. S. 217, 237 (1969) (Black, J., dissenting). We can all agree on “ ‘[t]he abhorrence of society to the use of involuntary confessions,’ ” Linkletter v. Walker, supra, at 638, and the need to preserve the integrity of the human personality and individual free will. Ibid.; Blackburn v. Alabama, 361 U. S. 199, 206-207 (1960).
But use of Williams’ disclosures and their fruits carries no risk whatever of unreliability, for the body was found where he said it would be found. Moreover, since the Court makes no issue of voluntariness, no dangers are posed to individual dignity or free will. Miranda’s safeguards are premised on presumed unreliability long associated with confessions extorted by brutality or threats; they are not personal constitutional rights, but are simply judicially created prophylactic measures. Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U. S. 433 (1974); Doyle *424v. Ohio, 426 U. S. 610, 617 (1976); Brown v. Illinois, supra, at 606 (Powell, J., concurring in part).
Thus, in cases where incriminating disclosures are voluntarily made without coercion, and hence not violative of the Fifth Amendment, but are obtained in violation of one of the Miranda prophylaxes, suppression is no longer automatic. Rather, we weigh the deterrent effect on unlawful police conduct, together with the normative Fifth Amendment justifications for suppression, against “the strong interest under any system of justice of making available to the trier of fact all concededly relevant and trustworthy evidence which either party seeks to adduce. . . . We also 'must consider society’s interest in the effective prosecution of criminals ....’” Michigan v. Tucker, supra, at 450.6 This individualized consideration or balancing process with respect to the exclusionary sanction is possible in this case, as in others, because Williams’ incriminating disclosures are not infected with any element of compulsion the Fifth Amendment forbids; nor, as noted earlier, does this evidence pose any danger of unreliability to the factfinding process. In short, there is no reason to exclude this evidence.
Similarly, the exclusionary rule is not uniformly implicated in the Sixth Amendment, particularly its pretrial aspects. We have held that
“the core purpose of the counsel guarantee was to assure 'Assistance’ at trial, when the accused was confronted with both the intricacies of the law and the advocacy of the public prosecutor.” United States v. Ash, 413 U. S. 300, 309 (1973).
Thus, the right to counsel is fundamentally a “trial” right necessitated by the legal complexities of a criminal prosecu*425tion and the need to offset, to the trier of fact, the power of the State as prosecutor. See Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, supra, at 241. It is now thought that modern law enforcement involves pretrial confrontations at which the defendant’s fate might effectively be sealed before the right of counsel could attach. In order to make meaningful the defendant’s opportunity to a fair trial and to assistance of counsel at that trial—the core purposes of the counsel guarantee—the Court formulated a per se rule guaranteeing counsel at what it has characterized as “critical” pretrial proceedings where substantial rights might be endangered. United States v. Wade, 388 U. S. 218, 224-227 (1967); Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, supra, at 238-239.
As we have seen in the Fifth Amendment setting, violations of prophylactic rules designed to safeguard other constitutional guarantees and deter impermissible police conduct need not call for the automatic suppression of evidence without regard to the purposes served by exclusion; nor do Fourth Amendment violations merit uncritical suppression of evidence. In other situations we decline to suppress eyewitness identifications which are the products of unnecessarily suggestive lineups or photo displays unless there is a “very substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification.” Simmons v. United States, 390 U. S. 377, 384 (1968). Recognizing that “ [i]t is the likelihood of misidentification which violates a defendant’s right to due process,” Neil v. Biggers, 409 U. S. 188, 198 (1972), we exclude evidence only when essential to safeguard the integrity of the truth-seeking process. The test, in short, is the reliability of the evidence.
So, too, in the Sixth Amendment sphere failure to have counsel in a pretrial setting should not lead to the “knee-jerk” suppression of relevant and reliable evidence. Just as even uncounseled “critical” pretrial confrontations may often be conducted fairly and not in derogation of Sixth Amendment values, Stovall v. Denno, 388 U. S. 293, 298-299 (1967), evi*426dence obtained in such proceedings should be suppressed only when its use would imperil the core values the Amendment was written to protect. Having extended Sixth Amendment concepts originally thought to relate to the trial itself to earlier periods when a criminal investigation is focused on a suspect, application of the drastic bar of exclusion should be approached with caution.
In any event, the fundamental purpose of the Sixth Amendment is to safeguard the fairness of the trial and the integrity of the factfinding process.7 In this case, where the evidence of how the child’s body was found is of unquestioned reliability, and since the Court accepts Williams’ disclosures as voluntary and uncoerced, there is no issue either of fairness or evidentiary reliability to justify suppression of truth. It appears suppression is mandated here for no other reason than the Court’s general impression that it may have a beneficial effect on future police conduct; indeed, the Court fails to say even that much in defense of its holding.
Thus, whether considered under Miranda or the Sixth Amendment, there is no more reason to exclude the evidence in this case than there was in Stone v. Powell;8 that holding was *427premised on the utter reliability of evidence sought to be suppressed, the irrelevancy of the constitutional claim to the criminal defendant's factual guilt or innocence, and the minimal deterrent effect of habeas corpus on police misconduct. This case, like Stone v. Powell, comes to us by way of habeas corpus after a fair trial and appeal in the state courts. Relevant factors in this case are thus indistinguishable from those in Stone, and from those in other Fourth Amendment cases suggesting a balancing approach toward utilization of the exclusionary sanction. Rather than adopting a formalistic analysis varying with the constitutional provision invoked,9 we should apply the exclusionary rule on the basis of its benefits and costs, at least in those cases where the police conduct at issue is far from being outrageous or egregious.
In his opinion, Mr. Justice Powell intimates that he agrees there is little sense in applying the exclusionary sanction where the evidence suppressed is “ 'typically reliable and often the most probative information bearing on the guilt or innocence of the defendant.' ” Ante, at 414. Since he seems to concede that the evidence in question is highly reliable and probative, his joining the Court’s opinion can be explained only by an insistence that the “question has not been presented in the briefs or arguments submitted to us.” Ibid. But petitioner has directly challenged the applicability of the exclusionary rule to this case, Brief for Petitioner 31-32, and has invoked principles of comity and federalism against reversal of the conviction. Id., at 69-73. Moreover, at oral argument—the first opportunity to do so—petitioner argued *428that our intervening decision in Stone v. Powell should be extended to this case, just as respondent argued that it should not. Tr. of Oral Arg. 26-27, 49-50.
At the least, if our intervening decision in Stone makes application of the exclusionary rule in this case an open question which “should be resolved only after the implications of such a ruling have been fully explored,” the plainly proper course is to vacate the judgment of the Court of Appeals and remand the case for reconsideration in light of that case. Indeed, only recently we actually applied the intervening decision of Washington v. Davis, 426 U. S. 229 (1976), to resolve the constitutional issue in Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U. S. 252 (1977). There, we found no difficulty in applying the intervening holding ourselves without a remand to give the Court of Appeals an opportunity to reconsider its holding; we reached the correct result directly, over Mr. Justice White's dissent urging a remand. Today, the Court declines either to apply the intervening case of Stone v. Powell, which Mr. Justice Powell admits may well be controlling, or to remand for reconsideration in light of that case; this is all the more surprising since Mr. Justice Powell wrote Stone v. Powell and today makes the fifth vote for the Court's judgment.
The bizarre result reached by the Court today recalls Mr. Justice Black’s strong dissent in Kaufman v. United States, 394 U. S., at 231. There, too, a defendant sought release after his conviction had been affirmed on appeal. There, as here, the defendant’s guilt was manifest, and was not called into question by the constitutional claims presented. This Court granted relief because it thought reliable evidence had been unconstitutionally obtained. Mr. Justice Black’s reaction, foreshadowing our long overdue holding in Stone v. Powell, serves as a fitting conclusion to the views I have expressed:
“It is seemingly becoming more and more difficult to gain acceptance for the proposition that punishment of *429the guilty is desirable, other things being equal. One commentator, who attempted in vain to dissuade this Court from today’s holding, thought it necessary to point out that there is ‘a strong public interest in convicting the guilty.’ . . .
". . . I would not let any criminal conviction become invulnerable to collateral attack where there is left remaining the probability or possibility that constitutional commands related to the integrity of the fact-finding process have been violated. In such situations society has failed to perform its obligation to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. But it is quite a different thing to permit collateral attack on a conviction after a trial according to due process when the defendant clearly is, by the proof and by his own admission, guilty of the crime charged. . . . In collateral attacks whether by habeas corpus or by § 2255 proceedings, I would always require that the convicted defendant raise the kind of constitutional claim that casts some shadow of a doubt on his guilt. This defendant is permitted to attack his conviction collaterally although he conceded at the trial and does not now deny that he had robbed the savings and loan association and although the evidence makes absolutely clear that he knew what he was doing. Thus, his guilt being certain, surely he does not have a constitutional right to get a new trial. I cannot possibly agree with the Court.” 394 U. S., at 240-242.
Like Mr. Justice Black in Kaufman, I cannot possibly agree with the Court.

 “The criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered. . . . A room is searched against the law, and the body of a murdered man is found. . . . The privacy of the home has been infringed, and the murderer goes free.” People v. Defore, 242 N. Y. 13, 21, 23-24, 160 N. E. 585, 587, 588 (1926).
The Court protests, ante, at 407 n. 12, that its holding excludes only “Williams’ incriminating statements themselves [as well as] any testimony describing his having led the police to the victim’s body,” thus hinting that successful retrial of this palpably guilty felon is realistically possible. Even if this were all, and the corpus delicti could be used to establish the fact and manner of the victim's death, the Court’s holding clearly bars all efforts to let the jury know how the police found the body. But the Court’s further—and remarkable—statement that “evidence of where the body was found and of its condition” could be admitted only “on the theory that the body would have been discovered in any event” makes *417clear that the Court is determined to keep the truth from the jurors pledged to find the truth. If all use of the corpus delicti is to be barred by the Court as “fruit of the poisonous tree” under Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U. S. 471 (1963), except on the unlikely theory suggested by the Court, the Court renders the prospects of doing justice in this case exceedingly remote.

 Such a paternalistic rule is particularly anomalous in the Sixth Amendment context, where this Court has only recently discovered an independent constitutional right of self-representation, allowing an accused the absolute right to proceed without a lawyer at trial, once he is aware of the consequences. Faretta v. California, 422 U. S. 806 (1975).

 Paradoxically, in light of the result reached, the Court acknowledges that Williams repeatedly stated: “When I get to Des Moines and see Mr. McKnight, I am going to tell you the whole story.” Read in context it is plain that Williams was saying he intended to confess. The Court then goes on to hold, in effect, that Williams could not change his mind until he reached Des Moines.

 One familiar example of this Court's unwillingness to apply the prophylactic exclusionary rule beyond its natural scope is the requirement that evidence seized in violation of the rights of another person may not be challenged by a defendant whose own rights were not invaded. Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165, 174-175 (1969).
Another is the rule that the “taint” of a constitutional violation may be vitiated by later events so that evidence which would not have been obtained but for the constitutional violation may yet be admissible. Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U. S. 471 (1963); see Brown v. Illinois, 422 U. S. 590 (1975).
Both these limitations on the use of the exclusionary rule are inconsistent with its deterrent rationale. If courts wished to enhance the deterrent effect on law enforcement officers, all evidence whose seizure could be traced directly to any constitutional violation would be suppressed. It is evident that our refusal to expand the rule in this fashion represents a considered balancing between “the additional benefits of extending the exclusionary rule” and “the public interest in prosecuting those ac*422cused of crime and having them acquitted or convicted on the basis of all the evidence which exposes the truth.” Alderman v. United States, swpra, at 175; see United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338, 348 (1974).

 Indeed, if this were a Fourth Amendment case our course would be clear; only last Term, in Stone v. Powell, we held that application of the exclusionary rule in federal habeas corpus has such a minimal deterrent effect on law enforcement officials that habeas relief should not be granted on the ground that unconstitutionally seized evidence was introduced at trial. Since the quantum of deterrence provided by federal habeas does not vary with the constitutional provision at issue, it appears that the Court sees fundamental, though unarticulated, differences in the exclusionary sanction when it is applied in other contexts.

 Statements obtained in violation of Miranda have long been used for impeachment purposes. Oregon v. Hass, 420 U. S. 714 (1975); Harris v. New York, 401 U. S. 222 (1971). See also Walder v. United States, 347 U. S. 62 (1954).

 Indeed, we determine whether pretrial proceedings are “critical” by asking whether counsel is there needed to protect the fairness of the trial. See United States v. Ash, 413 U. S. 300, 322 (1973) (Stewart, J., concurring); Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S. 218, 239 (1973). It is also clear that the danger of factual error was the moving force behind the counsel guarantee in such cases as United States v. Wade, 388 U. S. 218 (1967) (post-indictment lineups).

 This is a far cry from Massiah v. United States, 377 U. S. 201 (1964). Massiah’s statements had no independent indicia of reliability as do respondent’s. Moreover, Massiah was unaware that he was being interrogated by ruse and had not been advised of his right to counsel.
Here, as Mr. Justice Blackmun has noted, there was no interrogation of Williams in the sense that term was used in Massiah, Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 U. S. 478 (1964), or Miranda. That the detective’s statement appealed to Williams’ conscience is not a sufficient reason to equate it to a police station grilling. It could well be that merely driving on the road *427and passing the intersection where he had turned off to bury the body might have produced the same result without any suggestive comments.

 Clearly there will be many cases where evidence obtained in violation of right-to-counsel rules is inadmissible, either for reasons related to the normative purposes of the Sixth Amendment or to the deterrence of unlawful police conduct. But this is, on the Court’s facts, not such a case, and it hardly furthers reasoned analysis to lump it into an undifferentiated conceptual category for reasons which do not apply to it.