Court Opinion

ID: 9752702
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 18:29:15.599152+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:21.136904
License: Public Domain

KELLEHER, Justice,
dissenting.
I fully subscribe to the sentiments expressed by the Chief Justice. However, in view of the substantial inroads made today by the majority on the fundamental right against self-incrimination, I feel compelled to offer the following comments.
At the time of his arrest during the mid-afternoon of June 29, 1977, Brian Burbine was a twenty-one-year-old fifth-grade dropout. Although he now appears before us as a convicted murderer, when he was arrested that afternoon by the Cranston police and subsequently taken to the bowels of the Cranston police headquarters where the detective bureau is located, he was entitled to the plenary protection of the constitutional guarantees against compelled self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the Federal Constitution and in the declaration of rights of the Rhode Island Constitution, specifically, art. I, sec. 13. The procedural safeguards delineated in the Miranda case were designed to effectuate such guarantees. State v. Perez, R.I., 422 A.2d 913, 914-15 (1980). I for one do not believe they should be so easily evaded as they were in the case at bar.
With seemingly unquestioned acceptance, my colleagues adopt the trial justice’s incongruous findings that public defender Allegra Munson did in fact call the Cranston detective division and offer to be available should they wish to question Burbine but “that there was no conspiracy or collusion on the part of the Cranston Police Department to secrete this defendant from his attorney” despite the denials by all five of the officers involved in Burbine’s interrogation of any knowledge of such a call. According to the testimony of these officers, Detective Ferranti and Lieutenant Ricard were the only Cranston police officers on duty in the detective division that evening. I have already alluded to the fact that the division is a self-contained unit within the department located in the basement of the Cranston station. The only other law-enforcement personnel present in this area during the critical hours of interrogation that night were Providence officers Captain Wilson, Lieutenant Gannon, and Detective Trafford.
In describing the system for routing incoming calls, the Cranston officers indicated that all such calls are first received by a main switchboard operator situated on the second floor of the building. Calls relating to a specific suspect in police custody would be relayed either to the officer on duty in charge of all department operations or to the detective division. The officer in charge of all departmental operations that evening testified that he had not received any calls regarding Burbine. He further indicated that if Ms. Munson had requested, as she testified, that her call be transferred to the detective division, it would have been routed there directly. I find it incredible on the record before us that someone other than one of the five officers who were the only persons present in the detective division, someone whom no one seems to be able to identify, could have answered Ms. Munson’s call. The representations made to her that Burbine was indeed in the custody of the Cranston police but that he would not be questioned or placed in a lineup that evening, that they were “through with him for the night,” and that he would be arraigned in District Court the following morning dispel any notion that the individual responding to Ms. Munson’s inquiry was but an unwitting custodian of the telephone on behalf of the detective division.
This court on numerous occasions has stated that a trial justice’s factual findings in matters such as were presented at the suppression hearing will be disturbed only if they are clearly wrong. Findings will be classified as clearly wrong if, after reviewing all the evidence, this court is “left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed.” State v. Amado, R.I., 424 A.2d 1057, 1062 (1981); State v. LaRosa, 112 R.I. 571, 576, 313 A.2d 375, 377 *39(1974). The no-collusion finding, when cast in the light of all the evidence adduced at the suppression hearing, in my opinion was clearly wrong.
By its ruling today, the majority has made every police station throughout the state a potential privileged sanctuary for law-enforcement personnel in which interrogation of a suspect can proceed uninterrupted while the attorney hired by the accused’s family is rendered powerless to do anything to ensure that the constitutional rights of someone’s family member during such period of in-custody questioning are protected. Consequently, the police gain in their powers of interrogation12 as the thrust of the Miranda safeguards go out the window, and the populace is left to wonder who responded to attorney Munson’s inquiry and told her that there was no necessity to make herself available because the police were through with Burbine for the night and there would be no interrogation or lineup.
The majority’s footnote 5, which attempts to eradicate any trace of collusion by suggesting the likelihood of confusion on the part of the members of the Cranston Police Department, is ingenious. However, ingenuity is no substitute for evidence. The record is devoid of any evidence to support the confusion theory. Not one of the police officers testified as to the existence of any confusion within the confines of the detective division. Rather, they were insistent that the call had never been made.
At the suppression hearing, the issue was very simple. Ms. Munson testified that her conversation with the detective division occurred at 8:15 p. m.; however, every detective who was in the division headquarters at 8:15 p. m. testified that no such call was made. The trial justice had a choice: he could have believed Ms. Munson or the police. He believed Ms. Munson and, in an effort to emulate Solomon, found no collusion, a conclusion entirely without any evi-dentiary support.
It is my belief that when law-enforcement authorities have failed to admit counsel to a person in custody or to inform the person of the attorney’s efforts to contact him, they cannot thereafter rely upon a suspect’s “waiver” for the use against him of his subsequent uncounseled statements or evidence garnered as a result of such statements. This rule protects the suspect’s rights under both the Federal and State Constitutions not to testify against himself, and in the event the United States Supreme Court takes the position now espoused by the majority, I would hold that the principle cited above would still be applicable under the pertinent provisions of the declaration of rights embodied in our state’s constitution.
A few observations are warranted with regard to the fears expressed by my brother Weisberger that requiring law-enforcement personnel to inform suspects in their custody of calls by attorneys hired by or contacted by the suspects’ families will encourage defense counsel and public defenders to forward the names of their recidivist clients to the various police departments throughout the state with instructions that they are to be notified in the event a client previously identified is arrested. The factual situation before us is, as the Chief Justice explains in his dissent, a far cry from that depicted in the majority’s hyperbole. The hypothesized onslaught of general requests by unsolicited defense counsel to be notified should an individual whose name appears among a long list of names previously submitted by counsel to the police be arrested at some uncertain date in the future is precluded by *40the court’s decisions in Cline and Fuentes, both supra. Moreover, I find it significant in this respect that the Providence police seemed to have had no difficulty in contacting and procuring the presence of Burbine’s counsel when it either suited their convenience or served their purposes.
During interrogation at the Providence station the morning following his arrest and after the two confessions had been obtained at the Cranston station, an officer of the Providence police department called the Office of the Public Defender to request the presence of Burbine’s counsel at a police lineup.13 The officer and a staff member of the public defender’s office testified that the call was made at about 12:05 p. m. on June 30. The third incriminating statement was obtained from Burbine that day at about 12:30 p. m. If the Miranda procedural safeguards are to have any meaning at all, their invocation cannot be at the discretion of the police when it is convenient for them to do so or advances their own purposes.
With all due respect to the majority, in my opinion its adherence to this unsubstantiated floodgates argument of “jailhouse lawyering” has blinded it to the harsh realities confronting an arrested suspect. Perhaps even more disturbing, the court’s ruling sanctions the erection of an impenetrable wall between the arrested suspect during the critical hours of in-custody interrogation and the suspect’s family, oft-times the only supporting link the suspect may have at this time to the world outside the hostile environment of the police station.
I have one final remark to make. Mrs. Justice Murray’s concurrence reminds us that the Office of the Public Defender first came into existence in 1941. An examination of the pertinent Rhode Island Manual indicates that in 1941 the public defender’s professional staff consisted of two individuals, the public defender and an assistant. The Rhode Island Manual for 1977 reveals that at the time of Burbine’s arrest the public defender’s office consisted of the public defender, seventeen assistant public defenders, a chief investigator, and six assistant investigators. The growth in this office reflects the profound changes that have occurred within the criminal-law field since the implementation of the 1966 landmark Miranda decision. When the Legislature first established the office and described the duty of the public defender to “act as attorney for indigent defendants” upon referral by the Superior Court, it could not have anticipated the expansion of a suspect’s prearraignment, in-custody constitutional rights mandated by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda. The rigid and mechanistic interpretation applied to G.L. 1956 (1981 Reenactment) § 12-15-3 by my sister Murray completely ignores this development of constitutional law with respect to in-custody interrogation and the procedural safeguards crafted in Miranda to which all persons are entitled irrespective of their financial status.
Evidently, the Providence police had no difficulty accepting the public defender as Burbine’s duly authorized counsel even though no referral had been made by the Superior Court relating to the homicide ease when they called the Office of the Public Defender to procure the presence of counsel at a police-station lineup. I would also point out that it is highly improbable that Burbine had enjoyed a ballooning of his financial assets since his previous completion of a financial questionnaire that entitled him to representation by public defender Casparian on charges that were still pending at the time of his arrest on June 29, 1977. Moreover, it is obvious that any check on Burbine’s current net worth could not have been performed that evening when public defender Munson called to provide counsel to Burbine during the critical hours of interrogation.
*41Justice Murray’s view, if followed to its logical conclusion, would create a dual system of justice — one for indigent persons and one for persons fortunate enough to afford private counsel. Those able to retain private counsel would be assured of the presence of their respective attorneys at the police station to serve as a buffer in the oppressive atmosphere of in-custody interrogation and to provide continuous legal advice whereas those who cannot afford private counsel would be forced to face the oppressive police-station atmosphere alone without any advice from counsel until such time as they were brought before a court for referral to the public defender’s office.
Such a dual system, in my opinion, is a result never contemplated or intended by the General Assembly. General Laws 1956 (1981 Reenactment) § 12-15-9 places the responsibility of determining eligibility for the services of a public defender squarely with the Office of the Public Defender. When this provision is read in pari materia with § 12-15-3, there is nothing inconsistent with a preliminary determination by that office of an arrested individual’s eligibility based upon the individual’s oral representation of financial status or, as in this case, that of representations of a family member, so as to afford indigent persons the advice of counsel during in-custody interrogation to which they are just as much constitutionally entitled as those able to hire private counsel.
I respectfully dissent.

. Mr. Justice Jackson, in discussing “the right of interrogation,” realized that preserving the power of interrogation presented “a real dilemma in a free society” because subjecting one without counsel to questioning presented a real peril to individual freedom whereas bringing in a lawyer impeded solution of the crime because “any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to police under any circumstances.” Watts v. Indiana, 338 U.S. 49, 59, 69 S.Ct. 1347, 1358, 93 L.Ed. 1801, 1808-09 (1949). The learned jurist, when he expressed those thoughts in 1949, was obviously unaware that some seventeen years later the Supreme Court with its Miranda pronouncements would opt to buttress the constitutional guarantee against self-incrimination.

. The Providence police gave conflicting versions concerning the reason an attorney was called. One officer stated that Burbine had requested an attorney. Another officer stated that Burbine did not want an attorney but the officer’s supervisors insisted that Burbine have counsel present during the lineup.