Court Opinion

ID: 9624645
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 07:12:33.326258+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:07:00.607510
License: Public Domain

Hale, J.
(concurring in the result)—I concur in the result of the majority opinion and would affirm the conviction on the elemental premise that the defendant’s guilt was overwhelmingly proved without perceptible error. It occurs to me that this is the best possible basis for an affirmance.
The reason why defendant’s incriminating statements to the store employees were properly received in evidence is that all material and relevant statements of a damaging nature made by a sane person, immediately before, after, or during the commission of a crime, are admissible as *374admission against interest or as verbal acts constituting a part of the res gestae. This has been the law of evidence for several centuries and will remain so, I presume, for it is difficult to imagine a more convincing proof of guilt than a well corroborated confession or a series of damaging admissions against one’s own interests.
Aside from concurring in the result, I agree with that part of the majority’s thesis that Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694, 86 Sup. Ct. 1602 (1966), is completely inapplicable for, as the majority makes clear, the statements sought to be excluded under Miranda were made to employees of the hardware store and not to police officers. But, since the accused was neither undergoing police interrogation nor in custody of police officers at the time he made the statements, a restatement of the so-called Miranda doctrine, in my judgment, contributes little to the rationale for affirmance and may lay down obiter dicta that will ultimately prove mischievous.
As I see it, Miranda—except for its inapplicability—has no relevance to Valpredo’s predicament, and to make it the focus of discussion compounds the burgeoning mystique of that case. Accordingly, in my view, defendant’s statements to the hardware store’s employees were properly received without reference to Miranda under the familiar and long-established rules of evidence governing admissions against interest.
I find myself at odds, too, with what the majority opinion characterizes as the hope of Miranda, in saying that Miranda hoped to eliminate those confessions which are the product of an emotionally impaired state of mind, or because the accused was incapable of resisting the overpowering force of government. If the accused had been incapable of resisting the overpowering force of government, he would not have stolen the pistols in the first place because the overpowering forces of government would have kept him from them. Then, too, I think that anyone caught redhanded in the act of stealing pistols in a hardware store should be expected to experience a marked degree of what the *375majority describes as emotional impairment. This temporary affliction—a compound of guilt, consternation, embarrassment and trepidation, and maybe even remorse— I think would hardly prevent the accused from speaking the truth—even though the judiciary may proclaim otherwise.
Also, I see some pitfalls in the majority’s characterization of Miranda that “It was conceived by the court that a legally uneducated and unrepresented accused is no match for the skilled examining officer in the compelling atmosphere of the police interrogation room.” Does Miranda apply where police officers are interrogating another policeman, a detective, a lawyer, a law professor—or, heaven forbid—a judge or an experienced criminal thoroughly versed in his rights? I think it questionable to suggest an overmatch in such instances.
Due process of law does not, in my judgment, require or authorize the judiciary to compel a fair match. If the purpose of Miranda was to equalize the contest between the police and suspect—-assuming, arguendo, only that courts possess this power to equalize things—then this doubtful ambition would be achieved more readily by a judicial requirement that stupid police officers be assigned to conduct the interrogation. I find nothing in either the federal or state constitutions which purports to equalize the contest between police and suspect or that the interests of due process prevents highly intelligent officers from being detailed to interrogate less intelligent persons suspected of crime, or that the suspect is constitutionally entitled to be queried by officers of equal or less intelligence than himself.
With several parts of the majority opinion, however, including the result, I do agree. I agree that Miranda rests largely on judicial assumptions as to why persons confess; but these assumptions, I think, are the product of little aptitude and less genuine information. The psychologically impelling power of authority mentioned by the majority as the rationale supporting Miranda, it seems to me, is largely a figment of the judiciary’s imagination—and one *376completely repudiated every day in nearly every jailhouse and police station by both novice and hardened criminals who, as the saying goes, steadfastly “refuse to give the police the time of day.”
If the courts are prepared to say as a matter of fact and law that when an accused, although in police custody but knowing full well that he may remain silent and that the police are powerless to harm him in any way if he does remain silent, and that the police cannot compel him to speak; and he is subjected to no physical force, pain, threats, drugs, or promises of reward whatever; and he suffers no physical discomforts arising from high or. low temperatures, sleeplessness, hunger or thirst, but who, because of intelligent interrogation from the police and confronted by damning fragments of evidence, confesses or makes damaging admissions—if it be a judicial rule that the accused’s will has been thus overcome and his confession is to be held involuntary as a matter of law—then, in my judgment, we have entered upon a wonderful world of judicial nonsense bearing little connection with reality and the sooner out of it the better.
With the appellate judiciary’s current essay into the field of psychology, how long will the state’s right to cross-examination survive? If a defendant, knowing full well his right to remain silent, nevertheless, elects to testify in open court, is he not subject to an even greater psychological coercion than when in the station house? How can the courts rationally hold that one’s will has been overcome by what the courts call psychological coercion in the police station, and then, at trial, permit the same person to be subjected to the most grueling and penetrating cross-examination in open court when the witness well knows that, if he refuses to talk, the austere figure in the black robe on the elevated bench will consign him to close confinement for contempt, or if he speaks falsely to a long term of imprisonment for perjury?