Court Opinion

ID: 9547860
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:53:21.699974+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:18:09.903895
License: Public Domain

GILLETTE, P. J.,
concurring.
I join in the opinion of the court, which I believe is compelled by State v. Wolfe, 61 Or App 409, 657 P2d 227 (1983) and State v. Mendacino, 288 Or 231, 603 P2d 1376 (1979). I write separately to add two observations.
1. I regret the introduction of the metaphor of an escaping feline (“the cat is out of the bag”) into our legal lexicon. I recognize that it is a piece of literary cleverness from relatively ancient judicial roots (United States v. Bayer, 331 US 532, 540, 67 S Ct 1394, 91 L Ed 1654 (1947)), but mere age does not make it worthy. The fact is that we have used the metaphor as a short-hand description of a particular psychological phenomenon — a prisoner’s lowered resistance to confessing a second time, once a first confession has been given — to the extent that we now seem to think that this phenomenon must occur in every case. The metaphor now rules where analysis was once sovereign. However, the overthrow occurred too long ago for a dissent to serve any purpose now, so I concur.
*679Law enforcement authorities should take a hint: delaying service of a warrant in order to get a defendant to confess may seem cute or even useful, but it is counter-productive. The present state of the law seems to be that a defendant in such a case is best served if he responds to prearrest questioning, because doing so immunizes him from later effectively waiving his Miranda rights. A number of confessions are going to be lost from the bag, right along with the cat, unless this police practice is changed.