Court Opinion

ID: 9460750
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:59:28.708292+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:46.059672
License: Public Domain

COFFIN, Chief Judge
(dissenting).
As I read Simmons, supra, and the employment cases, Lefkowitz., Garrity, and Spevack, a principle emerges which, in my opinion, should control the instant case: the government should not be in a position where it might be tempted by potentially coercive means to short-cut its broad investigatory responsibilities and its obligation, if it wishes to punish an individual, to “produce the evidence against him by its own independent labors”. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 460, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 1620, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). Regardless of the government’s good intentions in requiring a defendant to establish standing under the Fourth Amendment, or disqualifying contractors and removing officials from office who might be bribe-takers (and who have failed to offer information which might dispel that suspicion), these circumstances carry with them too much danger that government power to grant or deny rights and privileges will be used coercively. The safeguards which courts have created around the exercise of the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination are essentially bulwarks against abuse of the government’s coercive power.
In the instant ease, the government’s ability to time the violation hearing, with its lower burden of proof, so that it comes before the criminal trial on the same charge, enables the government to gain evidence for the criminal trial the easy way. The right to be heard personally in the deferred sentence violation proceeding — the right to explain one’s “side of the story” — has been thought so important to an alleged violator that Rhode Island elevated it to a constitutional requirement a decade ago, Harris v. Langlois, 98 R.I. 387, 202 A.2d 288 (1964). Yet, with the government in control of the timing of the two proceedings, an alleged violator can explain his “side of the story” only by opening him*106self to self-incrimination in the subsequent criminal proceeding. Control over the timing of the two proceedings is as potentially coercive as control over removal from office or disqualification from public bidding. The fact that in this ease the petitioner was subjected to a twelve year sentence for his violation while being later acquitted of the crime itself illustrates the temptations facing the government in being able to accomplish by a lower burden of proof what it would risk in a criminal trial. I see little inconvenience to the state: bail conditions or restrictions are available for the parolee awaiting trial; should the state wish to press ahead on a violation hearing in advance of trial, it could do so if it immunized the parolee for his testimony — all it would be sacrificing would be evidence which would normally be unavailable to it.
The pressures on the parolee, the latent possibility of manipulation of timing, and the minimal inconvenience placed on the state are such that I would affirm the opinion of the district court, with the proviso that the state be given the choice of providing use immunity or postponing the violation hearing until after the criminal trial.