Court Opinion

ID: 9843059
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:25:28.83471+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:14:27.148334
License: Public Domain

*434GOODWIN, Circuit Judge,
(dissenting separately):
This case is en banc because a majority of our active judges believed that an important Sixth Amendment question, the right to counsel, may have been incorrectly dealt with by all the other courts, including our original panel, that have examined the question.
In the state court system the primary focus appears to have been on the question of Fifth Amendment voluntariness. The most troublesome question now is whether Collazo called the officers back on his own motion, or because he felt “pressured” by Officer Destro to do so. In this connection, the majority's footnotes carry most of the burden.
For example, footnote 2 says that California admits that “pressuring” is an appropriate characterization of Officer Des-tro’s tactics. I agree, but that leads to the next footnote.
Footnote 3 sets up the state trial court’s merger of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and helps to explain the resulting confusion. The state court listened to the tapes, found the confession “voluntary beyond any reasonable doubt,” and then disposed of the right-to-counsel issue with the throw-away line that there was “no taint whatsoever to his ultimate statement.”
Footnote 8 takes up the heart of the matter: Did Destro’s “pressuring” cause Collazo to change his mind about wanting a lawyer? That is what this case is about.
Footnote 5 answers the question left open in footnote 8. It holds that the pressure mentioned in footnote 2 carries over and taints Collazo’s statements.
Reasonable minds can and do differ about when a federal court should say as a matter of law that the state courts were wrong in their voluntariness analysis. As far back as Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. 368, 84 S.Ct. 1774, 12 L.Ed.2d 908 (1964), in the separate opinion of Mr. Justice Black, we find the doctrine emerging that the federal courts should “reexamine the facts to be certain that there has been no constitutional violation, and our inquiry ... cannot be cut off by fact findings at the trial level.” 378 U.S. 368 at 408, 84 S.Ct. 1774 at 1797.
Reasonable minds can and do differ about whether a federal court should say as a matter of law that the state courts were wrong in applying Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981), to this case. The state trial court and reviewing courts found in effect that Collazo initiated the second conversation and was not coerced into giving up his right to counsel.
It is not clear, however, that the state courts focused on this question. The majority finds that the state courts were wrong, and that Destro’s remark tainted Collazo’s later conversations. The case boils down to the question of “taint.”
I have come to the conclusion that in this case, the state trial court probably reached the right result for the wrong reason. Col-lazo knowingly called back the officers, not because he was “menaced” or coerced, but because he apparently thought he could improve his situation by appearing to cooperate. I doubt that Collazo was brooding for three hours about how much worse off he would be with a lawyer than without one. Collazo is an informer who made the perpetrator’s common mistake of thinking he could outsmart the police by telling them his side of the story.
I am content to take his taped confession at face value. There is no possibility in this case of an innocent man spending time in jail because of the overriding of his will by the comment of Officer Destro. Accordingly, I would vote to affirm the denial of the writ.