Court Opinion

ID: 9450441
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:48:04.313431+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:19.493322
License: Public Domain

FAHY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
Appellant was arrested on probable cause at approximately 12:40 o’clock a. m. His claim of an alibi was then checked by taking him to the house of the complaining witness who was involved in the claim. After this appellant was taken to the police station along with a co-arrestee. Notwithstanding the time consumed in checking the alibi, *786after the arrest, the officers testified they arrived with appellant at the police station at about one or 1:10 o’clock a. m. Appellant should then have been booked and taken before a committing magistrate, in accordance with Rule 5(a), Fed. R.Crim.P. If not, the intervening time was not to be utilized in secret interrogation by the officers leading to self-incriminating statements to be used at his trial. The fact is appellant was not booked until 9:55 a. m., shortly after which he was taken before a magistrate.
Although evidence of the Government was to the effect that appellant made the oral admissions used at his trial within a short time after being taken to the police station, the Government’s own evidence also shows that he was subjected during the remaining hours of the night to lengthy questioning and that the incriminating statements, at whatever time they were made, were elicited as a result of secret interrogation by the police after he was taken to the station, placed in a separate room there, questioned in detail, confronted with tape recordings used to implicate him, and after his efforts to exonerate himself from criminal complicity were explicitly rejected and countered by the interrogating officer as inconsistent with information in the latter’s possession. Thus appellant was not taken before a committing magistrate “as quickly as possible” in accordance with Rule 5(a) as construed in Mallory v. United States, 354 U.S. 449, 77 S.Ct. 1356 (1957), but was “taken to police headquarters in order to carry out a process of inquiry that lends itself, even if not so designed, to eliciting damaging statements,” a process condemned in Mallory, supra at 454, 77 S.Ct. at 1359 and which renders the resulting statements inadmissible. And see Spriggs v. United States, 118 U.S.App.D.C. 248, 335 F.2d 283 (1964).
Accordingly, I would reverse and remand for a new trial in which the challenged statements would be excluded as inadmissible because inconsistent with the Mallory rule.