Court Opinion

ID: 9478277
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:44:41.957904+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:20.157533
License: Public Domain

MIKVA, Circuit Judge,
concurring specially:
I confront at the outset an issue that the parties wish to avoid by stipulation: whether, as an alien, Yunis can challenge interrogation outside the territory of the United States on the grounds that the questioning violated the American Constitution. As has been noted, the FBI treated Yunis from the moment of his arrest as if he enjoyed the rights guaranteed to American citizens; Yunis understandably accepts that premise. This court, however, is not so free to enter into constitutional hypo-theticals. It is well established that a court should not adjudicate constitutional issues unless they are essential to resolving the case. See, e.g., Harmon v. Brucker, 355 U.S. 579, 581, 78 S.Ct. 433, 434, 2 L.Ed.2d 503 (1958) (per curiam). If fifth amendment rights do not extend to aliens who are interrogated on the high seas, this court need not determine whether Yunis gave a valid waiver of those rights.
As the trial judge noted, the Supreme Court has never determined whether aliens are entitled to the protections of our Bill of Rights outside the United States. See L. Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the Constitution 500-01 n. 69 (1972). The law in this court is also unsettled on the point. See, e.g., Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan, 770 F.2d 202, 208 (D.C.Cir.1985) (declining to “reach the question whether the protections of the Constitution extend to nonciti-zens abroad”). The trial judge nevertheless concluded that the fifth amendment did apply to the government’s interrogation of Yunis on board the Butte. In reaching this conclusion, the judge asserted that a “majority of circuits” have “required the United States government to conform to constitutional proscriptions when acting overseas.” Yunis, 681 F.Supp. at 917 (footnote omitted). Indeed, the judge cited Supreme Court language to the effect that the Constitution restrains the federal government “ ‘whenever and wherever the sovereign power of that government is exerted.’ ” Id. (quoting Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U.S. 298, 312, 42 S.Ct. 343, 348, 66 L.Ed. 627 (1922)); see also United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 856 F.2d 1214 (9th Cir.1988) (fourth amendment applies to search of nonresident alien’s home abroad).
We need not decide whether the trial judge is right as to the constitutional strictures imposed on our government when it acts against aliens outside the territory of the United States. My analysis of the constitutional issue is somewhat different from the district court’s, but I reach the same conclusion: Yunis’ confession must be suppressed if it was obtained in violation of the fifth amendment.
At least since the landmark decision in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 456, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), courts have protected the right against self-incrimination primarily by circumscribing police interrogation. It bears reemphasizing, however, that the fifth amendment’s text does not refer to custodial interrogation. Rather, it focuses on the period of trial and prosecution, proclaiming that “[n]o person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”
The Supreme Court has explained its extension of the self-incrimination clause to cover testimony given in situations not literally encompassed by the amendment’s text in this fashion:
[A] defendant’s right not to be compelled to testify against himself at his own trial might be practically nullified if the prosecution could previously have required him to give evidence against himself before a grand jury....
In more recent years this concern— that compelled disclosures might be used against a person at a later criminal trial —has been extended to cases involving police interrogation.
Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U.S. 433, 440-41, 94 S.Ct. 2357, 2362, 41 L.Ed.2d 182 (1974). As this statement makes clear, the focus of the fifth amendment protection continues to be the use of compelled, self-incriminatory evidence against the defendant at trial.
*971This fact was made clear in one of the Supreme Court’s earliest decisions enforcing the self-incrimination clause. In Brarn v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 18 S.Ct. 183, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897), the Court excluded a confession from an American trial, notwithstanding that the coercive interrogation was conducted by a foreign police officer in a foreign country. As the Ninth Circuit subsequently explained this result,
0t is not until the statement is received in evidence that the violation of the Fifth Amendment becomes complete. For this reason we believe that if the statement is not voluntarily given, whether given to a United States or foreign officer — the defendant has been compelled to be a witness against himself when the statement is admitted.
Brulay v. United States, 383 F.2d 345, 349 n. 5 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 389 U.S. 986, 88 S.Ct. 469, 19 L.Ed.2d 478 (1967); cf. United States v. Wolf, 813 F.2d 970, 972 n. 3 (9th Cir.1987) (fifth amendment may not require exclusion when confession is obtained abroad by foreign police, without involvement of American officials). I conclude, then, that the circumstances surrounding Yunis’ interrogation by FBI agents aboard the Butte should be subjected to fifth amendment scrutiny.
My conclusion is reinforced by precedents involving compelled testimony under grants of immunity. For example, in New Jersey v. Portash, 440 U.S. 450, 99 S.Ct. 1292, 59 L.Ed.2d 501 (1979), a criminal defendant had declined to testify in his own behalf because the trial judge had ruled that defendant’s prior grand jury testimony (given under a grant of immunity) could be used to impeach him on the witness stand. In overturning the defendant’s conviction, the Court noted that “[testimony given in response to a grant of legislative immunity is the essence of coerced testimony,” id. at 459, 99 S.Ct. at 1297, since the immunity wipes away any legal right of the witness to refuse to testify. Accordingly, the prior testimony could not even be used to impeach, because “a defendant’s compelled statements ... may not be put to any testimonial use whatever against him in a criminal trial.” Id.
I think a strong analogy can be drawn between cases like Portash and the case sub judice. If it is true that an alien who is interrogated outside the territorial United States cannot at that point claim fifth amendment rights, then he is in much the same position as a grand jury witness who has been granted immunity and therefore has no fifth amendment ground for refusing to testify. However, both persons — if compelled to give self-incriminating statements by an agent or institution of our government — must have the right to exclude those statements from any subsequent proceeding against them in American court. Nor can there be any doubt that, once Yunis is in an American courtroom, he is protected by the privilege against self-incrimination despite his alien. status. See Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228, 238, 16 S.Ct. 977, 981, 41 L.Ed. 140 (1896) (“it must be concluded that all persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to the protection guaranteed by th[e fifth and sixth] amendments”).
I conclude that Yunis’ confession is subject to fifth amendment scrutiny and therefore our review of the trial judge’s ground for suppressing the confession is mandatory. I do not agree with my colleagues that the mere stipulation of the parties allows us to avoid the uncomfortable but necessary constitutional analysis.