Court Opinion

ID: 9679629
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 07:00:38.064151+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:17.105376
License: Public Domain

*582NUGENT, Presiding Judge,
concurring.
I concur with the affirmance of defendant Smart’s conviction for the simple reason that if Lillian Smart were tried one hundred times on this evidence, with or without Detective Cosgrove's testimony, she would in my opinion be convicted one hundred times. I am convinced that the error committed in not striking the offending testimony or in refusing to declare a mistrial is harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967), and that the risk of confusion is not so great as to upset the balance of advantage. Shepard v. United States, 290 U.S. 96, 104, 54 S.Ct. 22, 25, 78 L.Ed. 196 (1933).
Nevertheless, Detective Cosgrove’s testimony was a violation of Ms. Smart’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
. The Miranda warning that she was given advised Ms. Smart that she had a right to remain silent. In its concluding words that warning further advised her in the plainest of language that she could “stop talking at any time.”
The transcript of Detective Cosgrove’s testimony makes abundantly clear that that is exactly what Ms. Smart did — she decided to “stop talking” as she had a constitutional right to do. She chose to remain silent as she had just been advised she could do lest anything she said could and would, as the Miranda warning advises, be used against her, and at trial the detective volunteered that she “refused to make any comment.”
The entire testimony of Detective Cos-grove took only seventy lines of the transcript at twenty-five lines to the page. His testimony about the questions he asked her reads as follows:
Q. Can you tell us what questions you asked of her and what her responses were?
A. OK. I asked her if she was, in fact, the same person who had been in both jewelry stores.
Q. By both jewelry stores, what stores are you referring to?
A. I believe it would be the Helzberg stores or Zale’s. I would have to get a report to look. The one at the Bannister Mall and the one at the Ward Parkway shopping center. I can recall that.
Q. What else did you ask her?
A. I asked her if she, in fact, had been holding the rings when the rings were taken from her hand.
Q. And what did she say?
A. She responded yes to both of them; that, yes, she had been in both jewelry stores and had been holding rings when they were snatched from her hand.
Q. Did she make any statement about whether ór not she took the rings out of the store?
Á. Yes, she did.
Q. What did she state?
A. When she was — you know, she asked — she says, Why am I here? During this part of the conversation, Why am I here? And I said — again explained to her, you have been charged with stealing because of the thefts of these two rings. She says, You can’t charge me with anything. I did not take them from the store.
Q. Did you have any photographs laying on your desk at the time?
A. Yes, I did. I had four photographs of parties lying on the interview table.
Q. And I’m not interested in who they were, but did they have any relationship at all to the defendant?
A. I had them laying there as part of the investigation. She asked me, Why do you have these photographs laying on the table? And at that time I asked her, Do you know any of these people? She refused to make any comment.
So far as the record on appeal shows, that terminated the interrogation.
Defense counsel objected at once and moved a mistrial and an admonishment, both of which the court denied. The prosecutor assured the judge that he had warned the detective not to say anything about her commenting on anything, to give only her answers.
*583In a factual situation quite similar to this, the Supreme Court of Missouri held that the trial court committed reversible error in overruling the defendant’s motion to strike the police officer’s testimony, “He refused to make a statement.” State v. Vainikos, 366 S.W.2d 423, 427 (Mo.1963) (en banc). There, at trial defendant testified that he had placed the pistol in question on the floor of the car where it could be seen and that he carried it in the car for protection as he made his collections for his employer. On cross-examination the prosecutor asked him if he had told that to the arresting officer, and the defendant said that he had not. The prosecutor called the officer in rebuttal and the following exchange took place:
Q. Officer, after you placed Vainikos under arrest and found ... the pistol, did you ask him why he was carrying it?
A. Yes, sir.
MR. KOSTER: I have no further questions.
MR. LEE: No questions.
MR. KOSTER: Did he give you an answer, Officer?
A. He refused to make a statement.
The court held that while under arrest the accused has no duty to make any statement and his silence is not admissible in evidence against him. State v. Bowdry, 346 Mo. 1090, 145 S.W.2d 127, 129-30 (1940).
The detective’s testimony about defendant Smart’s refusal to make any comment is a clear violation of the rule of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). There at 384 U.S. 475-76, 86 S.Ct. 1628-29, the Court held, “Moreover, when in-custody interrogation is involved, there is no room for the contention that the privilege is waived if the individual answers some questions or gives some information on his own prior to invoking his right to remain silent when interrogated.”
The Court also said:
Once warnings have been given, the subsequent procedure is clear. If the individual indicates in any manner, at any time prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease. At this point he has shown that he intends to exercise his Fifth Amendment privilege; any statement taken after the person invokes his privilege cannot be other than the product of compulsion, subtle or otherwise. Without the right to cut off questioning, the setting of in-custody interrogation operates on the individual to overcome free choice in producing a statement after the privilege has been once invoked.
384 U.S. at 473-74, 86 S.Ct. at 1627-28; Michigan v. Mosley, 423 U.S. 96, 100-101, 96 S.Ct. 321, 325, 46 L.Ed.2d 313 (1975).
That holding of the Court is the reason all valid Miranda warnings now contain the concluding bit of advice to the accused that he may decide at any time to exercise his privilege and stop answering questions. Neither the Court in Miranda nor the Miranda warning actually given require the accused to say, “Stop the questioning,” or anything else to exercise his privilege. All the accused need do is remain silent.
At trial in Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610, 96 S.Ct. 2240, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976), the defendants testified that they were framed. The prosecutor asked each defendant why he had not told the frameup story to the arresting agent. The cross-examining prosecutor framed his question to defendant Doyle to indicate that at the time he was arrested Doyle said to the arresting agent, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” Doyle’s answer to the question was, “I believe what I said, — ‘What’s this all about?’ If I remember, that’s the only thing I said.” There the Court explicitly held at 619 that the use for impeachment purposes of the accused’s silence about the frameup after arrest and after receiving the Miranda warnings violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
If defendant’s silence may not be used against him at trial even for impeachment of his trial explanation, a fortiori, his silence may not be used against him in the state’s case in chief. This is particularly so, as the Court noted in Anderson v. Charles, 447 U.S. 404, 100 S.Ct. 2180, 65 L.Ed.2d 222 (1980), where the question (or in this case the detective’s answer) was *584“designed to draw meaning from [the] silence....” Id. at 409, 100 S.Ct. at 2182.
Lillian Smart’s question to the interrogating detective, “Why am I here?” was similar to Doyle’s “What’s this all about?” Both defendant Smart and the Doyle defendants made their comments after Miranda warnings. As the Court said in Doyle v. Ohio, “Silence in the wake of these warnings may be nothing more than the arrestee’s exercise of these Miranda rights. Thus, every post-arrest silence is insolubly ambiguous because of what the State is required to advise the person arrested.” Doyle, 426 U.S. at 617, 96 S.Ct. at 2244. And, the Court added, although “the Miranda warnings contain no express assurance that silence will carry no penalty, such assurance is implicit to any person who receives the warnings.” Id. at 618, 96 S.Ct. at 2245.
To the extent that the cases cited by Judge Clark, State v. Van Doren, 657 S.W.2d 708 (Mo.App.1983), State v. Frentzel, 717 S.W.2d 862 (Mo.App.1986), and State v. Trice, 575 S.W.2d 739 (Mo.App.1978), deviate from Doyle v. Ohio and Miranda v. Arizona and hold or imply that the prosecution may exploit or draw meaning from an accused’s silence after Miranda warnings they are wrong and should not be followed. Cf. United States v. Hale, 422 U.S. 171, 95 S.Ct. 2133, 45 L.Ed.2d 99 (1975). If those cases mean, as they seem to, that an accused who answers any question after Miranda warnings are given while in custody thereby irrevocably waives his privilege against self-incrimination and may not reinvoke his privilege despite the concluding advice of the Miranda warning, they are incorrect. As Miranda says, the arrestee may in any manner “at any time prior to or during questioning” indicate that he wishes to remain silent and stop the interrogation. 384 U.S. at 473r74, 86 S.Ct. at 1627. A defendant may reassert his right'to remain silent at any time. Hill v. United States, 404 A.2d 525, 531 (D.C.Cir.1979); State v. Apostle, 8 Conn.App. 216, 512 A.2d 947, 954 (1986).
I do not want to be understood to condone a defendant’s selectively refusing to answer some questions while answering others. A defendant may waive his privilege against self-incrimination and later revoke the waiver and reinvoke his privilege, but Miranda and Doyle do not contemplate a stop and go, on again off again interrogation controlled by the accused.
If a defendant wishes to challenge the prosecutor’s use at trial of his confession or admissions on a Miranda or Doyle ground, the defendant has the burden in the trial court to show that, after a waiver, he reinvoked his Fifth Amendment privilege.
In this case, however, defense counsel in a motion in limine before trial had prevailed upon the trial court to suppress any testimony referring to defendant’s silence during her interrogation by Detective Cos-grove on the ground that it would reflect adversely on her post-arrest right to remain silent. The prosecutor agreed not to use that evidence. Thus, apparently, defendant Smart satisfied both the prosecutor and the trial court that she had rein-voked her privilege. Thereby, the defendant met its burden of showing that she had reinvoked the privilege.
The only way the question of defendant’s silence came into this case was through Detective Cosgrove’s testimony in apparent misunderstanding of or disregard' for the court’s suppression of such evidence. At that point, a mistrial was in order because the detective’s answer “was designed to draw meaning from [the] silence....”