Court Opinion

ID: 9496874
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:37:36.780958+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:51.512759
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
with whom McMILLIAN, BYE, and SMITH, Circuit Judges, join,
dissenting.
I pass over the question of whether Mr. LeBrun was in custody when he confessed to the murder of Mr. Muns, and go directly to the matter of whether his confession was voluntary, since I think that the case can be resolved rather quickly and easily on that ground. Because it appears to me that Mr. LeBrun’s confession was the product of an overborne will, I would affirm the district court. Our panel opinion in this case, see United States v. LeBrun, 306 F.3d 545, 548-50, 552-56 (8th Cir.2002), vacated and reh’g en banc granted (Dec. 31, 2002), very effectively rehearsed the tactics used to bring Mr. LeBrun to the point of confessing, which included threatening to ruin him financially, preying on fears related to his cancer, and vividly limning the effects that protracted civil and criminal litigation in a faraway place would have on his family, on its reputation, and in particular on his pregnant wife. I will therefore content myself with some observations on the court’s opinion and on some matters that I think have not already received proper attention in previous opinions.
While, as the court notes, the agents never shouted at Mr. LeBrun or threatened him physically, the district court found on ample evidence that the atmosphere at the interrogation was police-dominated and that the agents. frequently raised their voices and changed their tone when doing so. They also interrupted Mr. LeBrun in a bullying manner and demonstrated a threatening kind of impatience with him. The court indicates that United States v. Astello, 241 F.3d 965 (8th Cir.2001), cert. denied, 533 U.S. 962, 121 S.Ct. 2621, 150 L.Ed.2d 774 (2001), supports a conclusion that the type of pressure that Mr. LeBrun experienced could not alone render his confession involuntary, but the case is distinguishable, and it certainly establishes no bright-line legal rule about psychological pressure. In fact, the nature of the question at the heart of this case necessarily reduces the precedential value of previous cases considerably.
The court also adverts to the fact that the district court made no findings as to what promises the interrogators actually made, but instead found only that Mr. LeBrun reasonably believed that he was promised that he would not be prosecuted if he would say that he had killed Mr. Muns “spontaneously.” The court then looks for support in cases that hold that a mistaken belief as to what the law is will not render a confession involuntary. But *728in at least one of those, Winfrey v. Wyrick, 836 F.2d 406, 411-12 (8th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 833, 109 S.Ct. 91, 102 L.Ed.2d 67 (1988), it was crucial to the holding that the defendant’s mistaken belief that he would not be prosecuted was not .induced by anything that his interviewers told him;' it was based entirely on his own ideas about what the law was. I agree that that kind of mistake cannot possibly render a confession inadmissible. But the clear purport of what the agents said in this case was that, Mr. LeBrun would not be prosecuted if he said what the agents wanted him to say, and they even assured Mr. LeBrun that Mr. Muns’s family approved of the deal. ’ Indeed, they said that the family would not pursue civil remedies if he confessed and apologized. What the family wanted, the interrogators said, was simply to clear Mr. Muns’s name.
In addition to the part of the interview that the court quotes in its opinion, the record reveals that, both before and after the exchange that the court isolates, the interviewers made reference to an alleged statute of limitations difficulty that would prevent prosecution for a “spontaneous” murder; and the officers intimated, moreover,, that if Mr. LeBrun would simply admit to a spontaneous killing, they would call the United States Attorney in charge of the prosecution and tell him that there was no case against Mr. LeBrun. In addition, I respectfully suggest that the district court did not, as the court maintains, note that the agents qualified their representations by telling Mr. LeBrun that it was “only ‘possible’” that he would not" be prosecuted. In relevant part, the transcript of the interview reveals only that one of the agents said at one point that “it was possible, beyond possible” that no prosecution would take place if Mr. Le-Brun would cooperate, which is significantly different from what the court asserts was said. Taken in their entirety, the agents’ assurances, which operated both as representations of what the law was and as promises, were categorical.
The district court shrank from holding that an absolute promise not to prosecute was madé, not because of this part of the exchange between Mr. LeBrun and his interrogators, but because the promise not to prosecute was fleetingly qualified at one point, by one agent, by the condition that Mr. LeBrun must be telling the truth that the killing was spontaneous before the government would refrain from prosecution. This transitory allusion to truth-telling does nothing to undermine the district court’s factual finding that Mr. LeBrun believed that he would not be prosecuted. My own examination of the transcript and the video tape leaves little room for doubt that the agents were in fact making such a representation about the law and a promise that Mr. LeBrun would not be prosecuted, and indeed it appears that the entire interview was deliberately structured around this stratagem. But nothing in particular really turns on this point: The coercive effect, if any, of a reasonably perceived promise is exactly the same as that of an actual promise.
In addition to the coercive tactics that the court briefly rehearses, among the enlarged pictures displayed prominently on the wall of the small interrogation room was a picture of Mr. Muns’s family at his gravesite. The agents, moreover, did not merely invent generic phantom witnesses to the killing; they contrived a bizarre tale of a suicide note implicating Mr. LeBrun, and even claimed that there were other witnesses to the killing who were so haunted that their lives had been ruined by what they had seen. These were all knowing falsehoods. None of this finds a place in the court’s opinion. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the court fails altogether to mention the district court’s finding that, *729despite the agents’ assurances, Mr. Le-Brun did not feel free to leave as the interview progressed. This is a finding of fact that is supported by Mr. LeBrun’s testimony and cannot be reasonably rejected as clearly erroneous. It is also a finding that weighs heavily in favor of the district court’s conclusion that Mr. Le-Brun’s confession was involuntary.
This is probably the right juncture to observe that it is not immediately apparent why statements by interrogators that are untrue, and known to be false, are more “coercive” than statements that are true. Such techniques may be reprehensible, but that fact would not seem to contribute to their propensity to overwhelm the will. Perhaps it is enough simply to note that the Supreme Court has said that “[t]he fact that the police misrepresented the statements that [a witness] had made is ... relevant,” Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U.S. 731, 739, 89 S.Ct. 1420, 22 L.Ed.2d 684 (1969), in circumstances like the present ones. But we need also to consider the possibility that what lies at the bottom of these kinds of cases is not merely an aversion to something called coercion, but a general uneasiness about the fairness of admitting confessions that were induced by knowing, lurid falsehoods and unfulfilled promises, whether “coercive” or not. In fact, the Supreme Court has specifically said that “the admissibility of a confession turns as much on whether the techniques for extracting the statements ... are compatible with a system that presumes innocence and assures that a conviction will not be secured by inquisitorial means as on whether the defendant’s will was in fact overborne.” Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. 104, 116, 106 S.Ct. 445, 88 L.Ed.2d 405 (1985).
In sum, a consideration of the evidence in this case, including the kinds of pressure that were brought to bear on Mr. LeBrun, the assurances of leniency that went unfulfilled, and the deceit that the interrogators practiced, leads me to the conclusion that his confession was illegally obtained and should have been suppressed. At the very least, it seems to me relatively plain that the government has not carried its burden, see Lego v. Twomey, 404 U.S. 477, 489, 92 S.Ct. 619, 30 L.Ed.2d 618 (1972), of showing that the relevant statements were voluntary.
I therefore respectfully dissent and would affirm the judgment of the district court. Affirming the judgment, not incidentally, has the effect of specifically performing the promise that an objective observer would conclude Mr. LeBrun’s interrogators made to him, an altogether appropriate and equitable result.