Court Opinion

ID: 9488318
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:41:50.654349+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:49.090066
License: Public Domain

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom RIPPLE, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc.
This case merits the careful consideration of the full court. The panel majority’s opinion not only places us in conflict with our sister circuits, as Judge Ripple points out (Ripple, J., Dissent from Denial of Rehearing En Banc, supra, at 367 & n. 3), but hinges on a reading of Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. 104, 106 S.Ct. 445, 88 L.Ed.2d 405 (1985), that I believe at the very least is open to question. Granted, the precise question before the Court in Miller was the degree of deference that a state court determination of voluntariness should be given by a federal habeas court. But in resolving that question, the Court considered at some length the nature of the voluntariness assessment, and where it falls in the spectrum between findings of purely “historical” fact reviewed for clear error and legal determinations subject to de novo review. In discussing the appropriate methodology for deeming a particular question one of “law” or of “fact” the Court noted:
Where ... the relevant legal principle can be given meaning only through its application to the particular circumstances of a case, the Court has been reluctant to give the trier of fact’s conclusions presumptive force and, in so doing, strip a federal appellate court of its primary function as an expositor of law.
Id. at 114, 106 S.Ct. at 451.
In deciding that the voluntariness determination was one that required independent review in habeas proceedings, the Court left little doubt that it did not consider this to be the type of factual question normally entitled to deference on appeal:
Although sometimes framed as an issue of “psychological fact,” the dispositive question of the voluntariness of a confession has always had a uniquely legal dimension. It is telling that in confession cases coming from the States, this Court has consistently looked to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to test admissibility. The locus of the right is significant because it reflects the Court’s consistently held view that the admissibility of a confession turns as much on whether the techniques for extracting the statements, as applied to this suspect, 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. This hybrid quality of the voluntariness inquiry, subsuming, as it does, a “complex *369of values,” itself militates against treating the question as one of simple historical fact.
Id. at 116-16, 106 S.Ct. at 452-53 (emphasis in original) (footnote and citations omitted).
As Judge Fairchild asks in his concurring opinion, “Is the issue any different when the accused relies on the due process guaranteed to a federal defendant by the Fifth Amendment?” Supra at 366. I think not. Indeed, the Supreme Court itself, when confronted with an involuntary confession claim in a federal prosecution, expressly observed that “[w]hen such a claim is raised, it is the duty of an appellate court, including this Court, ‘to examine the entire record and make an independent determination of the ultimate issue of voluntariness.’ ” Beckwith v. United States, 425 U.S. 341, 348, 96 S.Ct. 1612, 1617, 48 L.Ed.2d 1 (1976) (quoting Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U.S. 737, 741-42, 86 S.Ct. 1761, 1764, 16 L.Ed.2d 895 (1966)).
Both Miller and Beckwith speak directly to the question that the panel majority has posed and, in my view, they point to the de novo standard of review we have applied until today. Our departure from that standard demands far more attention than the court has given it.