Police officers questioned Larry Winsett in violation of his Miranda rights about his role in a murder-for-hire scheme. In this interrogation, Winsett divulged the name of his accomplice, and the State eventually secured the cooperation of this accomplice in the *271 prosecution of Winsett. Winsett argued in state post-conviction proceedings that the accomplice's testimony should have been inadmissible as the “fruit of a poisonous tree” and that his lawyer should have raised this issue on direct appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected these contentions, and Win-sett now appeals the district court’s denial of these same claims in his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. We affirm.
I. BACKGROUND
David Robinson had an affair with Maria Zarinara, the wife of Arturo Zarinara, in the summer of 1984. Mrs. Zarinara testified at Petitioner’s trial that Robinson became obsessed with her. Robinson let two employees at his construction company know in October 1984 that he was interested in paying someone to kill Mr. Zarinara. One of these employees introduced Robinson to the petitioner, who claimed to know someone who would perform the murder. After some haggling over price, Robinson gave Winsett $20,000 to arrange the murder of Mr. Zari-nara; they agreed to refer to the job as a “car sale” in any subsequent conversations. Winsett then subcontracted the hit to Glenn Spruille for $2,000, but Spruille (luckily) could not complete the job despite shooting Zarinara four times on January 9, 1985. Robinson received a phone message that night from a man named “Larry” stating that Robinson’s car had been sold.
Four plainclothes police officers 1 arrested Winsett at his home on February 20,1985, as he was eating dinner with his family. When the officers placed him under arrest, Winsett immediately told one of the detectives, “I want a lawyer.” In addition, Winsett told his wife to call his lawyer numerous times during the course of the arrest in front of his six children, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and nephew. The trial court found these family members’ testimony to be “extremely credible.” The officers told Mrs. Winsett that they were taking her husband to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and that he would be able to phone her after he was booked. 2
They instead took Winsett to an interview room in the Waukegan Police Station. Win-sett received his Miranda warnings and was asked to sign a waiver form prepared by one of the officers; he refused to sign the waiver and expressed his unwillingness to make any statements until he could speak with his attorney. Undeterred, the officers kept questioning Winsett for nearly two-and-a-half hours. Petitioner asked to speak to his lawyer at least three separate times during this interrogation, but the officers persisted in their interrogation.
Winsett eventually identified Glenn Spruille as his accomplice in the attempted murder of Mr. Zarinara. After making this statement, the police presented Winsett with another Miranda waiver form, which this time he signed. Finally, the officers allowed him to call his wife; telephone records show that he made this call nearly three-and-a-half hours after his arrest at home. Mrs. Winsett relayed the petitioner’s location to his lawyer, who arrived at the police station soon thereafter and belatedly advised the petitioner not to sign any statements. Based on Winsett’s confession, the police tracked down Spruille, who cooperated in the prosecution of Winsett in exchange for the prosecutor’s recommendation of a reduced sentence.
Soon after his indictment, Winsett filed a motion to suppress the statements he made to the police. In the course of this hearing, the circuit court heard evidence from a number of witnesses, including Winsett, his family members, and the police officers, regarding the circumstances of the petitioner’s interrogation and statements. Winsett testified that he was “seared and confused” during the interrogation and that the police officers “manipulated [him] into a state of duress and confusion.” The court granted the petitioner’s motion to suppress the statements because they were made after
*272
his repeated requests for counsel in violation of
Edwards v. Arizona,
I find there was no trickery, there was no coercion, that there was nothing ... other than the violation of the affirmative request for counsel ... I do not find it was voluntary from-involuntary from the point of view of coercion, so as to suspect authenticity to make it inadmissible under Harris v. New York.
The court denied a subsequent motion in limine in which Winsett claimed that his statements to the police and all evidence resulting from those statements should be excluded as “fruits” of his tainted interrogation; the court stated in its ruling that the “present state of the law was such that the motion was not well taken.”
A jury convicted Winsett of attempted murder, solicitation to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. In a post-trial motion, Winsett asked for a new trial based on the admission of Glenn Spruille’s testimony, which Winsett characterized as the fruit of an unconstitutional interrogation. The trial court denied this motion and sentenced Winsett to concurrent terms of forty years in prison for the attempted murder and solicitation of murder charges, as well as a fourteen-year prison term for the conspiracy conviction. Defense counsel pressed only two points on direct appeal: (1) the jury did not hear sufficient evidence of the petitioner’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and (2) the trial court should not have admitted testimony concerning the cryptic phone message from “Larry” to Robinson on the night of the attempted murder. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed Winsett’s conviction and sentence in an unpublished order on October 2, 1986, and the Illinois Supreme Court denied his petition for leave to appeal on February 6,1987.
In state post-conviction proceedings, Win-sett claimed both that the admission of Spruille’s testimony was error and that his appellate counsel was unconstitutionally ineffective in failing to raise this issue on direct appeal. The trial court rejected Winsett’s post-conviction petition, but the state appellate court reversed and found merit in his claims.
II. DISCUSSION
Winsett makes four claims of error in his appeal of the district court’s decision. As before, he argues that the trial court should have excluded the testimony of Glenn Spruille as the fruit of an unconstitutional interrogation. He also claims again that his appellate counsel provided ineffective assistance by not raising this point on appeal. In addition, he now adds for the first time a claim that his trial counsel provided inadequate representation by failing to challenge the voluntariness of his statements. Finally, Winsett argues that the district court should not have adjudicated his petition before ruling on his pending motion requesting the appointment of counsel.
We are unable to reach the merits of Win-sett’s first claim because granting the relief he requests would state a new rule of law in contravention of the rule of
Teague v. Lane,
*273 A Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
Winsett contends that police officers unconstitutionally extracted information from him regarding Glenn Spruille. He argues that the officers violated his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination by coercing him into making inculpatory statements. Petitioner asserts that the trial court should have granted his motion
in limine
to exclude all evidence derived from these statements as “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
See Wong Sun v. United States,
1. Voluntariness of Winsett’s Statements
The trial court in this case found that the police officers violated Winsett’s
Miranda
rights and that the prosecution could not use the statements in its case-in-chief. The court also ruled, though, that the statements were not involuntary and that they could be used for impeachment purposes. Winsett did not contest this finding of volun-tariness at trial and did not raise the issue on direct appeal. In post-conviction proceedings, Winsett argued that the evidence pertaining to Glenn Spruille should have been excluded because the officers obtained this evidence by violating his
Miranda
protections. He did not, however, challenge the voluntariness of his statements in these post-conviction proceedings or in his petition to the district court for a writ of habeas corpus. Normally, a party waives those issues it fails to raise in the district court.
See, e.g., Henderson v. DeTella,
Winsett typed a four-page description of the grounds on which he sought a writ of habeas corpus. For the most part, the petition details the numerous state court rulings in his case. Its only reference to the volun-tariness of his statements is a recapitulation of the trial court’s ruling on the question. Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, No. 94 C 821, at 6 (“[T]he trial judge stated that there was no showing that the police used any trickery so as to render the confession involuntary, and that the confession would be admissible to impeach Petitioner if he were to testify.”). Nowhere in the petition does Winsett plead any facts—much less any legal arguments-that would support a claim of involuntariness. He complains about his interrogation by police officers only in terms of the violation of his Miranda rights; when describing this violation, he never provides specific factual examples of police conduct that might have also rendered his statements involuntary, but rather speaks only in eonclu-sory terms regarding the Miranda violation. There was nothing in Winsett’s petition from which the district court could have inferred an involuntariness challenge, and we find it telhng that he has never objected to the district court’s failure to consider the issue.
Winsett cannot expect the district court to presume a voluntariness challenge simply because he demonstrated a violation of his Miranda rights. It may be true that the same facts can sometimes trigger both a Fifth Amendment prohibition on the use of invol *274 untary statements and the Miranda exclusionary rule. As the bulk of this opinion explains, however, the two protections are constitutionally distinct, and Winsett does not plead one automatically by pleading the other. Winsett tacitly concedes this point when he alleges that his trial counsel was incompetent for arguing the Miranda point without objecting also to the trial court’s voluntariness determination. Thus, we cannot consider Winsett’s voluntariness challenge because he did not present it to the district court.
2. Statements Obtained in Violation of Miranda
The trial court suppressed the statements made by Winsett because police officers obtained them in violation of his Miranda rights. Winsett argued that this Miranda violation, standing alone, was a sufficient constitutional violation to justify exclusion of all derivative evidence as the fruit of a poisonous tree. The Supreme Court, however, established Miranda protections as prophylactic safeguards of the Fifth Amendment and has not recognized those safeguards as independent constitutional rights. See infra at 275-77. Win-sett’s habeas petition, then, hinges on our willingness to create a new rule of constitutional law that gives Miranda greater constitutional status than that bestowed by the Supreme Court.
We are forbidden from taking such a step by the Court’s prohibition against applying “new constitutional rules of criminal procedure” on collateral review.
Teague v. Lane,
Neither party addressed the application of
Teague
to this case, but the Supreme Court has noted that a court may raise the issue of its own volition.
See Goeke v. Branch,
In determining whether
Teague
bars consideration of this claim of Winsett’s habeas
*275
petition, we follow the Supreme Court’s instruction to proceed in three steps.
See Caspari,
The first inquiry is very straightforward. Winsett pressed his direct appeal to the Illinois Appellate Court, which affirmed his conviction and sentence in an unpublished order on October 2,1986.
People v. Winsett,
Under the second step, the question now becomes whether the Illinois courts in 1987 reasonably could have denied Winsett the relief he seeks in his federal petition. Win-sett claims that the police officers’ violation of his Miranda rights is a constitutional violation sufficient to support the exclusion of all evidence derived from his tainted statements as fruit of the poisonous tree. As discussed supra at page 273, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine applies only to evidence discovered as a result of the Government’s infringement of a defendant’s constitutional rights. We must deny Winsett’s petition if the Illinois courts reasonably could have concluded in 1987 that a Miranda violation did not support exclusion under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
Miranda v. Arizona
created several “procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination.”
The Court emphasized this distinction in two eases interpreting
Miranda
before 1987:
Michigan v. Tucker,
The Court took another step down this road in
Elstad.
Police officers in that case willfully omitted the required warnings in their interrogation of a burglary suspect, who eventually made an inculpatory statement regarding his participation in the crime. Based on this statement, the officers took the suspect to the police station whereupon he received and waived his
Miranda
rights in the process of executing a second confession (this one in writing).
Elstad,
The Supreme Court rejected this contention and held that the Fifth Amendment did not require suppression of the voluntary, second confession.
Id.
at 318,
The Oregon court assumed and respondent here contends that a failure to administer Miranda warnings necessarily breeds the same consequences as police infringement of a constitutional right, so that evidence uncovered following an unwarned statement must be suppressed as “fruit of the poisonous tree.” We believe this view misconstrues the nature of the protections afforded by Miranda warnings and therefore misreads the consequences of police failure to supply them.
Id.
at 304,
The Miranda exclusionary rule ... sweeps more broadly than the Fifth Amendment itself. It may be triggered even in the absence of a Fifth Amendment violation. ... Miranda’s preventive medicine provides a remedy even to the defendant who has suffered no identifiable constitutional harm. .
Id.
at 306-07,
*277
The Supreme Court also recognized this dichotomy in a number of other cases before 1987. The Court held that a
Miranda
violation prevented introduction of a particular statement in the prosecution’s case-in-chief, but that prosecutors could nevertheless use the statement as impeachment material unless it was involuntary under the Fifth Amendment.
Harris v. New York, 401
U.S. 222, 225-26,
The opinions of both this Court and Illinois courts have followed, as they must, the Supreme Court’s example.
See, e.g., Stawicki v. Israel,
Despite this apparent clarity in the law, an Illinois court in 1987 might have perceived some ambiguity regarding the nature of
Miranda’s
constitutional foundation. The first relevant set of cases concerned the Supreme Court’s holding in
Edwards v. Arizona,
Confusing signals emanated from sources other than the Supreme Court. Soon after the Court announced the decision in
Edwards,
a panel of the First Circuit affirmed the suppression of physical evidence found as a result of a defendant’s statements obtained in violation of his
Miranda
and
Edwards
rights.
United States v. Downing,
We need not decide whether the Illinois courts in 1987 reasonably could have suppressed Spruille’s testimony as the fruit of a
Miranda
violation. Our inquiry here is more constrained. For
Teague
purposes, we can grant relief only if the Illinois courts would have acted
unreasonably in refusing
to suppress Glenn Spruille’s testimony, or, tracking the well-worn formula, whether suppression of his testimony was “dictated by precedent existing at the time [Winsett’s] conviction became final.”
Teague,
We hold that the Illinois courts acted reasonably by refusing to suppress Spruille’s testimony as a fruit of a Miranda violation. The law on this question may not have been completely settled, but the decisions of the Illinois courts were substantially justified. The relief Winsett seeks in this count of his petition, therefore, is a new rule. Unless we can say confidently that controlling precedent existing in 1987 compelled an opposite result, we must follow Teague’s command against announcing new rules of constitutional law on collateral review.
The third step of the
Teague
inquiry allows us to circumvent the general prohibition on announcing new rules if the rule sought by Winsett falls into one of two narrow categories. “The first exception permits the retroactive application of a new rule if the rule places a class of private conduct beyond the power of the State to proscribe” or “prohibit[s] a certain category of punishment for a class of defendants because of their status or offense.”
Saffle v. Parks,
A rule excluding the fruits of a
Miranda
violation does not qualify for this second
Teague
exception because it lacks the necessary connection to the fairness and accuracy of a trial. Adopting the rule sought by Win-sett does not promise to save many innocent defendants from wrongful convictions and further the search for truth in criminal trials. The
Miranda
decision itself arguably might qualify as such a watershed rule because of its focus on eliminating unreliable confessions and its overall pathbreaking nature.
9
But
*280
Winsett’s proposed rule, at its most basic level, fails because the presence of evidentia-ry fruits of a confession most often indicates that the confession was accurate and supported in fact.
See Solem v. Stumes,
We conclude, therefore, that Winsett is not entitled to a writ of habeas corpus on his fruit of the poisonous tree claim because the relief he seeks would be a new rule within the meaning of Teague v. Lane.
B. Ineffective Assistance ofCounsel(s)
Winsett presents two claims of ineffective assistance of counsel in his appeal. First, he alleges that his trial counsel should have contested the voluntariness of his statements to the police in addition to seeking suppression of the statements under Miranda/Edwards. Second, Winsett argues that his appellate counsel was unconstitutionally ineffective by failing to raise the fruit of the poisonous tree claim on direct appeal. Winsett’s complaint about his trial counsel’s performance appears for the first time in any of his post-conviction pleadings, and he submerged his reference to the ineffectiveness of his appellate counsel deep in his petition to the district court.
We cannot reach the merits of the first claim because Winsett did not present it in his petition to the district court. His petition concerned only the
Miranda
issue. For that matter, Winsett has not claimed to any court — state or federal — that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance. As we made clear earlier, our precedent unambiguously requires Winsett to present this claim to the district court before bringing it to our attention.
See supra
at 274;
see also Smith v. Fairman,
The State argues that Winsett also failed to present his second ineffectiveness claim to the district court, but we have no trouble locating that claim in his single-count petition to the district court. Although his
pro se
petition is generally well-crafted, he lumped both of his claims of error into one count. He nevertheless did point out that his appellate counsel failed to argue the fruit claim on direct appeal, Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, No. 94 C 821, at 7, and he notes that “[t]he Illinois Supreme Court ... erroneously determined that the circuit court properly denied the petition for post-conviction relief because Petitioner was not deprived of the effective assistance of counsel on direct appeal.”
Id.
at 8. We cannot agree with the State that Winsett waived this claim simply because he did not cast it as a separate count in his petition.
10
This is especially true in light of our mantra that “it is important to construe
pro se
filings liberally.”
Coulter v. Gramley,
We employ familiar standards to resolve ineffective assistance of counsel claims. A petitioner must establish both that his counsel’s performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness and that, but for this deficient performance, “the result of the proceeding would have been different.”
See Strickland v. Washington,
Our earlier survey of the relevant case law for Teague purposes should have foreshadowed our conclusion that Winsett cannot demonstrate that his fruit of the poisonous tree claim probably would have succeeded on direct appeal. The law at that time suggested strongly that, like other Miranda protections, the right under Edwards to have police cease a custodial interrogation when a defendant invokes his right to counsel is a prophylactic safeguard of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-inerimination. The prevailing authority suggested, in other words, that Miranda and Edwards are extra-constitutional, not extra constitutional, protections. We cannot conclude that this fruit of the poisonous tree claim probably would have succeeded on direct appeal, especially in light of the rejection of this very same claim by the Supreme Court of Illinois in Winsett’s petition for post-conviction relief. Thus, Winsett cannot demonstrate the necessary likelihood that raising the issue would have produced a different result on direct appeal.
C. Appointment of Counsel
As a final matter, Winsett finds fault with the district court’s failure to rule on his motion to appoint counsel. After the State filed a brief responding to his pro se petition, Winsett allowed the time to pass in which he could have filed a Reply Brief. Instead, eight days after the deadline to reply, Win-sett filed a motion for appointment of counsel and stay of the briefing schedule. There was, however, no more briefing to be done at this point. The district court did not rule on Winsett’s motion but instead issued its final decision a little over a month after receipt of the motion. Then-Judge Aspen addressed the motion in a footnote of his order:
After missing [t]he deadline for responding to the government’s answer, Winsett moved for appointment of counsel. Although we agree with petitioner that this issue presents a novel question of law that would ordinarily prompt us to grant such a request, our review of the law leads us to the conclusion that appointed counsel would add little to the analysis, particularly in light of the thorough and competing opinions emanating from the state courts. Accordingly, rather than delay resolution of this matter, we deny petitioner’s motion for appointment of counsel.
United States ex rel. Winsett v. Washington,860 F.Supp. 479 , 486 n. 7 (N.D.Ill.1994).
Appointing counsel for pro se petitioners in habeas corpus eases is a power commended to the discretion of the district court in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. See 18 U.S.C. § 3006A(a)(2)(B) (“Whenever ... the court determines that the interests of justice so require, representation may be provided for any financially eligible person who ... is seeking relief under section 2241, 2254, or 2255 of title 28.”). This has been the law of our circuit for many years:
[Appointment of counsel for indigents in habeas corpus and section 2255 proceedings rests in the sound discretion of district courts unless denial would result in fundamental fairness impinging on due process rights.
LaClair v. United States,
Winsett’s due process claim must fail even under this more charitable standard. In essence, the district court simply chose to issue its ultimate ruling on the merits and deny Winsett’s motion at the same time. We cannot conclude in this instance that this approach or the decision not to appoint counsel itself deprived Winsett of his right to due process. First, the district court’s opinion does contain a ruling — albeit one contained in a footnote in the final order — on Winsett’s motion. Second, Winsett forfeited any due process rights he may have had in this regard by filing his motion eight days after all briefs were due. Finally, as the district court noted, Winsett was not prejudiced by the refusal to appoint counsel after all briefs were submitted to the court; the well-reasoned opinions from the Illinois courts clearly elaborated the competing arguments and legal authority. The district court, therefore, did not deprive Winsett of due process of law.
III. CONCLUSION
For all the foregoing reasons, we affirm the district court’s denial of Winsett’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
Notes
. Two were detectives from the Waukegan Police Department and two were police officers from the Round Lake Beach Police Department.
. The officers did not, however, take Winsett to the Lake County Sheriff's Office. In response to Mrs. Winsett's repeated calls, Lake County sheriffs told her for over an hour that there was no record of his presence in their custody. No one, apparently, knew where the police officers had taken Winsett.
. One member of this Court has written that "[o]ur jurisprudence has yet to develop guiding principles as to when our court ought to raise
Teague
despite the failure of the state to do so.”
Stewart,
. This holding seemed to resolve the conflict created by an evenly-divided Court’s affirmance of a 1977 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision.
Commonwealth v. White,
. Although it is not relevant to our survey of pre-1987 law, we note that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize the distinction between
Miranda
and Fifth Amendment violations.
See Davis v. United States,
. Indeed, cases of the Supreme Court and our Court have cast the
Edwards
protection in this light.
See, e.g., Davis v. United States,
. It should be noted, however, that both of these decisions preceded the Court’s resolution of Oregon v. Elstad in 1984. But see note 4, supra, at 276-77.
. The state courts hearing Winsett’s case, by contrast, found only a violation of his prophylactic Miranda protections. Hudson does not stand for the proposition that a Miranda violation, standing alone, justifies suppression of its evidentiary fruits. In fact, the Hudson Court expressly stated the opposite rule:
A majority of the Court (other than the author of this opinion) conclude that even where an interrogation occurs after the Miranda decision, and warnings required by it are not given, the deterrent effect of excluding third party testimonial fruits of an otherwise voluntary statement is not sufficient to warrant exclusion. The majority would therefore extend Tucker to this case to the extent that petitioner's claim rests solely on omission of Miranda warnings.
. We note, though, that the Supreme Court did not apply its holding in
Miranda v. Arizona
retroactively. See
Jenkins v. Delaware,
. It is true that the district court did not explicitly consider this claim. The court’s resolution ol the fruit of the poisonous tree issue against Win-sett, however, implicitly addressed and foreclosed his ineffectiveness claim relating to the failure to raise such a claim on appeal; as we discuss infra, without a persuasive contention on appeal, he could not show the requisite prejudice to prevail on his Sixth Amendment claim.