LаCresha MURRAY, et al., Plaintiffs, LaCresha Murray, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Ronnie EARLE, etc.; et al., Defendants, Dayna Blazey, Individually and as an Assistant District Attorney of Travis County, Texas; Stephanie Emmons, Individually and as an Assistant District Attorney of Travis County, Texas; Angela McGown, Individually and as Supervisor of the Travis County Child Protective Services; Hector Reveles, Individually and as a Detective of the Austin Police Department; Ernest Pedraza, Individually and as a Detective of the Austin Police Department; Albert Eells, Individually and as a Detective of the Austin Police Department, Defendants-Appellants.
No. 03-51379
United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
March 31, 2005
District Judge, Northern District of Texas, sitting by designation.
Elaine Agnes Casas (argued), Marion Ann Damen, Austin, TX, for Dayna Blazey and Stephanie Emmons.
Frederick A. Hawkins, Asst. City Atty. (argued), City of Austin, Law Dept., Austin, TX, for Angela McGown, Hector Reveles, Ernest Pedraza and Albert Eells.
Before WIENER and PRADO, Circuit Judges, and KINKEADE,* District Judge.
WIENER, Circuit Judge:
Defendants-appellants Dayna Blazey, Stephanie Emmons, Hector Reveles, Angela McGown, Ernest Pedraza and Albert Eells appeal the district court’s denial of their motion for summary judgment on the grounds of immunity under federal and state law. They contend on appeal that they should not be held liable for coercing a confession from the minor plaintiff-appellee, LaCresha Murray, which ultimately led to her later-reversed conviction (and lengthy incarceration) for injury to a child.1 We reverse.
This case arises out of the investigation of plaintiff-appellee LaCresha Murray’s (“LaCresha”) involvement in the death of Jayla Belton, age two, in 1996. At the time of these events, LaCresha was eleven years old. She and her siblings lived with her grandparents, R.L. and Shirley Murray, who were her adoptive parents, as well. The Murrays also provided daycare in their home for several other children.
Late in May of 1996, Jayla, who was routinely cared for by the Murrays, was dropped off at the Murray home by her mother’s boyfriend. During the course of the day, Jayla appeared to be ill. After she vomited at the lunch table, LaCresha’s older sister, Shawntay, gave Jayla some medication and put her to bed. No one checked on Jayla until later that day. R.L. Murray testified that, late in the afternoon, LaCresha came in from outside and went to the back of the house, near the bedroom where Jayla was sleeping. R.L. then heard “thumping noises,” but he assumed that LaCresha was playing with a ball and told her to stop. Shortly after that, LaCresha told R.L. that Jayla was throwing up and shaking. He asked her to bring Jayla to the front of the house, where he observed that Jayla appeared ill. He told LaCresha to take Jayla outside to warm her up.
At 5:00 p.m., another parent arrived to сollect her children and noticed that Jayla was sweating profusely. That parent urged R.L. to call 911, but he declined to do so. R.L. took Jayla to the hospital, however; she was pronounced dead at approximately 5:30 p.m.
An autopsy conducted the following day revealed that Jayla had suffered a severe liver injury caused by a blunt blow to the abdomen. This trauma had broken four of her ribs and split her liver into two pieces. The medical examiner concluded that Jayla had died within five to fifteen minutes after receiving the injury and also noted some thirty other bruises to her head, ear, forehead, back, shoulder, elbow, chest, and the left side of her torso. The examiner ruled Jayla’s death a homicide.
That same day, law-enforcement authorities removed all the children from the Murray home. They placed LaCresha and one of her sisters in Texas Baptist Children’s Homе, a private shelter for children which contracts with the State to provide foster care. At the time that these children were removed from their adoptive parents’ home, the authorities believed that they were in danger. There is some dispute as to exactly when the police first began to suspect that LaCresha had killed Jayla, but the focus of the investigation had quickly shifted to LaCresha after law-enforcement authorities spoke with other members of the household.
Three days after LaCresha had been removed from her adoptive parents’ home, Detective Reveles directed Detectives Pedraza and Eels, along with Angela McGown, the supervisor of the Travis County Child Protective Services, to interview LaCresha. It is undisputed that, by this time, the police no longer feared for LaCresha’s safety but instead considered her a suspect in Jayla’s death.
Before the interview of LaCresha, Detectives Reveles and Pedraza consulted with assistant district attorney Emmons on the proper method of interrogating LaCresha. Emmons testified that, even though LaCresha had been at the Texas Baptist Children’s Home for three days, none of the officials believed that she was in the custody of the State. In their minds, this obviated the need for them to take her before a magistrate, as required by Texas law for children who are in state custody. Pedraza and Eels gave LaCre
The detectives questioned LaCresha at the Baptist Children’s Home for approximately two hours, eventually eliciting a confession that she had dropped Jayla and kicked her. The State then charged her with capital murder and injury to a child; the juvenilе court ruled her confession admissible; and the jury convicted her of negligent homicide and injury to a child. Extensive publicity followed, presumably influencing the juvenile court to order a new trial on its own motion. At the second trial, the State charged LaCresha with injury to a child; her confession was again admitted; and the second jury convicted her. The juvenile court adjudicated LaCresha delinquent and sentenced her to twenty-five years in the custody of the Texas Youth Commission.
Three years later, the Texas Court of Appeals reversed LaCresha’s conviction.2 The appellate court ruled that LaCresha had been in the custody of the State, that law-enforcement authorities had violated Texas law by not taking her before a magistrate prior to interrogating her, and that her confession was therefore inadmissible.3
LaCresha then brought suit in district court for damages against numerous individuals, some of whom were only tangentially related to the LaCresha’s judicial proceedings, asserting various violations of her constitutional and state rights. On motions for summary judgment, the district court dismissed all her claims except those against the Defendants—Appellants (collectively, “the defendants”) for violations of her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and for state law civil conspiracy. The defendants now appeal the denial of their summary judgment motions for qualified immunity on LaCresha’s Fifth Amendment claims and for official immunity under state law on her civil conspiracy claims.
We have jurisdiction over both appeals. A defendant may immediately appeal the denial of qualified immunity, even though it is not a “final decision” under
II. ANALYSIS
A. Standard of Review
We review denials of grants of summary judgment de novo.6 Summary judgment may be granted if the moving party shows there is no genuine issue of material fact, and it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.7 We construe all facts and inferences in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party when reviewing grants of motions for summary judgment.8
In undertaking a qualified immunity analysis, we must first determine whether the plaintiff has suffered a violation of his constitutional rights and, if so, whether a reasonable official should have known that he was violating the plaintiff’s constitutional rights.9 The district court held that, under these narrow circumstances—an eleven-year-old child is removed from her home, housed at a private shelter by the State for three days, interrogated there for hours by two seasoned investigators to the point of confession without an adult or advocate present to represent her interests, and is сonvicted largely on the strength of that confession—the child may, after the conviction is overturned on the grounds that the confession was inadmissible, sue under
1. Constitutional Violation
It is axiomatic that a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights have been violated “if his conviction is based, in whole or in part, on an involuntary confession, regardless of its truth or falsity.”11 The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination is a fundamental trial right which can bе violated only at trial, even though pre-trial conduct by law enforcement officials may ultimately impair that right.12 The constitutional privilege against self-incrimination adheres in juvenile court proceedings just as it does in ordinary criminal court.13 In fact, states must take greater care to protect juveniles against coerced confessions during police interrogations, because children are more likely to be induced to confess, and their confessions are less likely to be reliable.14
An individual’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is implicated only during a “custodial” interrogation.15 The Supreme Court defines “custodial interrogation” as “questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody.”16 A suspect is “in custody” for these purposes either (1) when he is formally arrested or (2) “when a reasonable person in the position of the suspеct would understand the situation to constitute a restraint on freedom of movement to the degree that the law associates with formal arrest.”17 We review de novo the question whether an interrogation was custodial.18
The district court relied heavily on the reasoning of the Texas Court of Appeals in determining whether LaCresha was in the custody of the State during her interrogation. The Texas appellate court’s initial determination whether LaCresha was in custody, though addressing the federal constitutional standard for “custodial interrogations,” was undertaken solely for the purposes of the Texas law requiring that, if so, she should have been taken before a magistrate before the police questioned her.19 This inquiry is apposite but not determinative of our de novo federal constitutional inquiry regarding “in custody,” i.e., whether a reasonable person in LaCresha’s position would have understood that his liberty was constrained to the extent associated with formal arrest.
On the latter issue, the Texas apрellate court held, in contrast to the Texas trial court, that LaCresha’s interrogation was custodial, adopting and applying a “reasonable child” standard. The court asked whether, under these circumstances, a reasonable child of eleven would have believed that her freedom of movement was constrained to the degree associated with formal arrest.20 The appellate court emphasized that LaCresha was involuntarily removed from her home by the State and placed in a children’s shelter pursuant to emergency provisions of section 262 of the
The defendants protest that we ought not consider a suspect’s age in evaluating whether he was “in custody” for purposes of a Fifth Amendment viоlation. Rather, they assert, we must use an objective test, asking only whether a reasonable person, not a reasonable child, would have concluded that his liberty was constrained.24 The Supreme Court has endorsed this approach when confronted with an interrogation of a seventeen-year-old suspect, but the Court’s conclusion rested on the assertion that the “custody inquiry states an objective rule designed to give clear guidance to the police, while consideration of a suspect’s individual characteristics—including his age—could be viewed as creating a subjective inquiry.”25 Justice O’Connor wrote separately to emphasize that “[t]here may be cases in which a suspect’s age will be relevant to the Miranda ‘custody’ inquiry” but that in Yarborough, the defendant was almost eighteen years old and it would be difficult “to expect police to recognize that a suspect is a juvenile when he is so close to the age of majority.”26
The case of an eleven-year-old is diffеrent. The police should have no difficulty recognizing that their suspect is a juvenile and adjusting their determination whether the suspect would understand his freedom of movement to be constrained accordingly. In any event, even if we were to ignore LaCresha’s age at the time of her interrogation, we would still conclude that a reasonable individual of any age who is removed involuntarily from his home, housed by the State for three days, not informed that he is free to leave, and questioned by two police detectives in a closed interrogation room, would believe that his liberty was constrained to the degree associated with formal arrest.27 We hold that LaCresha was “in custody” for purposes of evaluating her interrogation.
Next, we must determine whether the statement that LaCresha gave while in custody was involuntary, making its introduction at her criminal trial violative of her Fifth Amendment rights. Although LaCresha’s statement was taken in violation of Texas law, this alone did not automatically produce a violation of her Fifth Amendment rights.28 Once we have concluded that a juvenile’s interrogation was custodial, we determine whether such a suspect’s confession is coerced or involuntary by examining the totality of the circumstances surrounding the child’s interrogation.29 In addition to the fact that the interrogation was conducted in violation of state law, our examination includes consideration of the juvenile’s “age, experience, education, background, and intelligence, and into whether he has the capacity to understand the warnings given him, the nature of his Fifth Amendment rights, and the consequences of waiving those rights.”30 The Supreme Court has admonished that the police are required to take special care to ensure the voluntariness of a minor suspect’s cоnfession:
If counsel was not present for some permissible reason when an admission was obtained, the greatest care must be taken to assure that the admission was voluntary, in the sense not only that it was not coerced or suggested, but also that it was not the product of ignorance of rights or of adolescent fantasy, fright or despair.31
Every factor weighed in our analysis militates against the conclusion that LaCresha’s statement was voluntary. At eleven years of age, she was far younger than the fifteen-year-old juvenile suspect whom we held to have voluntarily confessed in Gachot v. Stadler.32 She had no experience with the criminal justice system, had been held in the custody of the State for three days, was unaccompanied by any parent, guardian, attorney, or other friendly adult, and was found to have below-normal intelligence by the court-appointed psychiatrist prior to her criminаl trial, also in contrast to the Gachot defendant.33
2. Clearly Established Law
To overcome a claim of qualified immunity, a plaintiff must establish that the right an official is alleged to have violated was “clearly established,” i.e., sufficiently clearly defined that “a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.”35 Although there need not be prior case law directly on point for a constitutional right to be clearly established, the state of the law must be such that a reasonable officer would be on notice that his actions could violate a constitutional right.36 Defendants argue that, even assuming arguendo that clearly established law should have put them on notice that their interrogation of LaCresha was custodial and that her statement was not made voluntarily, no clearly establishеd law put them on notice that their actions could violate her Fifth Amendment rights.
Defendants assert that a reasonable officer would not have understood that his actions could have violated LaCresha’s Fifth Amendment rights because, as we discussed above, such a violation requires that (1) officials coerce an involuntary statement from a suspect and (2) this statement later be introduced against her at trial.37 Therefore, because an officer cannot contemporaneously interrogate a suspect unlawfully and violate a suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights, we must determine whether clearly established law should have alerted a reasonable official that his pre-trial conduct, although perhaps a but-for cause of the violation of the plaintiff’s trial rights, could proximately cause a violation of her Fifth Amendment rights.
In a perfect world, trial courts protect defendants’ Fifth Amendment rights by excluding improperly obtained confessions or statements.38 In this real-world case,
Section 1983 does require a showing of proximate causation, which is evaluated under the common law standard.41 In cases like this one, we read
Albeit in dicta, the Supreme Court has intimated that this argument should not hold sway, at least with respect to false arrest claims. Although the Court in Malley v. Briggs conceded that the appellant police officer’s argument that he could not have proximately caused a defendant’s unlawful arrest by filing an affidavit unsupported by probable cause was not before it on appeal, the Court stated that it would not have been receptive to this contention.44 Malley states that
Petitioner has not pressed the argument that in a case like this the officer should not be liable because the judge’s decision to issue the warrant breaks the causal chain between the appliсation for the warrant and the improvident arrest. It should be clear, however, that the District Court’s “no causation” rationale in this case is inconsistent with our interpretation of
§ 1983 . As we stated in Monroe v. Pape, 365 U.S. 167, 81 S.Ct. 473, 5 L.Ed.2d 492 (1961),§ 1983 “should be read against the background of tort liability that makes a man responsible for the natural consequences of his actions.”45
One year after Malley, we implicitly endorsed this approach in United States v. Burzynski Cancer Research Institute, holding that Malley required us to reject a police officer’s “superseding cause” arguments and examine only whether a reasonably well-trained officer would have known that his warrant application was unsupported by probable cause.46 The following year, however, we decided Hand v. Gary, a false arrest case in which we held that, when a neutral intermediary, such as a justice of the peace, reviews the facts and allows a case to go forward, such an act “breaks the chain of causation.”47 We qualified our holding by stating that “the chain of causation is broken only where all the facts are presentеd to the grand jury, or other independent intermediary where the malicious motive of the law enforcement officials does not lead them to withhold any relevant information from the independent intermediary.”48 This holding in Gary was consistent with other circuit precedent,49 yet we made no mention
The rule of Hand v. Gary has since prevailed in this circuit for almost two decades.50 Even though Burzynski appears to contradict Hand’s holding on the issue of superseding cause, the earlier decision did not address the issue in depth, and we are unwilling to disregard firmly ensconced circuit precedent in favor of such a cursory analysis of Malley’s dicta. A review of other circuits’ case law addressing proximate cause when a plaintiff’s injury results from an independent decision-maker’s ruling also reveals a fundamental tension between these primary tenets of tort law: (1) An individual is liable for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his actions, and (2) an intervening decision of an informed, neutral decision-maker “breaks” the chain of causation.51
LaCresha has not identified, and we have not found, any evidence in the record to indicate that the state judge who presided over her juvenile trial failed to hear (or was prevented from hearing) all of the relevant facts surrounding her interrogation before deciding to admit her confession into evidence. Armed with all those facts, that judge nevertheless concluded that LaCresha was not “in custody” for purposes of Miranda or Texas law governing the interrogation of minors, and ruled that her statement to the police was voluntary and admissible.53 Like the state appellate court, we disagree with the trial court’s ruling, yet we are constrained to hold that it constituted a superseding cause of LaCresha’s injury, relieving the defendants of liability under
C. State Law Civil Conspiracy Claim
LaCresha has also asserted a claim under state law, contending that the defendants conspired to deprive her of her Fifth Amendment rights. The elеments of a civil conspiracy claim in Texas are: “(1) two or more persons; (2) an object to be accomplished; (3) a meeting of minds on the object or course of action; (4) one or more unlawful, overt acts; and (5) damages as the proximate result.”54 A plaintiff asserting such a claim must prove that the defendants conspired to accomplish an unlawful purpose or used unlawful means to accomplish a lawful purpose.55
Government officials in Texas are officially immune from liability for the performance of their (1) discretionary duties (2) in good faith (3) as long as they are acting within the scope of their authority.59 A discretionary function—as distinguished from a ministerial duty, which requires rote obedience to orders or performance of a function to which the actor has no choice—involves personal deliberation, decision and judgment.60 An officer acts in good faith if a reasonably prudent officer, under the same circumstances, could have believed that his actions were correct.61 An officer acts within the scope of his authority when he discharges the duties generally assigned to him.62
The district court ruled, and LaCresha does not dispute, that the remaining defendants were performing discretionary functions and acting within the scope of their authority vis-a-vis her interrogation. That leaves only the question whether they acted in good faith.
To obtain official immunity on summary judgment, an official must prove that a reasonably prudent official might have believed that his action was appropriate under the circumstances.63 Even if an official’s actions were taken negligently, that would not be sufficient to defeat a showing of good faith.64 The test for good faith is objective and is substantially derived from the test for good faith in a qualified immunity claim for federal constitutional violations.65
In light of our holding that the defendants are immune from prosecution for LaCresha’s Fifth Amendment constitutional claim because they did not act unreasonably according to clearly established law, we also determine, by conducting the analogous state law inquiry under Texas state law,66 that immunity bars LaCresha’s
Further, our determination that the defendants did not commit an actionable violation with respect to LaCresha’s Fifth Amendment violation bars a claim of civil conspiracy based оn that violation, as “[g]enerally, if an act by one person cannot give rise to a cause of action, then the same act cannot give rise to a cause of action if done pursuant to an agreement between several persons.”67 Although LaCresha did suffer a violation of her constitutional rights, our determination that none of the state officials could have proximately caused this violation means that none have committed a tortious act. As we conclude that LaCresha’s claims against these defendants are unavailing, we reverse the district court, and remand for entry of summary judgment in favor of the defendants.
The importance of deterring the improper obtaining of confessions, however, cannot be gainsaid. “A deliberate, voluntary confession of guilt is among the most effectual proofs in the law, and constitutes the strongest evidence аgainst the party making it that can be given of the facts stated in such confession.”68 Justice White called a voluntary confession the most damaging form of evidence and noted that “[e]ven the testimony of an eyewitness may be less reliable than the defendant’s own confession.”69 “Confession evidence (regardless of how it was obtained) is so biasing that juries will convict on the basis of confession alone, even when no significant or credible evidence confirms the disputed confession and considerable significant and credible evidence disconfirms it.”70
The privilege against self-incrimination is, of course, related to the question of the safeguards necessary to assure that admissions or confessions are reasonably trustworthy, that they are not the mere fruits of fear or coercion, but are reliable expressions of the truth ... coercion is thought to carry with it the danger of unreliability.73
Involuntary confessions also affront society’s “deep-rooted feeling that ... in the end, life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.”74 These principles are doubly true in cases such as this one, in which the suspect is a young child whose statements are more likely to be the product of “fear, ignorance, fantasy, or despair.”75
Nonetheless, the independent roles of police officers, prosecutors, and judges operate in this context to prevent individuals who have suffered violations of their Fifth Amendment rights from recovering for their damages, absent a showing that a neutral intermediary, such as a judge, did not have all pertinent information surrounding an interrogation before him when deciding a confession’s admissibility. Therefore summary judgment in favor of the defendants is appropriate.
III. CONCLUSION
As LaCresha cannot demonstrate that the acts of the defendants in obtaining her confession proximately caused the violation of her Fifth Amendment rights, we hold that she may not maintain against the defendants either a claim under
REVERSED and REMANDED.