Lead Opinion
OPINION OF THE COURT
Defendant has been convicted after trial of murder, second degree, for the stabbing death of his former girlfriend. The evidence against him included a statement he made in the police station approximately an hour after the police arrested him in his apartment without a warrant. Defendant contends that the statement should have been suppressed because it was obtained in violation of constitutional guarantees against illegal searches and seizures (see, NY Const, art I, § 12; US Const 4th Amend). The People contend that the entry and arrest were consensual but maintain that even if illegal under Payton v New York (
Ordinarily, questions of attenuation are mixed questions of law and fact that we may review only to ascertain whether there is support in the record for the determination of the lower courts (see, People v Borges,
On January 11, 1984 the police found the dead body of Thelma Staton in her apartment and investigation quickly
After a Huntley hearing, Supreme Court suppressed the first statement, given in defendant’s apartment, as the product of an illegal arrest and it suppressed the third videotаped statement given to the Assistant District Attorney, because it was taken after defendant had stated that he did not wish to be questioned further. It denied the motion to suppress the second statement finding the Miranda warnings had been repeated and defendant waived his rights before making the statement. The court’s findings, undisturbed by the Appellate Division, included findings that the police had probable cause to arrest defendant at the time they entered his apartment, that they went there with the intention of making a warrant-less arrest in his home and that defendant opened the door
Defendant was convicted after a bench trial and the judgment was affirmed by a divided Appellate Division. Justice Sandler, with whom Justice Wallach concurred, agreed with the Supreme Court’s determination that the police had made an illegal arrest but nevertheless found attenuation based upon the existence of probable cause. He also found that defendant gave his written statement at the station house not because he felt committed by what he had said at his apartment but because he had made a clear decision to admit his guilt prior to the illegal entry of the police.
Justice Asch, joined by Justice Kassal, cоncurred in affirmance in a separate writing. He found that defendant had consented to the police entry but held that, assuming a Payton
Justice Rosenberger dissented and voted to reverse the judgment and remand the matter for a new trial. He concluded that there was no significant intervening event between the defendant’s initial statement in his apartment, found by the hearing court to be the result of his unlawful arrest, and the written statement given at the police station.
In Payton v New York (
In Wong Sun v United States (
In Brown, defendant was unlawfully arrested and taken to a police station where some two hours later, after being given proper Miranda warnings, he made the incriminating statements used against him at trial. Justice Blackmun, spеaking
In the present case, defendant was given Miranda warnings and freely gave his statements at the apartment and at the police station and thus the Fifth Amendment threshold requirement has been satisfied. But because defendant was illegally arrested in his home, the court must determine, by applying the factors delineated in Brown, whether the statement given in the police station was sufficiently purged of the taint of this Fourth Amendment Payton violation or the causal connection between the illegality and the confession remains. The trial court’s conclusion of attenuation rested on its finding that Miranda warnings had been repeated before the statement was made. The two opinions for affirmance in the Appellate Division based their finding of attenuation on the repetition of the Miranda warnings, the lapsе of time between the arrest and the station house statement and the benign nature of the police conduct because of the existence of
Considering first temporal proximity, defendant’s written statement was given approximately one hour after the illegal arrest, a considerably shorter period than the time which elapsed between the illegal arrest and the suppressed statement in Brown v Illinois (supra). The People argue that the shortness of the interval between the arrest and the statement in the police station and the officers’ testimony concerning defendant’s conduct in the apartment indicates the confession was an act of free will formed before the police entry. It can be argued with equal force that the statement was given by defendant in submission to the authority of the police who had illegally entered his home and arrested him. In short, the temporal relationship between the illegal arrest and the statement is, at best, ambiguous. Standing alone, it cannot serve to attenuate the illegality and it becomes important to look for events occurring within the interval between arrest and confession (see, Dunaway v New York,
In this case, the short time period and the continuous police presence with defendant from the time he was arrested until the time he gave his statement, without any legally significant intervening event, indicate that the station house statement was no less a product of the Fourth Amendment violation than was the statement defendant made in his apartment which the courts below suppressed. Reading defendant his Miranda rights again may have cured the Fifth Amendment violation but, as Brown v Illinois (supra) held, standing alone it could not attenuate the link between the Fourth Amendment violation and the statement. Having just given a statement in his apartment which inculpated him in the crime, defendant had already committed himself and "there was little incentive to withhold a repetition of it” (United States v Johnson, 626 F2d 753, 759, affd
In the case before us, the trial court found the police went to defendant’s apartment to arrest him and, as the police conceded, if defendant refused to talk to them there they intended to take him into custody for questioning. Nevertheless, they made no attempt to obtain a warrant although five days had elapsed between the killing and the arrest and they had developed evidence of probable cause early in their investigation. Indeed, one of the officers testified that it was department policy not to get warrants before making arrests in the home. From this statement a reasonable inference can be drawn, as the dissent below did, that the department’s policy was a device used to avoid restrictions on questioning a suspect until after the police had strengthened their case with a confession (see,
The analysis highlights the distinction between this case and cases such as People v Conyers (
Two Justices of the Appellate Division distinguished this case because the police had probable cause to arrest the defendant. They reasoned that the defendant’s arrest could have taken place lаwfully anywhere except in his apartment and that this "major difference in the character of the underlying illegality” (
Indeed, the issue is no longer open for discussion. United States v Johnson (626 F2d 753, affd
Finally it should be noted that as a matter of policy, deterring Payton violations by suppressing confessions causally related to them is no less important than deterring investigative detentions or street arrests made on less than probable cause.
Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Division should be reversed, defendant’s statement suppressed and a new trial ordered.
Notes
. The dissent relies on similar reasoning, but the weakness of the argument is demonstrated by contrasting it with People v Emanuel (
In response to the dissent’s statement that the courts "apparently” held the entry into defendant’s home was not consensual, the trial court found, and its findings were undisturbed by the Appellate Division, that "no clearer violation” of Payton could be established. Nor were the police present to "investigate”. The trial court found that the police went to defendant’s apartment to make a warrantless arrest and labeled the claim that they were only there to investigate "nonsense”. Thus, the dissent, while rejecting the Brown test for measuring the taint, relies on a "sensitive assessment” of facts, as it finds them, which are contrary to the findings of the courts below.
. This view has been accepted by some courts (see, State v Thomas, 405 So 2d 462 [Fla App]; Thompson v State, 248 Ga 343,
. As to the dissent’s argument that deterrence is not required in Payton cases because the police will not make warrantless arrests at the home and risk having confessions suppressed, the simple answer is that they did so here and apparently do so routinely in this police department.
Concurrence Opinion
(concurring). I concur in the majority’s result and reasoning on constraint of our recent decision in People v Conyers (
As a threshold matter, before attenuation is considered, the courts must first determine whether "the challenged evidence is in some sense the product of illegal governmental activity” (United States v Crews,
. Contrary to the majority’s assertion and the views of one commentator (see, majority opn, at 623, n 2), the misgivings I express here are far morе substantial than a simple "misapplication” of the "inevitable discovery doctrine.”
. The precise holding of the Supreme Court in Payton was not that the arrest per se was unlawful, but rather that an otherwise improper warrant-less entry into the home cannot be justified by the sovereign’s common-law right to effect an arrest without a warrant, even when the arrest is supported by probable cause. This reading of Payton is evident both from Justice Stevens’ characterization of the question presented (
The language quoted by the majority — that " 'a "basic principle of Fourth Amendment law” [is] that searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable’ ” (majority opn, at 623-624, quoting Payton v New York, supra, at 586 [emphasis supplied]) — is certainly not to the contrary.
. In People v Riddick (
Dissenting Opinion
(dissenting). There is no sound
The facts are unusual but uncomplicated. Defendant’s girlfriend, Thelma Staton, was killed when her throat was cut with a knife. The police, with probable cause to believe that defendant did the killing, but without an arrest warrant, went to question defendant at his home. The police knocked at the door, and, after some delay, defendant came to the door and asked "who is it.” A detective held his badge up to the peephole, and defendant then opened the door, stating "I’m glad you came for me.” Defendant was then read the Miranda warnings, which he acknowledged that he understood. He then invited the police officers to sit down, and said that he was going to fix himself a glass of wine. One detective then sat down, and told defendant that he wanted to talk to him about the death of Thelma Staton. After pouring the wine, defendant stated that he loved Thelma Staton, but that she was not bringing up her child "right,” and that he had killed Thelma Staton by cutting her throat with a knife.
Defendant was then arrested and taken to the police station. The Miranda warnings were again read to him, and he indicated that he understood them. Defendant then dictated a confession to a police officer, who wrote it down as defendant spoke. When the confession was completed, defendant read it, and made one change by crossing out a section which stated that he had taken the murder weapon with him after the crime. This was changed to read that defendant had thrown the knife out of the window immediately after killing the
These facts were found by the trial court, were undisturbed by the Appellate Division, and, finding support in the record, now bind this court.
On these facts, the two lower courts found a Payton violation, apparently holding that defendant did not sufficiently consent to the entry of the police into his home (see, Payton v New York,
Initially, I note that this question is reviewable by us. Both lower courts held without analysis that the first confession was suppressible. However, simply put, when using the correct legal standard together with the facts found by those courts this conclusion is without basis (Cohen and Karger, Powers of the New York Court of Appeals §§ 114, 115 [rev ed]). Indeed, the majority exercises its power to review the suppression of the second confession on this very basis.
The fundamental principle here, repeated by the United States Supreme Court and this court so often as to be axiomatic, is that "it has never been enough to show that evidence must be suppressed simply because it is discovered subsequent to an illegal arrest; it must in addition be shown that the police exploited the illegal detention in such a way as to establish that it was the detention which produced the challenged statements” (People v Rogers,
Applying these principles in Brown v Illinois (supra, at 603), the Supreme Court held that when an illegal arrest has been followed by a confession, the question becomes whether the confession was actively produced by the arrest, or by some independent force. In Brown the court stated that relevant factors to analyze this question were the presence of Miranda warnings, temporal proximity of the arrest and confession, intervening circumstances, and the flagrancy of police misconduct (id., at 603-604). But these are only factors, none of which is dispositive, to be used as tools to assess the independence of a confession from any police illegality; mathematical summation of values accorded to each factor is no substitute for sensitive assessment of the facts of each case, and the reaching of a well-founded conclusion whether a police illegality actively caused a confession.
The case law bears this out; where it is clear that a confession is the product of a force independent from an allegedly unlawful detention, the confession is admissible. For example, in People v Rogers (supra), a confession caused by defendant being confronted with legally obtained evidence was admissible; in Rawlings v Kentucky (supra), a confession caused by the policе discovering physical evidence in a purse was admissible; and in People v Matos (
Similarly, on the facts in this record, defendant’s confessions manifestly were not the product of a Payton violation. Defendant was expecting the arrival of the police, as shown by his reaction that he was "glad” when they got there. Nor can it reasonably be inferred that defendant was feeling any police coercion as he fixed himself a glass of wine to make himself more comfortable, and then explained how he had both loved his girlfriend and killed her. These are not the statements and actions of a man reacting to police coercion or illegality; on the contrary, these facts portray a man who quite independently had decided to confess before the police arrived, and whose decision, therefore, was formed independently from any illegal police conduct. As a result, neither the first confession, nor the second confession which followed, were in any way actively produced by any police illegality.
As to the deterrence argument: the majority asserts that if we do not suppress here we will encourage Payton violations. In reality, however, use of defendant’s confessions will not have this effect. Here the defendant welcomed the police, sipped wine and confessed. If we did not suppress here the rule would remain, as it has long been, that there will be suppression if the confession is actively produced by police illegality. Given this fact, the deterrence benefit furthered by this case eludes me. Armed with probable cause to arrest a suspected murderer, surely the police will not forego obtaining a warrаnt with hopes of meeting a congenial host, and thereby circumventing Brown v Illinois (supra). Nor should we be worried that the police will choose to run the risk that, if this oddity does not occur, the whole police investigation will be jeopardized, including not only confessions obtained, but all physical evidence discovered as well.
Even more distressing, this decision will encourage more intrusive and dangerous police conduct than that which the majority erroneously believes it needs to deter. The majority suppresses here not on the usual grounds of the lack of probable cause, but, ironically, because there was probable cause. The majority’s rationale turns directly on that finding: it reasons that because there was probable cаuse there should have been a warrant, but because there was no warrant, suppression is required.
But what is missed here is that if the police had been conducting a routine investigation, without probable cause, defendant’s confessions would be admissible. Thus in the name of deterrence, for the sake of suppressing a manifestly independent confession, the majority encourages the questioning of suspects before probable cause is obtained.
Where deterrence is unnecessary, and where defendant’s confessions were not the product of police illegality, there should be no suppression. I therefore dissent.
Order reversed, etc.