Police Must Heed Suspects’ Right to Silence, Court Says

Los Angeles and Santa Monica Police Department policies allowing officers to continue questioning suspects after they invoke their right to remain silent violate constitutional rights and expose the officers to civil liability, a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Monday.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that both departments had questioned suspects in a manner that violated the landmark 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miranda vs. Arizona, which first established that a defendant had a right to remain silent and had to be warned that anything he said could be used against him.

In subsequent rulings, however, the high court ruled that confessions obtained in violation of Miranda could be used to impeach a suspect if he took the stand in his own defense.

A growing number of police departments in California and around the country have been relying on those decisions to train officers that they need not fear any consequences from violating a suspect’s Miranda rights, according to Charles D. Weisselberg, a UC Berkeley law professor, who served as co-counsel for the two inmates challenging the police practices.

“This decision is a very big deal and I hope that it will prompt police departments throughout California to change their training practices,” Weisselberg said.

Santa Monica City Atty. Marsha Moutrie agreed that the ruling has broad ramifications. “This decision risks vastly expanding civil liability for standard interrogation techniques,” she said. Moutrie added that Santa Monica officers had conducted interrogations in accord with statewide training standards. Moutrie said her agency is considering asking that the ruling be reviewed by a larger panel of 9th Circuit judges.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which represents the LAPD officers in the case, said he would have no comment until a deputy city attorney handling the litigation reviews it today. Los Angeles Police Officer April Archer, a department spokeswoman, said she was unable to find a department official who would comment.

Two Incidents Provide Ruling

Monday’s ruling stemmed from two incidents. In the first, Los Angeles police, who suspected James Bey of murder, interrogated him while he was handcuffed to a bench in a police station, according to the ruling. After giving Bey a Miranda warning and telling him that he was a murder suspect, the officers disregarded Bey’s statement that he would not answer any further questions without an attorney present. Eventually, Bey made incriminating statements. Bey later testified at his trial and the prosecution used the statements to impeach him. He was subsequently convicted of murder and received a life sentence.

Similarly, according to the ruling, Santa Monica officers continued to question James McNally about a murder after he said he did not want to talk and wanted to consult an attorney. The 9th Circuit decision noted that the detectives persisted in their questioning and assured McNally that his statements would not be used against him. McNally then proceeded to incriminate himself. Eventually he was convicted of manslaughter. His incriminating statement was used against him as an aggravating factor at his sentencing, although a judge would not allow it to be used during the initial phase of the trial, even for impeachment purposes.

The appeals court rejected the two basic contentions of the officers--that they had not violated the defendants’ constitutional rights by continuing to question them and that they were immune from liability because they had relied on training given to them by their departments.

On the first point, the judges said that “there is no constitutional right to the Miranda warnings themselves.” But they quickly added that Miranda rights “supply practical reinforcement for the 5th Amendment right,” against self-incrimination.

The judges cited several post-Miranda decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and concluded that “these decisions indicate that there has been no weakening in Miranda’s mandates to protect the rights of suspects during custodial interrogations. In the face of these clear and unequivocal decisions, reasonable officers in the position of defendants would have known that their actions violated McNally’s and Bey’s Miranda rights,” appeals court Judge William Canby wrote for the majority. He said that the officers had deliberately ignored the suspects’ requests to talk to an attorney.

Circuit Judge Sidney Thomas concurred with Canby. Federal trial Judge William Schwarzer, sitting by special assignment, concurred in the ruling involving the Santa Monica police and dissented in the portion concerning Los Angeles police.

On the second point, the judges cited a trial judge’s decision which held that “ ‘following orders’ will only insulate officers from liability when reliance is objectively reasonable.” Then, the 9th Circuit judges added, “the fact that Los Angeles and Santa Monica may have trained their police to violate the rights of individuals does not provide any defense for these officers.”

“Their policy contradicts the safeguards provided by Miranda,” the judges ruled, and is in “direct conflict” with an earlier 9th Circuit decision.

The decision comes at a time when the status of Miranda rights has developed into a very hot issue.

Just last week, the Clinton administration filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, strongly supporting a broad interpretation of the scope of Miranda. The Justice Department brief urged the high court to review a legal challenge to Miranda raised by a federal appeals court decision in Virginia and to reaffirm that Miranda “has come to play a unique and important role in the nation’s conception of our criminal justice system.”

In an unusual move, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s name appears on the cover of the brief, just above that of Solicitor Gen. Seth P. Waxman and several attorneys in his office. Normally, the attorney general’s name does not appear on such briefs. The Justice Department brief stems from a controversial decision of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals which held last year that the Miranda case did not establish a constitutional right but rather a procedural right that need not be binding. The defendant in that case asked the Supreme Court to review the decision, prompting the Justice Department brief.

Initially filed in December 1995 in federal district court in Los Angeles, the suit decided Monday sought to redress the alleged deprivation of the rights of two suspects under the 5th, 6th and 14th amendments. The suit challenged what it described as a common police practice of continuing to conduct interrogations of suspects even after they had clearly invoked their right to remain silent or their right to consult with an attorney.

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie rejected the contention of police officers that the case should be dismissed on the grounds that they were immune from liability and said Bey and McNally had the right to a trial. The officers filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit, seeking an interpretation on the key legal issue of immunity before any trial was held.

Trial May Be Next

If Monday’s decision is not overturned, it means that the case will be sent back to Rafeedie for a trial that would examine just what the officers did and whether damages can be assessed against them and their departments.

A co-counsel for the criminal defendants, Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said the ruling will have an impact on bullying tactics by police. “Now, when a suspect invokes the right to remain silent, the police must be silent, too, no longer free to ignore the assertion and strong-arm a confession,” Rosenbaum said.

In recent years, he said, a number of police departments “have realized that they have nothing to lose by continuing to question a suspect who invokes his constitutional rights. If no incriminating statements are obtained, the interrogators have nothing to lose. If they succeed in obtaining incriminating statements, the prosecution can use them to dissuade the defendant from testifying in his own defense or to impeach him if he does.”

The case is entitled California Attorneys for Criminal Justice vs. Butts, No. 97-56499.

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Times staff writer Ted Rohrlich contributed to this story.

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