Maryland v. Shatzer

From ScotusWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Argued October 5, 2009. Decided February 24, 2010.

Authorship: Diana Gillis of Georgetown Law School (with SCOTUSblog's Orin Kerr commenting on the opinion)

Docket: 08-680

Issue: Whether Edwards v. Arizona (1981), which bars police from initiating questioning with criminal suspects who have invoked their right to counsel, applies to an interrogation that takes place nearly three years later.

Contents

Briefs and Documents

Decisions

Reversed and remanded in a 9-0 decision by Justice Scalia.

Oral argument

Transcript (October 5, 2009)

Merits Briefs

Amicus Briefs

Certiorari-Stage Documents

Opinion Analysis

Orin Kerr originally wrote the following for SCOTUSblog:

Have you heard of the “14-Day Clause” of the Constitution? If not, you should take a look at the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday in Maryland v. Shatzer. Shatzer is an intriguing example of how the Supreme Court makes rules in the area of criminal procedure. It’s particularly notable in that it introduces a very rare (but not unprecedented) numerical rule to implement constitutional protections.

Shatzer is a case on the law of police interrogations when a suspect is in police custody. It’s one of the dozens of spinoff decisions from the 1966 blockbuster Miranda v. Arizona, also known as the “you have a right to remain silent” case. The specific question in Shatzer is whether a detained criminal suspect who has asked to speak with a lawyer can ever be questioned again without a lawyer present. In a 1981 case, Edwards v. Arizona, the Supreme Court held that when a detained suspect asks to speak with a lawyer, the police cannot try to persuade him to change his mind. They have to stop the questioning, and they cannot restart the questioning, even after time passes and the suspect has met with his attorney, unless the suspect reinitiates the questioning on his own.

The issue in Shatzer was whether that rule continues to apply if the suspect has been released from police custody and is then rearrested. In particular, do the police have to honor the earlier request for a lawyer? The Miranda protections don’t apply when a suspect is no longer in custody. When the suspect is arrested again, however, he regains his Miranda rights. The question is, does the break in custody reset the clock on the effect of the suspect’s earlier request to speak with a lawyer? Or does the fact that the suspect is released from custody make no difference at all, such that the police are forever barred from approaching the suspect without a lawyer whenever he is in custody?

Two practical points make answering this question unusually hard. Point One is that the police need clear rules that answer the question with certainty. It doesn’t work to give the police complex legal tests to apply on the fly: They need clear rules to know what they can and cannot do. Point Two is that the two obvious candidates for clear rules each create absurd results. If you say that any break in custody, however short, resets the clock, then the protections are meaningless. If a suspect asks to speak to an attorney, the police will just “release” the suspect for 30 seconds, re-arrest him, and then restart the interrogation. That doesn’t work. On the other hand, if you say that the break in custody has no effect at all, then all sorts of strange consequences follow. A request to speak with an attorney in one case will inoculate the suspect from police interrogations for the rest of his life for all of his unrelated crimes. A request to speak to an attorney at the age of 18 in one case would bar questioning a half-century later for something entirely different. That doesn’t work, either.

So what to do? What clear rule on how long the break must be to reset the clock is workable here? Enter the 14-day rule, announced today in Shatzer in a majority opinion by Justice Scalia:

We think it appropriate to specify a period of time [at which time the clock is reset]. It seems to us that period is 14 days. That provides plenty of time for the suspect to get reacclimated to his normal life, to consult with friends and counsel, and to shake off any residual coercive effects of his prior custody.

The 14-day limitation meets Shatzer’s concern that a break-in-custody rule lends itself to police abuse. He envisions that once a suspect invokes his Miranda right to counsel, the police will release the suspect briefly (to end the Edwards presumption) and then promptly bring him back into custody for reinterrogation. But once the suspect has been out of custody long enough (14 days) to eliminate its coercive effect, there will be nothing to gain by such gamesmanship—nothing, that is, except the entirely appropriate gain of being able to interrogate a suspect who has made a valid waiver of his Miranda rights.

As a matter of policy, I think that’s a pretty good rule. But why precisely 14 days? That is, 336 hours, or exactly 20,160 minutes? There is no 14-day Clause in the Constitution. (I checked.) Why not 15 days? Or 13.491 days?

As far as I can guess, the only reason 14 days was chosen is that it’s easy to remember and seemed in the right ballpark. Jews started measuring seven days as a time period in the 6th Century BC; the Romans then adopted it, measuring time in 7-day weeks; and two-thousand-odd years later, on February 24, 2010, a majority of the Justices on the Supreme Court thought that one of those was too short, three was too long, and two seemed about right. And how did the Justices know that 14 days would be about right? Based on their extensive experience being arrested, perhaps? Presumably not. But no matter. Fourteen days seemed about right, and so the 14-day rule became the law.

If you’re wondering how Justice Scalia could end up writing an opinion that sounds so legislative — picking 14 days out of thin air — you need to know Justice Scalia’s history with Miranda. Justice Scalia intensely dislikes the entire line of Miranda cases. The Court has sometimes referred to the Miranda rules as “prophylactic.” That is, they are rules created to protect the Constitution, and enforced as constitutional law, but not necessarily constitutional rules themselves. In his dissent in Dickerson v. United States, Justice Scalia argued that this entire approach was illegitimate. He would overthrow the entire line of cases as an illegitimate power grab.

It’s not clear how many Justices continue to see Miranda as just “prophylactic” after Dickerson. But Justice Scalia still does. And he has long had a special dislike for the Edwards rule in particular. (Remember, that’s the rule that the police have to stop interviewing someone, and can’t restart questioning, if he asks for a lawyer.) In a 1990 dissent, Scalia described the Edwards line of cases as “prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.”

But if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or at least join ‘em if that means you get to write the opinion that substantially limits the effect of the Edwards rule. And if you’re going to write an opinion that you see as merely “prophylactic,” presumably you’re not bound by your usual approach to constitutional interpretation. With apologies to Chief Justice Marshall, it is not a Constitution you are expounding. So explicitly policy-based rulemaking becomes more understandable, even if it’s jarring coming from Justice Scalia.

Opinion Recap

Diana Gillis originally wrote the following for SCOTUSblog:

Today, the Court issued its opinion in No. 08-680, Maryland v. Shatzer. Justice Scalia wrote the opinion, which six other Justices joined in full. Justice Thomas concurred in part and concurred in the judgment; Justice Stevens concurred in the judgment. The Court held that a fourteen-day break in custodial interrogation ends the Edwards presumption that a Miranda waiver at a subsequent interrogation is the result of coercion. In reversing the decision of the Maryland Court of Appeals, the Court concluded that Shatzer’s return to his normal pre-interrogation life in the general prison population for a period of two-and-one-half years before re-interrogation constituted a sufficient break in custody to end the Edwards presumption and enable him to voluntarily waive his Miranda rights. Therefore, Edwards did not require that Shatzer’s re-interrogation statements be suppressed, and the Court remanded the case for further proceedings.

The Court reasoned that a suspect who has been released for at least two weeks following the custodial interrogation in which he initially asserted a right to counsel will have had sufficient time to re-acclimate to his normal life, consult with counsel, family, and/or friends, and rebound from any lingering coercive effects of the prior custody. In adopting a bright-line fourteen-day rule, the Court noted the need for a clear and certain rule for law enforcement officers. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas disagreed with the Court’s creation of a fourteen-day rule, which he characterizes as arbitrary.

The Court next turned to the question of whether Shatzer’s return to the general prison population – where he was serving an unrelated sentence – constitutes a “break in custody” for Miranda purposes. The Court – in a part of the opinion joined by seven Justices, including Justice Thomas – held that it did. The Court reasoned that the release of a suspect who has been previously incarcerated back into the general prison population is a release to the suspect’s “accustomed surroundings and daily routine,” in which the suspect regains the same control over his life as he possessed prior to the interrogation.

In his opinion concurring in the judgment, Justice Stevens agreed that the protections provided by Edwards do not live on eternally, but he expressed concern that a suspect who invokes his right to counsel but is not in fact provided with counsel is then able to voluntarily waive that right. In Justice Stevens’s view, the Court also did not adequately support its conclusion that a fourteen-day break in custody removes the coercive effect against which Edwards was designed to protect; instead, the majority opinion relies on assumptions that are even more speculative when the break from interrogation merely returns the suspect to the prison environment. He ultimately concurred in the judgment, however: although Shatzer was never in fact provided with counsel, the substantial passage of time between the two interrogations precluded Shatzer from arguing that he had been denied counsel.

Oral Argument Recap

Diana Gillis originally wrote the following for SCOTUSblog:

In Maryland v. Shatzer, the first case of the October 2009 Term, the Court heard oral arguments regarding the scope of the Edwards prohibition on interrogation once a right to counsel has been asserted. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler urged the Court to adopt a bright-line rule terminating the Edwards prohibition following a break in custody from custodial interrogation, which would include Mr. Shatzer’s return to the prison population where he resided while serving time for another crime. Gansler stressed that multiple federal circuits and states have already adopted this rule, but Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor pointed out that returning to prison does not provide the same freedoms as returning home following interrogation.

Supporting the “break in custody” rule, Assistant to the Solicitor General Toby Heytens argued that Edwards is a prophylactic rule designed to prevent the police from badgering a suspect into waiving his Miranda rights, but that no such badgering occurred in this case. Both Heytens and Gansler argued that a “break in custody” rule is necessary so that individuals are not forever immune from police questioning. Concerned with the arbitrariness of the proposed rule, several Justices asked them to suggest a time limit; Gansler proposed seven days.

Shatzer’s counsel, Baltimore Assistant Public Defender Celia Davis, argued that the Court should maintain Edwards as a bright-line rule that prohibits re-interrogation indefinitely. Responding to a hypothetical from Justice Alito, she contended that it would not matter whether the suspect was approached about a different crime, in a different state, decades later: Edwards would remain intact, with the burden on the police to determine if the suspect had asserted his right to counsel in the past. Davis argued that Shatzer had no reason to believe that a request for counsel would be fulfilled, because he had not received counsel after his original request.

A large portion of the argument focused on the substantive scope of Edwards and Miranda, as well as the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Gansler argued that only the former is protected and that the police only have an obligation to stop speaking with a suspect; there is no obligation to find him an attorney. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsburg pointed out that Shatzer knew, based on his original interrogation, that if he invoked his right to counsel then the police would have stopped questioning him, regardless of whether he believed he would in fact receive attorney assistance. Justice Stevens proposed a rule whereby a prisoner is given the choice to see or deny visitors, in which case permitting visitors would remove him from “custody” and Edwards protections. Justice Breyer proposed a rule akin to the civil rule prohibiting lawyers from speaking to a client who is represented by an attorney, asking whether the interrogator did not reasonably believe the suspect was in search of, or already represented, by counsel. Justice Scalia focused on giving the police a clear standard.

Pre-Argument Articles

The Fifth Amendment provides that “[n]o person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Miranda protects this right in the context of custodial interrogation by requiring the police to inform suspects of their right to counsel. If the right to counsel is asserted, Edwards v. Arizona mandates that the police cease all questioning until counsel is present or the suspect voluntarily initiates further conversation. In Maryland v. Shatzer, No. 08-680, the Court will consider whether Edwards continues to prohibit interrogation when nearly three years has lapsed since the right to counsel was asserted and the suspect has remained incarcerated throughout that time for an unrelated crime.

Argument Preview

Diana Gillis originally wrote the following for SCOTUSblog:

Brief for Petitioner

Maryland argues that when, as here, there has been a break in custody or a substantial lapse of time between interrogations, the Edwards presumption should not apply and reinterrogation should be permitted when it is accompanied by a voluntary Miranda waiver. Such a result, the State contends, is fully consistent with the goals of Edwards: preventing police from badgering a suspect to waive his Miranda rights and protecting the suspect from making coerced statements.

Maryland first argues that after Shatzer’s initial interrogation, there was a break in custody for Miranda purposes because he was returned to the general prison population, where he was serving a sentence for an unrelated crime. Because he was not in police custody for questioning, he could not have continuously been subject to the coercive pressures of custodial interrogation against which Edwards is intended to protect.

The decision below should also be reversed, the State asserts, because the substantial lapse in time between interrogations further eliminated any coercive environment created by custodial interrogation. Allowing prohibitions of Edwards to continue indefinitely, the State warns, would provide suspects with permanent protection from interrogation, which would not serve the goals of Edwards but would needlessly impede legitimate police investigation.

In the State’s view, the protections provided by Edwards should be limited to the period in which the suspect is being held by police for questioning. Here, because over two-and-a-half years had passed between interrogations and incarceration for an unrelated crime does not constitute “custody” for Miranda purposes, Edwards no longer applied.

Brief for Respondent

Shatzer asserts that once a suspect has asked for the assistance of counsel, it must be presumed that he would like to have such assistance in future interrogations regarding the same allegations. Shatzer first argues that the Court should maintain Edwards’ bright-line rule barring reinterrogation and that a “break in custody” exception would undermine Edwards’s goal of ensuring that custodial statements are not obtained through coercion. In particular, Shatzer notes, a suspect who requested but did not receive counsel is unlikely to believe that a second request for counsel would be honored and, therefore, is more likely to believe that he has no choice but to speak. A “break in custody” exception would also create perverse incentives for the police to either ignore requests for counsel or to release and re-arrest a suspect in the hope that he will change his mind and waive his Miranda rights. Officers would also be required to make difficult case-by-case determinations on whether there has been a “break in custody.”

Nor, Shatzer argues, should the Court recognize any exception to Edwards based on the lapse of time since the initial interrogation. Further, Shatzer argues that any set time frame after which Edwards would expire would be arbitrary. There is no logical point after which the concerns of Edwards no longer apply – why a suspect would not feel coerced after 30 days, as suggested by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, as opposed to three months or three hours, is without reason.

Turning to the broader implications of the Court’s ruling, Shatzer dismisses the State’s argument that applying Edwards indefinitely will hamper legitimate law enforcement as overstated. He explains that preserving the scope of Edwards will not result in the exclusion of all evidence arising from reinterrogation: to the contrary, statements by suspects can be used under a variety of circumstances, such as when counsel is present.

Finally, Shatzer argues that even if the Court were to recognize a “break in custody” exception to Edwards, such an exception would not apply to him because he was continuously in custody. His position was exactly the same during the 2006 interrogation as it was in 2003, nothing changed to indicate that he had changed his mind about having the assistance of counsel – he never actually met with counsel, he remained incarcerated where his movement was restricted, he faced the uncertainty of potential charges or punishment, and he was questioned about the same allegations.

Amicus Briefs

The United States filed an amicus brief supporting Maryland, as did a group of thirty-seven states. The amici ask the Court to balance the goals of Edwards with state law enforcement interests and hold that Edwards terminates when there is a break in custody. They also echo Maryland’s arguments that serving a prison sentence constitutes a break in custody, as does a two-and-a-half-year lapse in time between interrogations, and that enforcing Edwards indefinitely would create significant obstacles to law enforcement. One other amicus, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, urges the Court to limit the protections provided by Edwards to thirty days.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed an amicus brief in support of Shatzer in which it argues that Edwards’s bright-line rule should be maintained as is, particularly when the reinterrogation involves the same crime and the suspect is incarcerated.

Grant Write-Up

Background In August 2003, the police interviewed Michael Shatzer, Sr. – who was then serving a sentence for an unrelated offense – regarding allegations that he had sexually abused his three-year-old son. Shatzer invoked his right to counsel, ending the interrogation, and the investigation was subsequently closed. In March 2006, when Shatzer’s son was older and able to provide more information, a different police officer informed Shatzer, who was still incarcerated, that a new investigation had been initiated. Shatzer waived his Miranda rights and denied allegations that he forced his son to perform fellatio on him, but admitted to masturbating in front of him. Several days later, Shatzer was again Mirandized and then failed a polygraph test. During questioning immediately thereafter, he began to cry and say “I didn’t force him. I didn’t force him.” Only then did Shatzer request an attorney; the interview ended, and he was charged with sexually abusing his son.

At trial, Shatzer filed a motion to suppress his March 2006 statements on the ground that, under Edwards, his 2003 invocation of his right to counsel barred police from interrogating him in 2006 without an attorney present. The trial court denied the motion, holding that his continuous incarceration on an unrelated offense for nearly three years constituted a break in custody for Miranda purposes, thereby terminating Edwards’s prohibition on reinterrogation. The court found Shatzer guilty of sexual abuse.

The Maryland Court of Appeals reversed. It held that under Edwards, once the right to counsel is asserted, the suspect may not be reinterrogated until he is provided with counsel or he voluntarily initiates communication. The Court stated that “the passage of time alone” will not end Edwards protections. Any “break in custody” exception to Edwards must mean something different than “custody” for Miranda purposes and, regardless, is inapplicable to an inmate who has been continuously incarcerated between interrogations.

Maryland filed a petition for certiorari in which it asked the Supreme Court to grant review to resolve disagreement in the lower courts on whether the Edwards prohibition on reinterrogation may terminate as a result of either a break in custody or a substantial lapse in time. The petition was granted on January 26, 2009.

Links and Further Information

Media Coverage

From the Blogosphere

Retrieved from "http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Maryland_v._Shatzer"
Personal tools
Creative Commons License
SCOTUSwiki by Tom Goldstein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at SCOTUSwiki.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at SCOTUSwiki.com