Seventh Circuit Criminal Case of the Week: Doing the Interrogation Two-Step

As all law students (and viewers of crime dramas) know, an incriminating statement generally cannot be used against a defendant if the defendant was not given the basic Miranda warnings before the statement was elicited by police.  But what if the defendant gives a second, warned statement after a first, unwarned statement?  In Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298 (1985), the Supreme Court seemed to give a green light to the use of such statements.  More recently, though, the Court ruled that a second statement was not admissible in Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004), in which police officers deliberately employed a two-step interrogation technique in order to minimize the effectiveness of the Miranda warnings. 

The trouble is that no single opinion drew a majority in Seibert.  A plurality opinion adopted a multifactor test for two-step interrogations, in which the reviewing court would determine whether a “reasonable person in the suspect’s shoes” would have understood that it was possible to refuse further questioning after the Miranda warnings were given.  Meanwhile, Justice Kennedy, providing the crucial fifth vote for the Court’s holding, wrote separately and advocated a different test that focused on whether the police were deliberately circumventing Miranda.  The Seibert split has caused continuing confusion in the lower courts.  (As Jon Deitrich observed in a post earlier today, Justice Scalia recently saved the Supreme Court from a similarly divided result in Arizona v. Gant.)

The Seventh Circuit had an opportunity to choose between the plurality and Kennedy approaches in its opinion last week in United States v. Heron (No. 07-3726). 

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After the issuance of a particularly fractured decision, featuring multiple concurrences and dissents, former Chief Justice Rehnquist once quipped, “I didn’t know we had that many people on our Court.”  The quote came to mind after reading a recent Supreme Court decision, Arizona v. Gant, in which Justice Scalia did something rather unusual and, from the perspective of those tasked with application of the Court’s often splintered decisions, laudatory.  He provided the fifth vote needed to produce a majority opinion, despite the fact that he did not entirely agree with the opinion he joined.

In Gant, the Court addressed the scope of the “search-incident-to-arrest” exception to the warrant requirement established in Chimel v. California.  In Chimel, the Court held that police may, incident to an arrest, search the area within the arrestee’s immediate control, i.e., the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence.  In New York v. Belton, the Court extended the rule, holding that police may also search the passenger compartment of the vehicle from which an arrestee was taken.  Most lower courts understood Belton to permit a vehicle search incident to arrest even when there was no real possibility that the arrestee could gain access to the vehicle at the time of the search.  Some courts even allowed a search under Belton when the handcuffed arrestee had already left the scene.

Gant presented an opportunity to narrow this construction of the Belton rule.  

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Fairness in Federal Cocaine Sentencing Policy

As is notorious, federal law treats one gram of crack cocaine the same as 100 grams of powder cocaine. Thus, a defendant caught with five grams of crack faces the same five-year mandatory minimum prison term as a powder cocaine offender in possession of 500 grams; 50 grams of crack produces the same ten-year minimum as five kilograms of powder. Despite a steady stream of criticism from academics, judges, and the United States Sentencing Commission over the past 20 years, Congress has declined to revisit the 100:1 ratio. In 2007, the Commission took a small step towards remedying the imbalance, reducing crack sentences under the advisory federal sentencing guidelines (which also contained a 100:1 crack/powder disparity) by two levels, then designating the amendment for retroactive application. As a result, thousands of federal crack prisoners received sentence reductions averaging about 17 percent. However, as the Commission itself acknowledged, true reform would require Congress to modify the 100:1 ratio and the resulting statutory mandatory minimum terms. Based on a change in position by the last major player supportive of the 100:1 disparity, the United States Department of Justice, that reform may, finally, be imminent.

In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer indicated that the Administration “believes Congress’s goal should be to completely eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.” It is too soon to tell whether Congress will completely eliminate the disparity, as the Justice Department appears to advocate, or merely narrow it to, say, 10:1 or 20:1, as the Commission and some legislators have previously recommended. Whatever it elects to do, Congress should consider retroactive application of the statutory change. Experience under the Commission’s recent crack guideline amendment shows that courts are well-equipped to apply the change to existing sentences.

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