to the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine?
Does anyone know more about this case and what it really means?
'Miranda warning' loses some clout
David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Washington -- The Supreme Court narrowed the historic right against self-incrimination Tuesday, ruling that police and government investigators can force an unwilling person to talk, as long as those admissions are not used to prosecute them.
The 6-3 opinion undercuts the well-known "Miranda warning," in which officers tell suspects of their right to remain silent. It appears to allow more aggressive police questioning of reluctant witnesses in the
hope of obtaining evidence. While a witness' words cannot be used against him in court, evidence can be.
Most immediately, the decision throws out part of a lawsuit brought on behalf of a gravely wounded farmworker in Oxnard who was questioned in a
hospital emergency room by a police supervisor.
The officers who shot Oliverio Martinez in the face and back can be sued for using excessive force, and possibly for "outrageous conduct" at the hospital, the court said. But the justices ruled that the police supervisor who repeatedly questioned Martinez did not violate his Fifth
Amendment rights in doing so.
The Martinez case examined whether the Constitution protects a person when he is being questioned by police, or only later at a future trial. In past decades, the more liberal Supreme Court had said that suspects and witnesses had a right to remain silent. Similarly, unwilling witnesses called before investigating committees had the right to "plead the Fifth Amendment" and thereafter refuse to testify.
But in Tuesday's opinion, the court majority said the Fifth Amendment comes into play only later, when a suspect is tried in court.
Despite a common perception, the Constitution does not bar police from using pressure -- short of torture -- to obtain information from suspects or witnesses, said Justice Clarence Thomas in the court's lead opinion.
"Mere compulsive questioning (does not) violate the Constitution," Thomas said. He dismissed the view adopted by the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco that "coercive police interrogations, absent the use of the involuntary statements in a criminal case, violates the Fifth Amendment's Self- Incrimination Clause."
Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with Thomas. In a separate opinion, Justices David Souter and Stephen Breyer agreed that the "core guarantee" of the right against self- incrimination bars the use of compelled confessions in court but that "outrageous conduct by the police" still might violate a witness'
constitutional right to "due process of law."
Three others justices who sided with the Oxnard farm worker --Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy -- agreed with Souter and Breyer that police can be sued for "outrageous
conduct" during an investigation.
In a long dissent, Kennedy said the court was abandoning a historic understanding of the Fifth Amendment.
"To tell our whole legal system that, when conducting a criminal investigation, police officers can use severe compulsion, even torture, with no present violation of the right against compelled self-incrimination can only diminish a celebrated provision in the Bill of Rights," Kennedy wrote. . The case is Chavez vs. Martinez, No. 01-1444.
URL:
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/28/MN9860\0.DTL
common sense.
