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8-Hour Break in 49 ½ Hour Interrogation Did Not Render Confession Voluntary

In a full-fledged opinion by Chief Judge Lippman, the Court of Appeals determined an 8-hour break and the presence of counsel, after a 491/2-hour custodial interrogation, did not render his confession to murder voluntary and reversed his conviction:

We are unwilling to draw the inference, which the People would have us make, that the eight-hour “break” between interrogation and arraignment attenuated the taint of the wrongful interrogation. Defendant’s pre- and post-arraignment statements were, despite their temporal separation, in all other ways seamlessly linked. At the end of the marathon session, the utterly spent defendant, in exchange for a lawyer to which he was absolutely entitled, agreed in a statement ultimately suppressed as coerced, to “give everybody what they want,” and when he returned to the Blue Room on the morning of the same day and faced the same interrogator across the same table, that is exactly what he did. We do not accept the hypothesis that his intervening stay in a holding pen and arraignment on the charge of murder sufficed to transform his coerced capitulation into a voluntary disclosure. By the time of defendant’s post-arraignment statements, his options would have seemed so constricted, by what he had already divulged during the earlier portion of the interrogation, as to render the intervening temporal buffer practically irrelevant. …

…[W]e reject the contention that the entry of counsel guaranteed the voluntariness of defendant’s subsequent statements …. This contention misconstrues the statement in Miranda v Arizona (384 US 436 [1966]) that “[t]he presence of counsel, in all the cases before us today, would be the adequate protective device necessary to make the process of police interrogation conform to the dictates of the privilege [against self incrimination]. His presence would insure that statements made in the government-established atmosphere are not the product of compulsion” (id. at 466 [emphasis supplied]). Plainly, this language, expressly limited in its reference, was not intended to stand for the proposition that the presence of counsel will invariably be adequate as an assurance of voluntariness.  People v Guilford, No 103, CtApp, 6-4-13

SUPPRESSION

 

 

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