542 US 600 (2004)
Justice Souter announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join.
This case tests a police protocol for custodial interrogation that calls for giving no warnings of the rights to silence and counsel until interrogation has produced a confession. Although such a statement is generally inadmissible, since taken in violation of Miranda v. Arizona, the interrogating officer follows it with Miranda warnings and then leads the suspect to cover the same ground a second time. The question here is the admissibility of the repeated statement. Because this midstream recitation of warnings after interrogation and unwarned confession could not effectively comply with Miranda‘s constitutional requirement, we hold that a statement repeated after a warning in such circumstances is inadmissible.
I
Respondent Patrice Seibert’s 12-year-old son Jonathan had cerebral palsy, and when he died in his sleep she feared charges of neglect because of bedsores on his body. In her presence, two of her teenage sons and two of their friends devised a plan to conceal the facts surrounding Jonathan’s death by incinerating his body in the course of burning the family’s mobile home, in which they planned to leave Donald Rector, a mentally ill teenager living with the family, to avoid any appearance that Jonathan had been unattended. Seibert’s son Darian and a friend set the fire, and Donald died.
Five days later, the police awakened Seibert at 3 a.m. at a hospital where Darian was being treated for burns. In arresting her, Officer Kevin Clinton followed instructions from Rolla, Missouri, Officer Richard Hanrahan that he refrain from giving Miranda warnings. After Seibert had been taken to the police station and left alone in an interview room for 15 to 20 minutes, Hanrahan questioned her without Miranda warnings for 30 to 40 minutes, squeezing her arm and repeating “Donald was also to die in his sleep.” After Seibert finally admitted she knew Donald was meant to die in the fire, she was given a 20-minute coffee and cigarette break. Officer Hanrahan then turned on a tape recorder, gave Seibert the Miranda warnings, and obtained a signed waiver of rights from her. He resumed the questioning with “Ok, ‘trice, we’ve been talking for a little while about what happened on Wednesday the twelfth, haven’t we?” and confronted her with her prewarning statements:
Hanrahan: “Now, in discussion you told us, you told us that there was a[n] understanding about Donald.”
Seibert: “Yes.”
Hanrahan: “Did that take place earlier that morning?”
Seibert: “Yes.”
Hanrahan: “And what was the understanding about Donald?”
Seibert: “If they could get him out of the trailer, to take him out of the trailer.”
Hanrahan: “And if they couldn’t?”
Seibert: “I, I never even thought about it. I just figured they would.”
Hanrahan: “‘Trice, didn’t you tell me that he was supposed to die in his sleep?”
Seibert: “If that would happen, ’cause he was on that new medicine, you know . . . .”
Hanrahan: “The Prozac? And it makes him sleepy. So he was supposed to die in his sleep?”
Seibert: “Yes.” .
After being charged with first-degree murder for her role in Donald’s death, Seibert sought to exclude both her prewarning and postwarning statements. At the suppression hearing, Officer Hanrahan testified that he made a “conscious decision” to withhold Miranda warnings, thus resorting to an interrogation technique he had been taught: question first, then give the warnings, and then repeat the question “until I get the answer that she’s already provided once.” He acknowledged that Seibert’s ultimate statement was “largely a repeat of information . . . obtained” prior to the warning. Id., at 30.
The trial court suppressed the prewarning statement but admitted the responses given after the Miranda recitation. A jury convicted Seibert of second-degree murder. On appeal, the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed, treating this case as indistinguishable from Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 84 L. Ed. 2d 222, 105 S. Ct. 1285 (1985).
The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed, holding that “[i]n the circumstances here, where the interrogation was nearly continuous, . . . the second statement, clearly the product of the invalid first statement, should have been suppressed.” The court distinguished Elstad on the ground that warnings had not intentionally been withheld there, and reasoned that “Officer Hanrahan’s intentional omission of a Miranda warning was intended to deprive Seibert of the opportunity knowingly and intelligently to waive her Miranda rights,” . Since there were “no circumstances that would seem to dispel the effect of the Miranda violation,” the court held that the postwarning confession was involuntary and therefore inadmissible. Ibid. To allow the police to achieve an “end run” around Miranda, the court explained, would encourage Miranda violations and diminish Miranda‘s role in protecting the privilege against self-incrimination.
We granted certiorari, to resolve a split in the Courts of Appeals. We now affirm.
III
The technique of interrogating in successive, unwarned and warned phases raises a new challenge to Miranda. Although we have no statistics on the frequency of this practice, it is not confined to Rolla, Missouri. The Police Law Institute, for example, instructs that “officers may conduct a two-stage interrogation. . . . At any point during the pre-Miranda interrogation, usually after arrestees have confessed, officers may then read the Miranda warnings and ask for a waiver. If the arrestees waive their Miranda rights, officers will be able to repeat any subsequent incriminating statements later in court.” Police Law Institute, Illinois Police Law Manual 83 (Jan. 2001-Dec. 2003) (available in the Clerk of Court’s case file) (hereinafter Police Law Manual) (emphasis in original). The upshot of all this advice is a question-first practice of some popularity, as one can see from the reported cases describing its use, sometimes in obedience to departmental policy.
IV
When a confession so obtained is offered and challenged, attention must be paid to the conflicting objects of Miranda and question-first. Miranda addressed “interrogation practices . . . likely . . . to disable [an individual] from making a free and rational choice” about speaking, and held that a suspect must be “adequately and effectively” advised of the choice the Constitution guarantees, The object of question-first is to render Miranda warnings ineffective by waiting for a particularly opportune time to give them, after the suspect has already confessed.
The threshold issue when interrogators question first and warn later is thus whether it would be reasonable to find that in these circumstances the warnings could function “effectively” as Miranda requires. Could the warnings effectively advise the suspect that he had a real choice about giving an admissible statement at that juncture? Could they reasonably convey that he could choose to stop talking even if he had talked earlier? For unless the warnings could place a suspect who has just been interrogated in a position to make such an informed choice, there is no practical justification for accepting the formal warnings as compliance with Miranda, or for treating the second stage of interrogation as distinct from the first, unwarned and inadmissible segment.
There is no doubt about the answer that proponents of question-first give to this question about the effectiveness of warnings given only after successful interrogation, and we think their answer is correct. By any objective measure, applied to circumstances exemplified here, it is likely that if the interrogators employ the technique of withholding warnings until after interrogation succeeds in eliciting a confession, the warnings will be ineffective in preparing the suspect for successive interrogation, close in time and similar in content. After all, the reason that question-first is catching on is as obvious as its manifest purpose, which is to get a confession the suspect would not make if he understood his rights at the outset; the sensible underlying assumption is that with one confession in hand before the warnings, the interrogator can count on getting its duplicate, with trifling additional trouble. Upon hearing warnings only in the aftermath of interrogation and just after making a confession, a suspect would hardly think he had a genuine right to remain silent, let alone persist in so believing once the police began to lead him over the same ground again. A more likely reaction on a suspect’s part would be perplexity about the reason for discussing rights at that point, bewilderment being an unpromising frame of mind for knowledgeable decision. What is worse, telling a suspect that “anything you say can and will be used against you,” without expressly excepting the statement just given, could lead to an entirely reasonable inference that what he has just said will be used, with subsequent silence being of no avail. Thus, when Miranda warnings are inserted in the midst of coordinated and continuing interrogation, they are likely to mislead and “depriv[e] a defendant of knowledge essential to his ability to understand the nature of his rights and the consequences of abandoning them.” Moran v. Burbine, 475 U.S. 412, 424, 89 L. Ed. 2d 410, 106 S. Ct. 1135 (1986). By the same token, it would ordinarily be unrealistic to treat two spates of integrated and proximately conducted questioning as independent interrogations subject to independent evaluation simply because Miranda warnings formally punctuate them in the middle.
V
Missouri argues that a confession repeated at the end of an interrogation sequence envisioned in a question-first strategy is admissible on the authority of Oregon v. Elstad, but the argument disfigures that case. In Elstad, the police went to the young suspect’s house to take him into custody on a charge of burglary. Before the arrest, one officer spoke with the suspect’s mother, while the other one joined the suspect in a “brief stop in the living room,” , where the officer said he “felt” the young man was involved in a burglary. The suspect acknowledged he had been at the scene. This Court noted that the pause in the living room “was not to interrogate the suspect but to notify his mother of the reason for his arrest,” described the incident as having “none of the earmarks of coercion,” The Court, indeed, took care to mention that the officer’s initial failure to warn was an “oversight” that “may have been the result of confusion as to whether the brief exchange qualified as ‘custodial interrogation’ or . . . may simply have reflected . . . reluctance to initiate an alarming police procedure before [an officer] had spoken with respondent’s mother.” At the outset of a later and systematic station house interrogation going well beyond the scope of the laconic prior admission, the suspect was given Miranda warnings and made a full confession. In holding the second statement admissible and voluntary, Elstad rejected the “cat out of the bag” theory that any short, earlier admission, obtained in arguably innocent neglect of Miranda, determined the character of the later, warned confession, on the facts of that case, the Court thought any causal connection between the first and second responses to the police was “speculative and attenuated,” the Elstad Court expressed no explicit conclusion about either officer’s state of mind, it is fair to read Elstad as treating the living room conversation as a good-faith Miranda mistake, not only open to correction by careful warnings before systematic questioning in that particular case, but posing no threat to warn-first practice generally.
The contrast between Elstad and this case reveals a series of relevant facts that bear on whether Miranda warnings delivered midstream could be effective enough to accomplish their object: the completeness and detail of the questions and answers in the first round of interrogation, the overlapping content of the two statements, the timing and setting of the first and the second, the continuity of police personnel, and the degree to which the interrogator’s questions treated the second round as continuous with the first. In Elstad, it was not unreasonable to see the occasion for questioning at the station house as presenting a markedly different experience from the short conversation at home; since a reasonable person in the suspect’s shoes could have seen the station house questioning as a new and distinct experience, the Miranda warnings could have made sense as presenting a genuine choice whether to follow up on the earlier admission.
At the opposite extreme are the facts here, which by any objective measure reveal a police strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings. The unwarned interrogation was conducted in the station house, and the questioning was systematic, exhaustive, and managed with psychological skill. When the police were finished there was little, if anything, of incriminating potential left unsaid. The warned phase of questioning proceeded after a pause of only 15 to 20 minutes, in the same place as the unwarned segment. When the same officer who had conducted the first phase recited the Miranda warnings, he said nothing to counter the probable misimpression that the advice that anything Seibert said could be used against her also applied to the details of the inculpatory statement previously elicited. In particular, the police did not advise that her prior statement could not be used. Nothing was said or done to dispel the oddity of warning about legal rights to silence and counsel right after the police had led her through a systematic interrogation, and any uncertainty on her part about a right to stop talking about matters previously discussed would only have been aggravated by the way Officer Hanrahan set the scene by saying “we’ve been talking for a little while about what happened on the twelfth, haven’t we?” The impression that further questioning was a mere continuation of the earlier questions and responses was fostered by references back to the confession already given. It would have been reasonable to regard the two sessions as parts of a continuum, in which it would have been unnatural to refuse to repeat at the second stage what had been said before. These circumstances must be seen as challenging the comprehensibility and efficacy of the Miranda warnings to the point that a reasonable person in the suspect’s shoes would not have understood them to convey a message that she retained a choice about continuing to talk.
VI
Because the question-first tactic effectively threatens to thwart Miranda‘s purpose of reducing the risk that a coerced confession would be admitted, and because the facts here do not reasonably support a conclusion that the warnings given could have served their purpose, Seibert’s postwarning statements are inadmissible. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Missouri is affirmed.
Justice Kennedy, concurring in the judgment.
The Miranda rule has become an important and accepted element of the criminal justice system. At the same time, not every violation of the rule requires suppression of the evidence obtained. Evidence is admissible when the central concerns of Miranda are not likely to be implicated and when other objectives of the criminal justice system are best served by its introduction.
In my view, Elstad was correct in its reasoning and its result. Elstad reflects a balanced and pragmatic approach to enforcement of the Miranda warning.
This case presents different considerations. The police used a two-step questioning technique based on a deliberate violation of Miranda. The Miranda warning was withheld to obscure both the practical and legal significance of the admonition when finally given. The two-step technique permits the accused to conclude that the right not to respond did not exist when the earlier incriminating statements were made. The strategy is based on the assumption that Miranda warnings will tend to mean less when recited midinterrogation, after inculpatory statements have already been obtained. This tactic relies on an intentional misrepresentation of the protection that Miranda offers and does not serve any legitimate objectives that might otherwise justify its use.
Further, the interrogating officer here relied on the defendant’s prewarning statement to obtain the postwarning statement used against her at trial. This shows the temptations for abuse inherent in the two-step technique. Reference to the prewarning statement was an implicit suggestion that the mere repetition of the earlier statement was not independently incriminating. The implicit suggestion was false.
The technique used in this case distorts the meaning of Miranda and furthers no legitimate countervailing interest. The Miranda rule would be frustrated were we to allow police to undermine its meaning and effect. When an interrogator uses this deliberate, two-step strategy, predicated upon violating Miranda during an extended interview, postwarning statements that are related to the substance of prewarning statements must be excluded absent specific, curative steps.
The plurality concludes that whenever a two-stage interview occurs, admissibility of the postwarning statement should depend on “whether [the] Miranda warnings delivered midstream could have been effective enough to accomplish their object” given the specific facts of the case. . This test envisions an objective inquiry from the perspective of the suspect, and applies in the case of both intentional and unintentional two-stage interrogations. In my view, this test cuts too broadly. Miranda‘s clarity is one of its strengths, and a multifactor test that applies to every two-stage interrogation may serve to undermine that clarity. I would apply a narrower test applicable only in the infrequent case, such as we have here, in which the two-step interrogation technique was used in a calculated way to undermine the Miranda warning.
The admissibility of postwarning statements should continue to be governed by the principles of Elstad unless the deliberate two-step strategy was employed. If the deliberate two-step strategy has been used, postwarning statements that are related to the substance of prewarning statements must be excluded unless curative measures are taken before the postwarning statement is made. Curative measures should be designed to ensure that a reasonable person in the suspect’s situation would understand the import and effect of the Miranda warning and of the Miranda waiver. For example, a substantial break in time and circumstances between the prewarning statement and the Miranda warning may suffice in most circumstances, as it allows the accused to distinguish the two contexts and appreciate that the interrogation has taken a new turn. Alternatively, an additional warning that explains the likely inadmissibility of the prewarning custodial statement may be sufficient. No curative steps were taken in this case, however, so the postwarning statements are inadmissible and the conviction cannot stand.
For these reasons, I concur in the judgment of the Court.
