Opinion
NO. PD-0810-19
06-23-2021
The STATE of Texas v. Ricardo MATA, Appellee
O. Rene Flores, Edinburg, Mauricio Martinez, for Appellee. Emily Johnson-Liu, for State.
O. Rene Flores, Edinburg, Mauricio Martinez, for Appellee.
Emily Johnson-Liu, for State.
Keller, P.J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which Hervey, Richardson, Yeary, Keel, and Slaughter, JJ. joined. Does the Miranda rule require the police to give Miranda warnings to a suspect who is in custody before asking him the location of a kidnapped child? We answer that question, "No."
I. BACKGROUND
A. The Kidnapping
A fifteen-year-old girl was kidnapped. Appellee called the girl's mother and demanded a ransom of $300 for her release. He said this was the amount he had "paid" for her. Antonio Porraz, an Investigator in the Major Crimes Unit of the Hidalgo County Sheriff's Office, posed as a friend of the mother to negotiate the trade. While he talked on the phone with Appellee, Major Crimes Unit Investigator Hermelinda Chavez had Appellee's cell phone "pinged," and they were able to trace the phone's location. Surveillance was set up outside of the house where the phone was traced to. Appellee left the house in a vehicle, and the phone's "pinged" location matched his movements. While Porraz was talking to Appellee on the phone, Appellee mentioned that his battery was dying. The investigators had a marked police car—driven by Deputy Noe Canales—stop Appellee's vehicle.
Porraz and Chavez arrived on the scene and questioned Appellee regarding the kidnapped girl. They did not administer Miranda warnings. Porraz immediately accused Appellee of being the kidnapper and said that "they got him." After further "aggressive interrogation," Appellee said he would help locate the girl if they let him go. Investigator Porraz responded that Appellee would not be free to leave. After continued interrogation, Appellee revealed the child's location. Once she was found, Appellee was transported to the sheriff's office.
This is how the trial court's suppression order characterized the encounter. We assume for the purpose of this discussion that this characterization is supported by the record. We note that Porraz testified that Appellee initially denied knowing anything about the girl but when told that Porraz was the person Appellee had been talking to on the phone, Appellee's "demeanor totally changed," and he then offered to tell them where the child was in exchange for his release.
This is the trial court's characterization of the encounter. We assume that characterization is correct but note that the trial court did not claim that any physical coercion was used.
B. The Trial Court's Suppression Ruling
Appellee filed a motion to suppress statements made by him to law enforcement. One of his contentions was that the statements elicited in the roadside questioning should be suppressed because the officers did not give him Miranda warnings. The trial court agreed, suppressing any "statements alleged to have been made by [Appellee] at the time he was detained on the side of the road and in response to direct questioning from Investigator Porraz, Chavez, and or Deputy Canales." The trial court found that Appellee was "not free to leave the side of the road" at the time he gave the roadside statements and that Miranda warnings had not been given. C. Appeal
The trial court also suppressed a written statement that Appellee gave later after receiving Miranda warnings, but that ruling was reversed by the court of appeals.
On appeal, the State argued that the roadside questioning fell within the public safety exception to the Miranda rule and that the resulting statements were admissible. The court of appeals disagreed, holding that the public safety "exception is a narrow one, and it has only been used in situations involving the use of guns." The appellate court concluded that "the officers had no indication of a weapon or gun being involved or used to endanger the safety of the public," and the court declined to construe the public safety exception more broadly because that "may lessen the clarity of the Miranda rule."
State v. Mata , No. 03-17-00494-CR, 2019 WL 3023318, *4 (Tex. App.—Corpus Christi-Edinburg July 11, 2019) (not designated for publication).
Id.
II. ANALYSIS
In New York v. Quarles , the Supreme Court held that there was "a ‘public safety’ exception to the requirement that Miranda warnings be given before a suspect's answers may be admitted into evidence." The Court held that the exception did not depend on the motivation of the officers involved, who had to be free to respond to "a kaleidoscopic situation ... ‘where spontaneity rather than adherence to a police manual is necessarily the order of the day.’ " The court explained that the doctrinal underpinnings of Miranda did not require it to be "applied in all its rigor to a situation in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety."
467 U.S. 649, 655, 104 S.Ct. 2626, 81 L.Ed.2d 550 (1984).
Id. at 656, 104 S.Ct. 2626.
Id.
Id.
The Court found that the police in its case, "in the very act of apprehending a suspect, were confronted with the immediate necessity of ascertaining the whereabouts of a gun which they had every reason to believe the suspect had just removed from his empty holster and discarded in the supermarket." Because the gun's location was unknown to the officers, "it obviously posed more than one danger to the public safety: an accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it." The Court explained that requiring Miranda warnings before asking about the gun might cause "suspects in Quarles’ position" to be "deterred from responding." The Court said that deterring a suspect from responding was deemed acceptable when the primary social cost was the possibility of fewer convictions, but Quarles’ case involved more than that—a danger to the safety of the public posed by the gun.
Id. at 657, 104 S.Ct. 2626.
Id.
Id.
Id.
So the Court concluded that "the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination." The Court was unwilling to put officers in the "untenable position of having to consider, often in a matter of seconds, whether it best serves society for them to ask the necessary questions without the Miranda warnings and render whatever probative evidence they uncover inadmissible, or for them to give the warnings in order to preserve the admissibility of evidence they might uncover but possibly damage or destroy their ability to obtain that evidence and neutralize the volatile situation confronting them." The Court acknowledge that the "narrow exception" it recognized here would to some degree lessen the "desirable clarity" of the Miranda rule. But the "public safety" exception it recognized "lessens the necessity of [an] on-the-scene balancing process" and would "not be difficult for police officers to apply because in each case it will be circumscribed by the exigency which justifies it." The Court believed that "police officers can and will distinguish almost instinctively between questions necessary to secure their own safety or the safety of the public and questions designed solely to elicit testimonial evidence from a suspect." The public safety exception, "far from complicating the thought processes and the on-the-scene judgments of police officers, will simply free them to follow their legitimate instincts when confronting situations presenting a danger to the public safety."
Id.
Id. at 657-58, 104 S.Ct. 2626.
Id. at 658, 104 S.Ct. 2626.
Id.
Id. at 658-59, 104 S.Ct. 2626.
Id. at 659, 104 S.Ct. 2626.
The court of appeals restricted the "public safety exception" to the situation in which a weapon is involved. But everything the Supreme Court said in Quarles applies with at least as much force to the kidnapping of a child. Even the kidnapping and holding of an adult is a very serious matter. When a child has been kidnapped, the State's interests are at their zenith. The State has a compelling interest in protecting the well-being of its children. We have recognized that even the slightest chance of rescuing a live, kidnapped child justifies overriding the attorney-client privilege. The Supreme Court of California recognizes a "rescue" doctrine that allows a statement taken in the absence of Miranda warnings to be admitted if there was a reasonable possibility at the time of interrogation of rescuing a live kidnapping victim. Police officers need to have freedom to rely upon their instincts when it comes to rescuing kidnapping victims, especially when those victims are children. The possibility that warnings will deter a suspect from giving information leading to the rescue of a child is not worth the societal cost. In fact, saying that a suspect has a "right to remain silent" hardly makes sense when the question is, "Where is the kidnapped child?"
Black v. State , 26 S.W.3d 895, 897 (Tex. Crim. App. 2000).
Henderson v. State , 962 S.W.2d 544, 557 (Tex. Crim. App. 1997) ("Even if authorities believed that the chance of the maps leading to a live baby was remote, they were entitled to pursue that remote possibility. If the child had been abandoned, or secreted with an accomplice of appellant's, his life or health might have been in jeopardy.").
People v. Davis , 46 Cal. 4th 539, 593-95, 208 P.3d 78, 122-24, 94 Cal.Rptr.3d 322 (2009). The California court considers this doctrine analogous to but distinct from the "public safety" exception. Id. at 593, 94 Cal.Rptr.3d 322, 208 P.3d at 122-23.
The Supreme Court recognized that the small loss of clarity to the Miranda rule was justified in light of the interests underlying the "public safety" exception. We see no further loss of clarity in recognizing that the "public safety" exception extends to attempts to find a kidnapped child. The Quarles case involved the location of a weapon, but its rationale was broader than that, and that rationale easily applies to a situation involving a kidnapped child.
We conclude that the Miranda rule poses no bar to the admission of the roadside statements in this case. We reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and remand the case to that court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Walker, J., filed a concurring opinion in which McClure, J., joined.
Newell, J., concurred.
CONCURRING OPINION
Walker, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which McClure, J., joined.
Depending on the circumstances, the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona may be set aside if the warnings themselves could create a threat to public safety. Giving warnings when a kidnapping is involved will not necessarily create such a threat. But in Appellee's case, if he was properly warned and thereafter decided to remain silent, the police would have been in an untenable situation where they would not know where the kidnapping victim was located and her safety could be put at risk. For that reason, and not because it was a kidnapping of a child generally, the Quarles public safety exception to the rule of Miranda applies, and Appellee's un-Mirandized answers to "aggressive interrogation" were admissible into evidence. I agree with the Court's decision to reverse the judgment of the court of appeals, but I respectfully do not agree with the Court's reasoning and cannot join its opinion.
I — The Quarles Public Safety Exception Is Not Categorical
The court of appeals decided the Quarles public safety exception did not apply because the situation did not involve a missing gun. The Court today decides the exception does apply because public safety—insofar as the kidnapping victim was a member of the public—was involved. From my own reading of Quarles , the public safety exception is not categorical and does not turn on whether there is a missing gun, whether there is a kidnapping, or whether public safety can be generally pointed to. Instead, the exception applies when the Miranda warnings themselves can cause more harm than good: when the warnings themselves implicate public safety.
A look at the facts involved in Quarles is necessary to understanding how the public safety exception works, and, knowing how it works, it is clear to me that the situation in Appellee's case fails to meet that standard. In Quarles :
On September 11, 1980, at approximately 12:30 a.m., Officer Frank Kraft and Officer Sal Scarring were on road patrol in Queens, N.Y., when a young woman approached their car. She told them that she had just been raped by a black male, approximately six feet tall, who was wearing a black jacket with the name "Big Ben" printed in yellow letters on the back. She told the officers that the man had just entered an A & P supermarket located nearby and that the man was carrying a gun.
The officers drove the woman to the supermarket, and Officer Kraft entered the store while Officer Scarring radioed for assistance. Officer Kraft quickly spotted [Quarles], who matched the description given by the woman, approaching a checkout counter. Apparently upon
seeing the officer, [Quarles] turned and ran toward the rear of the store, and Officer Kraft pursued him with a drawn gun. When [Quarles] turned the corner at the end of an aisle, Officer Kraft lost sight of him for several seconds, and upon regaining sight of [Quarles], ordered him to stop and put his hands over his head.
Although more than three other officers had arrived on the scene by that time, Officer Kraft was the first to reach [Quarles]. He frisked him and discovered that he was wearing a shoulder holster which was then empty. After handcuffing him, Officer Kraft asked him where the gun was. [Quarles] nodded in the direction of some empty cartons and responded, "the gun is over there." Officer Kraft thereafter retrieved a loaded .38–caliber revolver from one of the cartons, formally placed [Quarles] under arrest, and read him his Miranda rights from a printed card.
New York v. Quarles , 467 U.S. 649, 651–52, 104 S.Ct. 2626, 81 L.Ed.2d 550 (1984).
The police in Quarles were told that the suspect was armed, but when they apprehended him he had no gun yet he had an empty shoulder holster. Any reasonable police officer could deduce that the suspect must have gotten rid of the gun somewhere in the supermarket. Though the suspect could not do anything himself with the now-missing gun, someone else in the supermarket could. If anyone else found the gun before the police did, that person could present a clear and present danger to the police, the other people inside the supermarket, and the people outside the supermarket should the person leave with the gun. Plainly, time was of the essence.
In holding that there should be a public safety exception to Miranda , the Supreme Court explained that:
if the police are required to recite the familiar Miranda warnings before asking the whereabouts of the gun, suspects in Quarles’ position might well be deterred from responding. Procedural safeguards which deter a suspect from responding were deemed acceptable in Miranda in order to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege; when the primary social cost of those added protections is the possibility of fewer convictions, the Miranda majority was willing to bear that cost. Here, had Miranda warnings deterred Quarles from responding to Officer Kraft's question about the whereabouts of the gun, the cost would have been something more than merely the failure to obtain evidence useful in convicting Quarles. Officer Kraft needed an answer to his question not simply to make his case against Quarles but to insure that further danger to the public did not result from the concealment of the gun in a public area.
Quarles , 467 U.S. at 657, 104 S.Ct. 2626. The plain import is that the Quarles public safety exception is intended to prevent the Miranda warnings themselves from endangering the public. This could happen, as the Supreme Court explained, where, after being informed of his rights, the suspect chooses to insist on his right to remain silent and not answer any questions, but answers are necessary to prevent an immediate danger to the public. Id. In Quarles , this was simple enough—there was a loaded weapon somewhere in the supermarket, and "[s]o long as the gun was concealed somewhere in the supermarket, with its actual whereabouts unknown, it obviously posed more than one danger to the public safety: an accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it." Id.
Although Quarles involved a gun that, if not found, could be used to cause harm to the public and Appellee's case involves a kidnapped person that herself did not pose a harm to the public, if the police could not find her in time the potential harm could have fallen on her. If Appellee had been given Miranda warnings and he thereafter chose to remain silent in the face of the roadside interrogation, his silence could have created an imminent danger to the safety of the kidnapping victim, herself a member of the public, because her location was unknown and therefore her rescue was not at all assured.
To be sure, she was actually located at an address that the police had identified during their investigation, though they did not know it at the time. The police knew two locations where Appellee's phone, from which he had been making his ransom calls as "El Guero," had pinged from. One location was Appellee's residence in Palmview; the other location, also in Palmview, was where the victim was eventually found. As a result of their investigation, the police had probable cause to support search warrants to enter both locations. And the situation was arguably exigent such that they did not even need warrants to enter both locations to search for the victim. In hindsight, if Appellee was given Miranda warnings and he exercised his right to remain silent, the police nevertheless could have rescued the kidnapping victim and Appellee's silence would not have created an imminent danger.
Rep. R. vol. 2, State's Ex. 1.
Id.
But at the time of the roadside interrogation, it was not known that the victim was at either of the two identified locations. She could have been at a third, unknown location. This placed her in a different and more precarious situation than the gun in Quarles , because at least in Quarles the gun was somewhere in the grocery store, and it would have only been a matter of time to find it. If, on the other hand, at the time of the roadside interrogation, surveillance had established and confirmed the victim's location and the police were confident that the victim was not in any immediate danger, Appellee's silence following the Miranda warnings would not have caused a threat to the safety of the victim or the public, and the Quarles exception would not apply.
But her location and safety were not established and confirmed. Under the reasoning of Quarles , which asks whether the warnings themselves could cause a threat to public safety, it was reasonable for the police to conduct the roadside interrogation of Appellee without giving him Miranda warnings. Appellee's statement given during the roadside interrogation was therefore admissible, and the court of appeals's judgment, affirming the trial court's exclusion of the statement, should be reversed.
II — Conclusion
In sum, the Quarles public safety exception to giving Miranda warnings does not turn upon the presence of a gun, whether someone was kidnapped, or whether public safety can be generally pointed to. The exception instead turns upon whether the warnings themselves could create a threat to public safety. Thus, I agree with the Court that the court of appeals erred in determining that the exception was not met based on the lack of a gun. However, I disagree with the Court's categorical approach that a kidnapping of a child inherently implicates public safety and therefore qualifies for the exception. As in Quarles , it depends on the circumstances. In this case, the police who stopped Appellee on the roadside were faced with a situation where, if they had given Appellee the Miranda warnings and he thereafter exercised his right to remain silent, they might never learn of the location of the kidnapping victim in order to rescue her. The warnings themselves could have caused an imminent threat to the victim's safety.
I concur in the Court's judgment only.