Monday, June 17, 2013

US Supreme Court Salinas v. Texas 12-246

Decision here.

   In December 1992, two brothers were shot to death in Texas.  The investigation led the police to suspect Salinas, but they didn't have much evidence against him.  Salinas came to the police department voluntarily to be interviewed, and he also allowed the police to take his shotgun for forensic tests.  He was free to leave at any time, and was not read Miranda warnings.  The interview lasted about an hour.

   Although Salinas answered most of the investigator's questions during the interview, at one point he did not.  The investigator asked if the shells recovered from the crime scene would match Salinas' shotgun.  In response, Salinas looked down to the ground,shuffled his feet, bit his lip tensed up, and clenched his fists in his lap.  He stood silent for a moment, until the investigator tried asking him different questions.  Then he started talking again.

   At the end of the interview, Salinas was arrested for some traffic warrants.  He was not charged with murder because there wasn't enough evidence.  A few days later, though, police talked to another witness who said he had heard Salinas confess to the killings.  But by then Salinas was gone.

   In 2007, Salinas was found living in the same area under an assumed name.  He was arrested for the 1992 murders.  At his trial, the prosecution used his refusal to answer the investigator's shotgun testing question against him.  He was convicted (but only sentenced to 20 years.  Is Texas going soft?).  He appealed his conviction, arguing that the prosecution's introduction of his silence violated his Fifth Amendment rights.  This appeal made it's way to the Supreme Court.

   The decision explains that the Fifth Amendment guarantees that a person may not be compelled to be a witness against himself in a criminal case, but it doesn't universally protect silence.  In order for a person to be protected by the Fifth Amendment, they have to actually assert that right.

   That isn't to say that they have to specifically mention the Fifth Amendment, there's no ritualistic formula that they have to recite.  But they have to somehow put the government on notice that they are invoking their rights, and simply not saying anything doesn't do that.

   There are two exceptions to that rule:  First, a defendant doesn't have to actually take the stand at his own trial to advise the government that he is invoking his rights.  That would be pointless.  Second (and much more interestingly), when governmental conduct renders the defendant's waiver of his rights involuntary then he doesn't have to affirmatively invoke his rights in order to be protected by it.

   In other words, a person normally has to tell the police that he doesn't want to talk, but if the police apply so much coercive pressure that the courts find that he wasn't acting of his own free will in not asserting his right against self incrimination, then his right asserts itself.  In order for a person to validly waive his right, that waiver has to be voluntary.  And there are other exceptions related to this exception: in Miranda, the court held that the coercive pressures inherent in custodial interrogation render a waiver of someone's right to remain silent involuntary unless they are advised of their rights before they waive them.  In Garrity, the court held that the threat of withdrawing a governmental benefit (employment, in that case) makes invoking the right so costly that a defendant doesn't need to say anything to invoke it.  And in cases where asserting the privilege against self incrimination would somehow incriminate the defendant, they may exercise the right through silence (those have been cases where defendants opted to not fill out tax forms that would reveal illegal income, or that sort of thing).

   None of that was the case with Salinas, though.  He wasn't in custody or subjected to any undue coercion, he wasn't in a situation where saying he didn't want to talk would incriminate him.  His momentary silence during a precustodial interview could be used against him, and his conviction was affirmed.

No comments:

Post a Comment