Concept

Putting the Rules Together

Impeachment use and derivative evidence

Putting the Rules Together

Each earlier section answered a different question about a statement taken in violation of Miranda, and an exam fact pattern usually asks all of them at once. The questions have to be taken one at a time because their answers can point in different directions: the same statement may be unusable to prove guilt, usable to attack the defendant's credibility, and the starting point for physical evidence the jury sees. Each rule rests on its own reason. Barring the statement from the case in chief removes the officer's incentive to skip warnings, since a statement that cannot prove guilt is worth little to the person who took it. Impeachment use protects the truth-seeking function of the trial once the defendant chooses to testify, because a defendant who knew the earlier statement was off limits could otherwise testify falsely without fear of contradiction. The fruits question concerns causation, namely what the government would have had if the violation had never occurred. A student who lets the answer to one question stand in for the others will exclude too much or too little.

The sequence assumes that Miranda governs the encounter, and that premise should be checked first. Routine booking questions, public-safety questions, and questioning by an undercover agent fall outside the warning requirement, so they leave no violation to remedy.¹ Once a real violation is established, the analysis runs in the order below.

Exam Analysis Steps

Because each question has its own test and its own burden, a Miranda-defective statement is best run as a fixed sequence in which every question is answered before the next is asked. The steps are these:

Ask whether the prosecution may offer the statement in its case in chief, and answer no when it came from custodial interrogation without warnings and a valid waiver.
Ask whether the statement may impeach the defendant, and answer yes only if the statement was voluntary, the defendant testifies, and the defendant's own testimony contradicts it.
Ask whether evidence found because of the statement is admissible, treating a voluntary but unwarned statement as raising no fruits bar, and treating a coerced statement as raising a bar the prosecution must overcome by proving an independent source or inevitable discovery.

The first two steps restate rules from earlier in this chapter. A statement obtained during custodial interrogation is inadmissible unless the police first gave the required warnings and obtained a valid waiver, so the unwarned statement cannot carry the prosecution's case in chief.² A statement obtained in violation of Miranda may nonetheless impeach the defendant if it was otherwise voluntary and the defendant testifies inconsistently at trial.³ Two limits sit inside that second answer. The door opens only when the defendant takes the stand, so a defendant who stays silent at trial never exposes the statement, and the contradiction must come from the defendant's own testimony, since the exception exists to answer a false account given from the witness stand. The word voluntary carries the rest. In Mincey v. Arizona the Court held that an involuntary statement may not be used even to impeach, because due process forbids that use.⁴ That is why coercion, and not the mere absence of warnings, is the variable that changes the answer to the second question.

The third question depends on which kind of defect produced the statement. A Miranda violation without coercion departs from a protective rule built around the privilege and does not itself violate the privilege, so the Court has declined to apply the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine to it, on the theory that excluding every non-attenuated fruit adds little deterrence beyond the ban on using the statement itself.⁵ Witnesses and physical evidence discovered because of an unwarned but voluntary statement are therefore generally admissible.⁶ A coerced statement stands differently. The fruits doctrine applies in full, so evidence found by exploiting the statement is excluded unless the prosecution establishes an independent source or shows that discovery was inevitable.⁷ In Nix v. Williams the Court recognized that evidence is admissible if the prosecution shows that lawful means would inevitably have discovered it even without the unconstitutional conduct.⁸ That showing carries the burdens developed in the preceding sections: a preponderance of the evidence, resting on documented historical facts about a lawful investigation already underway. Students lose this issue when they assume that suppression of the statement ends the inquiry about the object it led to.

Hypothetical Illustration

Detectives arrest a suspect in a pawnshop armed robbery and question him in custody without giving warnings. They make no threats and no promises, and the suspect says he threw the pistol into the Mill Street canal. That same morning a dive team had been assigned to the canal under a written plan, and its log of numbered canal sections shows the team two sections away from the one holding the pistol. At trial the prosecution cannot offer the statement in its case in chief. The suspect then testifies that he has never owned a gun, and the prosecution may use the statement to contradict that testimony, because the statement was voluntary. The pistol comes in as well. The unwarned but voluntary statement raises no fruits bar, and the dive log would independently show that lawful means would have found the pistol.

Now change one fact. The detectives instead hold the suspect for hours and tell him that his mother will be arrested unless he talks, and he then gives the same account of the canal. The statement is involuntary, so it is out of the case in chief and out for impeachment too, which leaves his testimony that he never owned a gun unanswered by it. The pistol now faces fruits analysis, and the prosecution must prove by a preponderance that the dive team's lawful search would have reached it. The dive supervisor can testify to the plan and produce her log, and those documented facts carry the burden. Delete the plan and the log, and the pistol is excluded as the fruit of a coerced statement.

The two versions share every fact except coercion, and that single variable changes three answers: whether the statement may impeach, whether a fruits bar exists at all, and who must prove what about the pistol. The pistol is admitted in both versions, but by different routes. After the voluntary statement the dive log is a second layer of protection the prosecution does not need, while after the coerced statement the same log is the only thing standing between the pistol and exclusion. On an exam, a fact pattern that asks about the object found should therefore prompt the question of what kind of defect produced the statement before any question about inevitability.

A separate problem arises when the defendant received warnings and then said nothing. Silence after warnings is not a statement, so there is no inconsistent statement to set against the defendant's trial testimony, and the warnings themselves announce a right to remain silent. Allowing a prosecutor to ask a testifying defendant why the alibi was never given to the police after arrest would turn that announcement into a trap, which is why Doyle v. Ohio treats such use as impermissible.⁹ Miranda itself does not bar the prosecutor's comment, but the comment violates due process.¹⁰ The contrast with the impeachment rule is the useful part: an unwarned statement the defendant actually made can impeach, while silence the defendant kept after warnings cannot.

Putting the Rules Together

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