Bridges v. Valley
| Decision Date | 08 July 2011 |
| Docket Number | 10 Civ. 5950 (BMC) |
| Parties | EDWARD BRIDGES, Petitioner, v. LIA VALLEY, Respondent. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of New York |
DECISION AND ORDER
Petitioner, having had a fight with his first victim two weeks earlier, approached the victim on the street and fatally shot him in the head from two feet away. He continued firing multiple shots and also killed a woman who was with the first victim. He was convicted in state court of intentional murder in the second degree with respect to the first victim, and depraved indifference murder in the second degree with respect to the second. The trial court sentenced him to twenty-five years to life for each murder, to run consecutively.
In his petition for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §2254(d), petitioner timely raises seven exhausted points of error: (1) two confessions he gave should have been suppressed for lack of Miranda warnings; (2) the evidence was legally insufficient to support his depraved indifference murder conviction; (3) the trial court did not instruct the jury that depraved indifference was a mental state that had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt; (4) the sentencing judge violated Apprendi in deciding that the sentences imposed would run concurrently, not consecutively; (5) witness identifications of him should have been suppressed; (6) his trial counsel was ineffective for omitting to make certain motions and raise certainobjections; and (7) the trial court failed to administer required oaths to the jury. Points two and three are procedurally barred, and the Appellate Division's rejection of points one, four, and five through seven was not an unreasonable application or contrary to Supreme Court precedent. Accordingly, his petition is denied.
Additional facts will be set forth below as necessary to address each of petitioner's points of error.
Upon his arrest, at 9:45 p.m. on June 24, petitioner was read his Miranda rights and signed a written advice and waiver. After just over two hours of questioning, he made an exculpatory statement at 11:45 p.m., admitting that he was in the area of the shooting at the time but denying any knowledge of it. He remained in custody overnight. The next day, at noon, he was questioned again, without additional Miranda warnings, and essentially gave the same statement.
Just over three hours later, at 3:25 p.m., he was interrogated again; the detectives, who had his signed Miranda waiver form from the previous night, did not re-administer the warnings. Petitioner then broke down and admitted that he was the shooter. The detectives wrote down petitioner's statement, and he signed it. At 8:25 p.m., an Assistant District Attorney interviewed petitioner on videotape. Petitioner acknowledged that he had received and waived his Miranda rights the preceding evening, and the ADA again advised him of those rights and petitioner again agreed to waive them. He then repeated his confession.
Petitioner contended on appeal that the police had the obligation to re-administer his Miranda warnings prior to his confession because eighteen hours had passed between the time ofhis waiver and his confession. Petitioner further argued that since the ADA's videotape was tainted by his confession, both should have been suppressed. The Appellate Division rejected his claim on the merits, holding that the police, having obtained a valid waiver, were not obligated to re-administer Miranda warnings. People v. Bridges, 63 A.D.3d 752, 880 N.Y.S.2d 341 (2d Dep't), leave to app. den., 13 N.Y.3d 794, 887 N.Y.S.2d 544 (2009). Because the state court adjudicated this claim on the merits, I cannot grant habeas relief unless the state court's decision was "contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established" Supreme Court precedent. See 28 U.S.C. 2254(d); Williams v. Taylor. 529 U.S. 362, 405 (2000).
The controlling Supreme Court authority is Wyrick v. Fields, 459 U.S. 42, 47 (1982). There, the Court rejected the contention that the mere passage of time could require the re-administration of Miranda warnings. Rather, the Court held that renewed warnings were not required "unless the circumstances changed so seriously that his answers no longer were voluntary, or unless he no longer was making a 'knowing and intelligent relinquishment or abandonment' of his rights." Id. at 47 (citation omitted). To make that determination, the Court required a review of "the totality of the circumstances" to determine if the confession was voluntary. Id.
Courts within this Circuit have accordingly refused to suppress confessions simply because of the time period that elapsed between the initial and subsequent interrogations. See, e.g., U.S. v. Davis, No. 06 Cr. 911, 2009 WL 637164, at *12 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 11, 2009) (); Tobias v. Portuondo, 367 F. Supp. 2d 384 (W.D.N.Y. 2004) (same); James v. Ricks, No. 01 CV 4106, 2003 WL 21142989 (E.D.N.Y. Mar. 6, 2003) (). Indeed, the facts of this case are strikingly similar to Hotchkiss v. Walsh, No. 00 Civ. 5518, 2004 WL 2721943 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 29, 2004), where the defendant was mirandized and waived his right to remain silent at 11:55 p.m., made an exculpatory statement, and then confessed around 5:40 p.m. the next day without re-administration; the court refused to find that new warnings were constitutionally required. As the Second Circuit has held, "[i]t is well established that once an arrested person has received a proper Miranda warning, the fact that questioning is stopped and then later resumed does not necessarily give rise to the need for a new warning." United States v. Banner, 356 F.3d 478, 480 (2d Cir. 2004), judgment vacated on other grounds sub nom. Forbes v. U.S., 543 U.S. 1100, 125 S. Ct. 1010 (2005).
In the instant case, petitioner's arguments before the Appellate Division relied solely on the passage of time between his waiver and his confession. The record contains no other facts upon which he could have relied. While in custody, he was fed or offered food several times, he slept overnight, and there is no evidence that he was denied the use of a bathroom or subjected to coercive measures. His location did not change; he remained at the police precinct, either in a holding cell or interview room, throughout. Moreover, when he gave his videotaped confession, he acknowledged that he had previously been given and waived his rights, thus foreclosing any possible claim that he had forgotten them. Finally, as the hearing court noted, petitioner was "not a novice to the criminal justice system," further suggesting that he knew and voluntarily waived his rights.
Considering the totality of the circumstances, the Appellate Division's decision to sustain admission of the confessions was not contrary to or an unreasonable application of Wyrick.
There was an eyewitness to the shooting who knew petitioner from around the neighborhood and the street on which he lived. The eyewitness was interviewed by the police shortly after the shooting, and the police thereafter came to his home with a computer-generated black and white photo array showing six pictures, one of which was of petitioner. The eyewitness told the police that the bottom row of the array (which contained petitioner's picture) was too dark to see and that the shooter could be any one of the three pictures in that row; he asked to see it in color. He went down to the precinct the next day and viewed the color array on a computer screen, at which time he identified petitioner. The array was then printed out in black and white and the eyewitness signed his name under petitioner's picture. The eyewitness then observed a lineup containing petitioner and picked petitioner out of the lineup.
By the time of the pretrial suppression hearing, the original black and white array with the too-dark bottom row had been lost. The prosecutor introduced into evidence at the hearing the array signed by the eyewitness (or a copy of it), a newly generated color printout of that array, and another black and white printout of it created on the day of the suppression hearing, together with testimony explaining the sequence of events described above.
The suppression court held that the eyewitness would be permitted to identify petitioner at trial, rejecting petitioner's argument that the lineup was rendered unduly suggestive by the loss of the original photo array which the eyewitness had found too dark. The Appellate Division affirmed that decision on the merits. It noted the New York rule holding that the failure to preserve the original printout gave rise to a rebuttable presumption of suggestiveness, but held that the prosecutor had presented evidence sufficient to overcome that presumption because"each computer printout of the photographic array in question was virtually identical." Bridges, 63 A.D.3d at 753, 880 N.Y.S.2d at 341.
I can find no Supreme Court authority which the Appellate Division unreasonably applied or to which the Appellate Division's holding was contrary. Notably, petitioner has cited no federal authority of any kind in support of his argument and cited none in the Appellate Division, relying instead on the New York presumption. But that presumption itself is not required by federal law, see Sales v. Harris, 675 F.2d 532, 538 n. 3 (2d Cir. 1982); United States v. Williams, 575 F.2d 388, 393 (2d Cir. 1978) (), so it seems unlikely that violation of this New York rule could...
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