In re R.J.H., 00-1256.

• Decision Date: 30 May 2002
• Docket Number: No. 00-1256.,00-1256.
• Citation: 79 S.W.3d 1
• Parties: In the Matter of R.J.H., Petitioner.
• Court: Texas Supreme Court

Page 1

79 S.W.3d 1

In the Matter of R.J.H., Petitioner.

No. 00-1256.

Supreme Court of Texas.

Argued October 17, 2001.

Decided May 30, 2002.

Ronald Earle, Travis County District Attorney, Lisa Dotin Stewart, Assistant District Attorney, Rae-Ann F. Allong, Travis County District Attorney's Office, Austin, for Petitioner.

Thomas Wyatt Robertson, Austin, for Respondent.

Justice HECHT delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice PHILLIPS, Justice ENOCH, Justice OWEN, Justice JEFFERSON, and Justice RODRIGUEZ join.

Whether a juvenile's noncustodial, inculpatory statements, made after the juvenile has already given police a confession inadmissible under state law because a magistrate was not present, are nevertheless voluntary and therefore admissible without offense to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution must be determined from the totality of the circumstances.¹ Our main inquiry here is whether the court of appeals correctly applied this test in holding that the admission of a juvenile's statements was error.² We hold that it did not and therefore reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and reinstate the trial court's adjudication of delinquency.

I

A

The record before us consists of the testimony of three Department of Public Service officers, Michael Scheffler, D.G. Elder, and Michael Telles, at a hearing on a motion to suppress evidence. We summarize their testimony as follows.

R.J.H., a sixteen-year-old boy, was a passenger in a car driven by his adult cousin, Pedro Ybarra, when they were stopped mid-afternoon by Officer Scheffler because neither was wearing a seat belt. When Ybarra could not produce a driver's license, Scheffler arrested him, and had the car inventoried and impounded. Scheffler noticed that there were no keys in the ignition and that the steering column had been "popped", indicating that the car may have been stolen. He also detected the odor of marijuana in the car and saw a marijuana cigarette in the ashtray. Scheffler asked R.J.H. whether the cigarette was his, and he admitted it was. In searching the car, Scheffler found an expensive set of golf clubs, some telephone equipment, and numerous compact disks and videotapes that had all been reported stolen from a residence the previous day.

Scheffler handcuffed R.J.H. and took him to Detective Elder's office at a local DPS station. Elder had R.J.H.'s handcuffs removed, determined that he should be released, and telephoned his father to come to the station and pick him up. While R.J.H. waited for his father to arrive, he was free to walk around the office, go to the rest room, and get something to drink. He also talked with Elder for a little while, explaining that he had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, had fathered a child, and was on probation. Elder testified that he did not suspect R.J.H. of theft of the property that had been found in the car but wanted to ask him about Ybarra's involvement with his father present.

After about an hour R.J.H.'s father arrived, and Elder asked if he could question R.J.H. further. R.J.H. and his father agreed. Elder gave R.J.H. his Miranda³ warnings and then questioned him about the theft. R.J.H. said he had broken into a house and opened the door for Ybarra, and the two of them had carried off the property found in their car. R.J.H. stated that because he was a juvenile, he believed nothing serious would happen to him as a result of the crime. Elder did not take R.J.H. before a magistrate when R.J.H. began to implicate himself in the burglary because Elder did not consider R.J.H. to be in custody. Elder had R.J.H.'s statement reduced to writing, and R.J.H. and his father signed it. The two then left Elder's office.

Several days later, R.J.H. telephoned Elder and asked to change his written statement. He told Elder that he had committed the burglary by himself, that Ybarra had not been involved at all. After that conversation, Elder and R.J.H. spoke together several other times. R.J.H. repeatedly told Elder that he wanted to revise his written statement to take sole responsibility for the burglary, exonerating Ybarra. Based on what R.J.H. had told him before, Elder thought that R.J.H. believed the consequences would be less severe for himself than they would be for Ybarra if Ybarra, an adult, were charged with the crime. In the course of their conversations, Elder told R.J.H. that the burglary victims were anxious to recover all of the property taken, including an old Masonic ring that had been in the family for many years. Elder hoped to "guilt trip" R.J.H. into helping him locate the ring and other property, and R.J.H. did appear to cooperate, although no other property was found.

B

The State petitioned for an adjudication that R.J.H. had engaged in delinquent conduct, namely burglary, a felony.⁴ R.J.H. moved to suppress the written statement he gave to Elder on the ground that he had not been admonished of his rights by a magistrate as required by section 51.095(a)(1) of the Texas Family Code. Under the United States Constitution, a juvenile charged with delinquency is protected from self-incrimination and entitled to counsel and must be advised of these rights before being asked to make a statement while in police custody.⁵ The Texas Family Code provides that a juvenile can waive his rights once he is in custody only if joined by his attorney⁶ or if done in the presence of a magistrate.⁷ R.J.H. also moved to suppress his later oral statements to Elder because they were tainted by the inadmissibility of the earlier written statement. The State countered that R.J.H. was not in custody when he gave his written statement and therefore section 51.095(a)(1) was inapplicable.

The State called Officer Scheffler and Detective Elder to testify on the motion. R.J.H. did not testify and called only one witness, Officer Telles, who testified only about the inventory he conducted of the car. At the conclusion of the hearing the court stated on the record that it found that R.J.H. had been in custody when he gave his written statement but not afterward. The court ordered that R.J.H.'s written statement be suppressed but not his subsequent oral statements. Subject to this ruling, R.J.H. then pleaded "true" to the petition and was sentenced to intensive-supervision probation for one year. (The State did not argue in the court of appeals that R.J.H.'s plea of "true" forecloses appeal from the ruling on the motion to suppress, and thus has failed to preserve that argument. We therefore express no opinion on that issue.)

A divided court of appeals reversed.⁸ The court agreed that R.J.H.'s written statement was inadmissible under section 51.095(a)(1) of the Family Code, but held that as a result his later oral statements were involuntary and therefore inadmissible under the Fourteenth Amendment.⁹ The court also held that R.J.H.'s oral statements were inadmissible under section 54.03(e) of the Family Code, which provides in pertinent part: "An extrajudicial statement which was obtained without fulfilling the requirements of this title or of the constitution of this state or the United States, may not be used in an adjudication hearing."¹⁰

The State's petition for review challenges these holdings, and R.J.H. does not argue here that his later statements were inadmissible for any other reason. Thus, the only issues before us are whether R.J.H.'s later oral statements to Detective Elder were admitted either in violation of constitutional due process because they were not voluntary, or in violation of section 54.03(e) of the Family Code. We consider each issue in turn.

II

The test for determining whether a confession was made voluntarily is well established: the totality of the circumstances surrounding the making of the confession must be examined to determine whether the confession was "the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice by its maker".¹¹ Conversely, a statement is involuntary "only if there was official, coercive conduct of such a nature that any statement obtained thereby was unlikely to have been the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice by its maker."¹²

Under federal law, whether a confession is voluntary is a mixed question of fact and law.¹³ Appellate review of the trial court's findings of historical fact is deferential because the trial court is in a better position to weigh credibility and make such determinations, but review of the application of the law to the facts is de novo because the trial court is in no better position to decide legal issues than the appellate court.¹⁴ The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stated that a trial court's ruling on a motion to suppress in a criminal case is reviewed by an abuse-of-discretion standard¹⁵ and has not said whether that standard of review is different from the standard under federal law.¹⁶ The Family Code, which governs juvenile delinquency proceedings in Texas, requires that they be conducted under the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, except as to discovery, and under the Texas Rules of Evidence applicable to criminal proceedings."¹⁷ These rules do not set a standard for appellate review of a ruling on a motion to suppress. Finding no rule, statute, or court decision that prescribes a standard of review of such a ruling in a juvenile case, we choose to use an abuse-of-discretion standard, which for purposes of this case at least we take to be essentially identical to the federal standard, because it seems to us to make the most sense and is most consistent with appellate procedure in civil cases generally. Thus, we defer to the trial court's findings of historical fact but determine de novo whether those facts show that a juvenile's statements were made voluntarily for purposes of constitutional due process.

The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure requires trial judges to make written findings of fact in connection with rulings on motions to suppress,¹⁸ and...