Stanton v. Commonwealth of Ky.

• Citation: 349 S.W.3d 914
• Decision Date: 22 September 2011
• Docket Number: No. 2010–SC–000102–MR.,2010–SC–000102–MR.
• Parties: Scott Richard STANTON, Appellant,v.COMMONWEALTH of Kentucky, Appellee.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court (Kentucky)

349 S.W.3d 914

Scott Richard STANTON, Appellant,

v.COMMONWEALTH of Kentucky, Appellee.

No. 2010–SC–000102–MR.

Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Sept. 22, 2011.

Julia Karol Pearson, Department of Public Advocacy, Frankfort, KY, Counsel for Appellant.Jack Conway, Attorney General, Julie Scott Jernigan, Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General, Criminal Appellate Division, Frankfort, KY, Counsel for Appellee.Opinion of the Court by Justice ABRAMSON.

Scott Stanton appeals as a matter of right from a Judgment of the Todd Circuit Court convicting him of first-degree rape and first-degree sodomy and sentencing him to twenty years' imprisonment. Stanton's guilty plea, in which he admitted anal intercourse with his stepson, a child under twelve years of age, was conditioned upon his right to appeal the trial court's denial of his motion to suppress two statements he gave to law enforcement officers. Stanton maintains that the officers coerced him to make the incriminating statements by representing that his two young children could be removed from the family home pursuant to a court order if he failed to cooperate with the investigation. Convinced that the trial court correctly found from the totality of the circumstances that Stanton was not coerced to make the two statements he now challenges, we affirm.

RELEVANT FACTS

In late December 2008, Stanton's stepson, his wife's child from a former marriage, told his father that Stanton had sexually assaulted him. The father took the child to the Guthrie, Kentucky police station and informed Officer John Lancaster of the child's accusations. Officer Lancaster sought assistance from Donna Monroe, a social worker for the Department for Community Based Services. Together they interviewed the child and then drove to Stanton's brother's house, where they found Stanton, his wife, and their two children. At the insistence of the two investigators, Stanton and his family, driving in their own vehicle, followed Lancaster and Monroe to the Guthrie police station. There, the investigators first interviewed Stanton's wife and then interviewed Stanton, after having informed him of his Miranda rights. In the course of his interview, Stanton admitted having had sexual contact with his stepson on two occasions. At the conclusion of the interview, Officer Lancaster formally arrested Stanton, who then spent the night in the Todd County Jail. The next day he was reminded of his Miranda rights and then interviewed again, this time by Officer Lancaster and Detective Ken Roberts, a child-abuse investigator for the Christian County Sheriff's Department. During that interview Stanton again admitted one of the incidents he had admitted during the first interview, but at that point he claimed to have no memory of the other.

On February 26, 2009, a Todd County grand jury indicted Stanton for one count each of rape and sodomy. About two weeks later an amended indictment was returned charging him with an additional thirty-three counts of rape, sodomy, and sexual abuse. The record does not indicate against whom these additional acts were alleged to have been perpetrated. In the meantime, Stanton had grown so despondent at the jail that he was referred to the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center (KCPC) for evaluation. He was there found to suffer from bipolar disorder with psychotic tendencies and to be of low intelligence, his IQ somewhere between 73 and 82.

In September 2009, Stanton moved to suppress his two December statements. Following a suppression hearing in October 2009, the trial court denied the suppression motion, and soon thereafter, on November 20, 2009, Stanton pled guilty to one count of rape and one count of sodomy in exchange for a concurrent twenty-year sentence and the dismissal of the other charges. He conditioned his plea on being able to seek appellate review of the trial court's suppression ruling. Stanton now contends that social worker Monroe's statement that she would seek a court order for removal of Stanton's children from the family home unless he “cooperated” with her and Officer Lancaster rendered his statements involuntary and therefore inadmissible under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. ¹ Although statements in that vein can be threatening and coercive, the trial court correctly held in this case that Stanton's confession was not coerced.

ANALYSIS

“[C]ertain interrogation techniques,” the United States Supreme Court has held, “either in isolation or as applied to the unique characteristics of a particular suspect, are so offensive to a civilized system of justice that they must be condemned.” Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. 104, 109, 106 S.Ct. 445, 88 L.Ed.2d 405 (1985). This condemnation arises not only because we are concerned that the enforcers of the law themselves respect the law, but as importantly because we are concerned that the fundamental fairness guaranteed criminal defendants by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and by Section 11 of the Kentucky Constitution not be undermined by confessions extracted from them against their will. Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. 368, 84 S.Ct. 1774, 12 L.Ed.2d 908 (1964); Culombe v. Connecticut, 367 U.S. 568, 81 S.Ct. 1860, 6 L.Ed.2d 1037 (1961); Bailey v. Commonwealth, 194 S.W.3d 296 (Ky.2006). See also Kentucky Revised Statute (KRS) 422.110 (forbidding interrogation by “wrongful means.”). Recognizing the vital and legitimate role interrogation plays in the investigation of crimes, the United States Supreme Court has sought to balance the state's interest in crime control with that of the defendant in fair proceedings by declaring inadmissible at trial only those confessions that may be deemed involuntary in that they spring not from the defendant's “essentially free and unconstrained choice,” Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 225, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973), but rather from “coercive police activity,” Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U.S. 157, 167, 107 S.Ct. 515, 93 L.Ed.2d 473 (1986), that succeeds in overbearing the defendant's will and in “critically impair[ing]” his “capacity for self-determination.” Schneckloth, 412 U.S. at 225, 93 S.Ct. 2041. Physical pressures to confess, such as violence, the threat of violence, or deprivations of food, sleep or medical attention, have been held impermissible. Connelly, 479 U.S. at 163–64, 107 S.Ct. 515 (collecting cases). And undue psychological pressures, such as holding suspects incommunicado for lengthy periods or subjecting them to unduly long or repeated interrogation sessions, have also been condemned. Id.

When a defendant challenges the admissibility of his confession on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, it is the Commonwealth's burden to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the confession was voluntary. The trial court assesses that claim by considering the totality of the surrounding circumstances, including the details of the interrogation and the characteristics of the defendant, and by asking whether the confession resulted from overreaching by the interrogators or from the defendant's own properly elicited choice. Schneckloth, 412 U.S. at 226, 93 S.Ct. 2041; Connelly, 479 U.S. at 169–70, 107 S.Ct. 515. On appeal, we defer, absent clear error, to the trial court's findings of fact with respect to the surrounding circumstances, but we review its ultimate voluntariness determination—a question of law— de novo. Cummings v. Commonwealth, 226 S.W.3d 62 (Ky.2007) (citing Welch v. Commonwealth, 149 S.W.3d 407 (Ky.2004)). And see, Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. at 110, 106 S.Ct. 445 (noting that the “ultimate issue of Voluntariness' is a legal question.”).

Stanton maintains that his interrogation was tainted by an improper threat—social worker Monroe's threat to have his children removed from their home if he did not “cooperate” with the investigation. Monroe, Officer Lancaster, and Stanton all testified at the suppression hearing, and all were in accord that at some point in the investigators' encounter with Stanton, Monroe did indeed indicate that she was prepared to “pick up the phone and call [District Court] Judge Browning for an order to remove the children.” All three witnesses also testified that the remark came after Stanton initially refused to go to the police station. Monroe and Officer Lancaster testified that Monroe made the remark at Stanton's brother's house when Stanton refused to follow them to the police station. Stanton testified inconsistently. He first agreed that the remark was made at his brother's house when the investigators told him that he and his wife needed to cooperate with the investigation. The remark, he testified, greatly upset his wife, troubled him, and convinced him to submit to questioning. Later in his testimony, however, he claimed that Monroe made the removal remark not at his brother's house, but three times during the course of his station-house interview.² He testified that he understood the remark regarding cooperation and the court order to mean that he was to tell the investigators what they wanted to hear, and so, to protect his children, he confessed to crimes that in fact he did not commit. In its findings, the trial court noted the discrepancy in Stanton's testimony, and though not expressly resolving it, appears to have credited Stanton's initial version, which accorded with the other testimony and tended to explain why Stanton and his wife relented and went to the police station.

Otherwise, Officer Lancaster testified that at the beginning of the first interview, which was not recorded, he informed Stanton of his Miranda rights and that Stanton appeared to understand them. He reminded Stanton of those rights at the beginning of the second interview, which was recorded although the recording was not made a part of the record, and again Stanton indicated that he understood....