State v. Klos
| Decision Date | 10 December 2019 |
| Docket Number | No. 2 CA-CR 2018-0111,2 CA-CR 2018-0111 |
| Parties | The STATE of Arizona, Appellee, v. Supranom KLOS, Appellant. |
| Court | Arizona Court of Appeals |
Mark Brnovich, Arizona Attorney General, Joseph T. Maziarz, Chief Counsel, By Heather A. Mosher, Assistant Attorney General, Tucson, Counsel for Appellee
James L. Fullin, Pima County Legal Defender, By Jeffrey Kautenburger, Assistant Legal Defender, Tucson, Counsel for Appellant
¶1 Supranom Klos appeals her convictions for three counts of theft from a vulnerable adult, fraudulent use of a credit card, fraudulent scheme and artifice, and unlawful use of a power of attorney. She contends the trial court erred by denying her motion to suppress her self-incriminating statements because she was not adequately informed of her rights pursuant to Miranda v. Arizona , 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), or the consequences of waiving them before she was interrogated. For the following reasons, we affirm.
¶2 In reviewing a motion to suppress, we consider only the evidence presented at the suppression hearing, State v. Gonzalez , 235 Ariz. 212, ¶ 2, 330 P.3d 969 (App. 2014), viewing it in the light most favorable to upholding the trial court’s ruling, State v. Morris , 246 Ariz. 154, ¶ 2, 435 P.3d 1060 (App. 2019).
¶3 In June 2015, after a bank reported Klos’s suspicious activity involving an elderly customer’s accounts, Roger Nusbaum, a special agent from the Attorney General’s office, and Tyler Evenson, an FBI agent, arrested Klos at the beauty salon she managed. Nusbaum drove Klos to the Attorney General’s office in downtown Tucson, and because Klos had an accent indicating she was not a native English speaker, he talked with her during the twenty-minute trip to assess how well she understood English. Klos, a native Thai speaker who began to learn English when she moved to the United States in 1975, told Nusbaum she had difficulty understanding "hard words" but she could read and write in English at a tenth-grade level and had passed a cosmetology test in English. During the trip, Klos and Nusbaum conversed in English on various topics, with Klos generally responding appropriately to Nusbaum’s questions and remarks.
¶4 Once at the office, Klos again indicated she could read and write English at a tenth-grade level. Nusbaum then provided Klos a written waiver form and read it with her:
Klos then signed the waiver, which stated,
¶5 During subsequent interrogation by Nusbaum and Evenson, Klos made numerous self-incriminating statements. She admitted, for example, that on several occasions she had withdrawn large amounts of cash from the bank account of an elderly widow to whom she provided some care and used the money to pay her gambling debts. She also admitted she had repeatedly withdrawn cash at casino ATMs to gamble, and had spent tens of thousands of dollars of the victim’s money on dental implants
and a luxury vehicle for herself. Finally, Klos admitted that in the days before she was arrested, she moved tens of thousands of dollars from the victim’s bank accounts to an account jointly in her own name at a different financial institution. When confronted with the fact that she had taken over $200,000 of the victim’s money, Klos did not express surprise at the amount and admitted she had not used the money for the victim’s benefit, as required by the power of attorney she used to conduct the victim’s affairs.
¶6 Klos was indicted on three counts of theft from a vulnerable adult, fraudulent use of a credit card, fraudulent scheme and artifice, and unlawful use of a power of attorney. Before trial, Klos filed a motion to suppress her statements to police, alleging that the investigators had violated her rights by interrogating her after she "unequivocally invoked her right to counsel." She also argued that she had not understood the waiver and it was not voluntary.
¶7 During the hearing, Nusbaum testified that Klos’s responses throughout the Miranda warnings indicated that she understood him. When he advised Klos that "anything you say can be used against you in a court of law" and she responded she did not understand, he interpreted her response to mean that she did not understand "what was happening and why we were there," so he explained that she was being charged with a crime. When Klos remarked that maybe she should have an attorney appointed because she did not know what was going to happen, Nusbaum believed "[s]he was interested in the immediacy of what was going to happen to her, whether she was going to jail or not," so he told her she was going to jail. He did not take her statement as an invocation of her right to counsel. Finally, when she asked about what crime she was being charged with, Nusbaum testified he told her he could not talk about that until he completed the Miranda advisory simply because he needed to get through the advisory.
¶8 After the two-day suppression hearing, at which Evenson and Klos also testified and the state presented a transcript of the interrogation, audio recordings of the interrogation and Nusbaum’s pre-interrogation conversation with Klos, and the signed Miranda waiver, the trial court denied the motion to suppress. The court found that Klos was "fairly conversant" in English, and her statement at the end of the Miranda advisory that she "got it" along with her act of signing the waiver indicated she understood her rights. The court also found Nusbaum’s explanation that he told Klos that he did not tell her the charges against her in order to complete the Miranda warnings made "perfect sense" and found no coercion or duress. Finally, the court found that Klos had not invoked her right to counsel.
¶9 After a six-day trial, at which Nusbaum testified to Klos’s self-incriminating statements during the interrogation, a jury found Klos guilty on all counts. The trial court sentenced Klos to 6.5 years in prison followed by 3 years of probation, and ordered Klos to pay restitution of $311,833 to the victim. Klos timely appealed. We have jurisdiction under A.R.S. §§ 12-120.21(A)(1), 13-4031, and 13-4033(A)(1).
¶10 Klos contends that the trial court erred in denying her motion to suppress because she "was not adequately informed of her rights or the consequences of abandoning" her rights. "We review a trial court’s ruling on a motion to suppress evidence for abuse of discretion, but review purely legal issues and constitutional issues de novo." State v. Champagne , 247 Ariz. 116, ¶ 28, 447 P.3d 297 (2019) (citation omitted). We defer to the trial court’s factual findings, State v. Wyman , 197 Ariz. 10, ¶ 5, 3 P.3d 392 (App. 2000), and will sustain them if "substantial evidence" supports them, State v. Mumbaugh , 107 Ariz. 589, 597, 491 P.2d 443, 451 (1971).
¶11 "In order to be...
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