Thompson v. Runnel

• Decision Date: 08 September 2010
• Docket Number: No. 08-16186.,08-16186.
• Citation: 621 F.3d 1007
• Parties: Antwion E. THOMPSON, Petitioner-Appellant, v. D.L. RUNNEL, Warden, Respondents-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

621 F.3d 1007

Antwion E. THOMPSON, Petitioner-Appellant,

v.D.L. RUNNEL, Warden, Respondents-Appellees.

No. 08-16186.

United States Court of Appeals,Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted Feb. 10, 2010.

Filed Sept. 8, 2010.

J. Bradley O'Connell, First District Appellate Project, San Francisco, CA, for the appellant.

Edmund G. Brown, Gerald A. Engler, Peggy S. Ruffra and Sharon G. Birenbaum, Office of the Attorney General of California, San Francisco, CA, for the appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Jeremy D. Fogel, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. 5:05-cv-01264-JF.

Before: ALFRED T. GOODWIN, MARSHA S. BERZON and SANDRA S. IKUTA, Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge BERZON; Dissent by Judge IKUTA.

BERZON, Circuit Judge:

Before he was given Miranda warnings, Antwion Thompson confessed to killing his girlfriend. He then confessed again once he was properly advised of his rights. He was convicted by a California jury of first-degree murder, mayhem, and personal deadly weapon use. Before the California courts and in this federal habeas proceeding he maintains that the admission at trial of his confession violated the privilege against self-incrimination, because the investigating officers deliberately withheld Miranda warnings until after he had confessed to the crime. The district court denied the petition. We reverse.

I.

Arie Bivins, Thompson's sometime girlfriend, was murdered between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m. on June 22, 1998. Bivins was seventeen, Thompson eighteen. In the preceding days and months, Bivins had attempted to break up with Thompson, prompting violent reactions from him.

On the day of the murder, Thompson's father saw Thompson and Bivins talking outside his house at 1:30 p.m. Thompson left his father's house at 2:00, not saying where he was going. At about 3:00, a dog in the yard next to Bivins' house barked ferociously. Thompson returned home at 4:00, told his father he was worried about Bivins, and had his father drive him to Bivins' home. There, Thompson found Bivins' front door unlocked and her dead body just inside the door.

When the police arrived, Thompson appeared distraught. Officer Solzman approached Thompson, who said he did not feel well. Solzman offered to let Thompson lie down in the air-conditioned police car, and Thompson agreed. Later, homicide detective Conaty woke Thompson to ask him to go to the police station to talk about finding the body. Thompson responded that he wanted to go home and sleep. When Conaty explained that Thompson's assistance could be critical to the investigation, Thompson agreed to go to the station. Thompson was not placed under arrest at that time.

When Thompson arrived at the station he was placed in a break room, where he waited approximately six hours. Officer Solzman sat outside the break room doing paperwork. Thompson's father testified that he asked to speak to his son but was refused; a police witness denied that there was any such request.

Around 11:00 p.m., Inspectors Conaty and Giacomelli moved Thompson into an interview room containing three chairs and no other furniture. Thompson was not handcuffed and did not ask to go home, but, by then, Conaty considered him “the primary suspect.” The ensuing two-hour interview was videotaped.

At the outset, Conaty told Thompson that the interview could be conducted another time in the event Thompson was too tired to do it. No Miranda warnings were given. Thompson agreed to talk about the incident and gave an initial account of his activities that day with little prompting by the officers. Thompson insisted that he did not go to Bivins' house between 10:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

The tone of the interrogation then became more confrontational: The officers invented an eyewitness account that put Thompson at Bivins' house around 2:30 p.m. and pressed Thompson to explain the apparent contradiction. Thompson suggested that the witness got the time wrong, but Conaty forcefully disagreed: “No, no, no bro. Eight hours we've been up there talking to these people. I've been very clear with them about what we're talking about.... Now you've got to help me out with this thing.” As Inspector Conaty testified at trial, this fabricated eyewitness account was one of several techniques that he and Giacomelli employed for the purpose of “keep[ing] the interview going” and “hav[ing] the defendant place [himself] at the location.”

The breakthrough occurred when the officers tried again to get Thompson to admit that he had been to the house in the early afternoon, this time suggesting that Thompson had lied earlier because he was scared, “understandable,” they said, in light of his youth. ¹ Thompson thereupon broke into tears and said he went alone to Bivins' house around 2:00 p.m. where he found her dead. ² Thompson told the officers he was scared and wanted to kill himself.

No Miranda warnings had yet been administered, but the interrogation continued. The officers told Thompson-again, falsely-that they had found “high-velocity blood spatter” on a brown shirt left in his bedroom and his fingerprint in blood on a chair in Bivins' living room. Citing this “evidence” as proof that Thompson was at the scene and that a fight occurred, the officers told Thompson, “What makes or breaks this thing for how it comes out for you is to tell us what the circumstances were.... [T]his is your one chance to do that.”

Taking the bait, Thompson abandoned his story that Bivins was already dead when he arrived at her house in the afternoon. ³ He admitted to finding her alive and to stabbing her in the chest during an altercation, although he insisted that he did so accidentally. In response to further questions, Thompson then elaborated upon the details of the altercation and the location of the murder weapon and his bloodied clothing. When Conaty asked Thompson whether he felt better after “getting it all off [his] chest,” Thompson repeated that he wanted to, and intended to, commit suicide.

At this point, Conaty told Thompson that the decision about what would happen next to Thompson would be up to the District Attorney. Asked after that for more details about the incident-still with no Miranda warnings-Thompson gave a yet more detailed account of the altercation in Bivins' living room. In response to specific questioning about who held the knife, Thompson admitted that Bivins never wielded it. Recounting the altercation once more, he admitted to stabbing her and slitting her throat after she had collapsed on the floor. The officers asked several more questions about Thompson's intent in doing so and about his trip home afterwards.

Only then did the interrogating officers provide the warnings that Miranda specifies. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444-45, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). Having done so, they took Thompson back through the day's events. When Thompson reported that he slit Bivins' throat to prevent her from suffering, Conaty corrected him based on a pre- Miranda warning admission: “That, and you didn't want her to necessarily survive and tell on you, isn't that right?” The officers repeatedly referred back to the previous conversation as Thompson recapitulated his account.

Some time after 1:00 a.m., after receiving the Miranda warnings, Thompson asked to end the interview, saying that he was sleepy and needed to lie down. But the interview continued with a few more questions. The officers then handcuffed Thompson, without telling him that he was under arrest, and, around 2:00 a.m., took him to look for the murder weapon and clothing he had burned. Only after that excursion was Thompson booked into jail. He spent the rest of the night shackled to the floor in a safety cell, on suicide watch.

Stripped to his underwear and without a bed or blankets, Thompson was unable to sleep.

At the jail the next morning Inspectors Conaty and Giacomelli re-advised Thompson of his Miranda rights. After lunch, Thompson participated in a videotaped reenactment of the crime at Bivins' house.

Before trial, Thompson moved to suppress all of the statements he had made during the interrogations and reenactment on June 22 and 23. After a brief evidentiary hearing, the state trial court first addressed the “custodial” prerequisite to the Miranda requirement, ⁴ determining that Thompson was not in custody at the outset of the interrogation but that the interrogation became custodial sometime after Thompson admitted to visiting Bivins' house alone but before he conceded that he found her there alive. The trial court suppressed the statements made after the interrogation became custodial and before Miranda warnings were administered. But the court admitted Thompson's post- Miranda confession and the videotaped reenactment of the crime.

At trial, Thompson was convicted of first-degree murder, Cal.Penal Code § 187, mayhem, § 203, and personal deadly weapon use, § 12022(b)(1). His sentence was twenty-six years to life in prison.

The state appellate court, deciding Thompson's appeal on February 3, 2004, relied on Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985), to conclude that Thompson made a knowing and voluntary waiver of his rights once he was given Miranda warnings, even though he had first confessed during a non- Mirandized custodial interrogation. The California Supreme Court summarily denied review on April 21, 2004. The United States District Court for the Northern District of California denied Thompson's habeas petition, affirming the state court determination that all of Thompson's statements were voluntary and citing a lack of evidence that the use of deliberate “two-step” interrogations was an official policy of the police department. ⁵ This timely appeal followed.

II.

Because Thompson's petition was filed after the effective date of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”) and his claims were rejected by the state courts in a...