U.S. v. Baldwin

• Decision Date: 19 July 1995
• Docket Number: No. 94-1025,94-1025
• Citation: 60 F.3d 363
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Charles BALDWIN, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 363

60 F.3d 363

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Charles BALDWIN, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 94-1025.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Submitted April 21, 1995.

Decided July 19, 1995.

Mel S. Johnson, Asst. U.S. Atty., Office of U.S. Atty., Milwaukee, WI, for plaintiff-appellee U.S.

Christopher Lowe, Milwaukee, WI, for defendant-appellant Charles Baldwin.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and FAIRCHILD and KANNE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Chief Judge.

The defendant was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 23 years in prison. His only ground for appeal that merits discussion is that inculpatory statements (that he was a habitual user of cocaine and that he routinely carried a gun for protection) that he made to a federal agent who questioned him shortly after he had been arrested should have been suppressed as involuntary. The agent had promised that any cooperation by the defendant would be brought to the prosecutor's attention. This promise, the defendant argues, rendered his statements involuntary. The district court rejected the argument and allowed the statements into evidence.

The conventional standard for appellate review of determinations of the voluntariness of a statement, which in this circuit was established in United States v. Hawkins, 823 F.2d 1020, 1022 (7th Cir.1987), is the de novo standard. See, e.g., United States v. Cichon, 48 F.3d 269, 275 (7th Cir.1995); United States v. Benitez, 34 F.3d 1489, 1495 (9th Cir.1994); United States v. Burns, 15 F.3d 211, 216 (1st Cir.1994). But beginning with Judge Easterbrook's concurring opinion in Sotelo v. Indiana State Prison, 850 F.2d 1244, 1253-54 (7th Cir.1988), our cases increasingly have questioned the soundness of the conventional approach. Johnson v. Trigg, 28 F.3d 639, 645 (7th Cir.1994); United States v. Rutledge, 900 F.2d 1127, 1128 (7th Cir.1990); United States v. Wildes, 910 F.2d 1484, 1485 (7th Cir.1990); Wilson v. O'Leary, 895 F.2d 378, 383 (7th Cir.1990). The cases that follow the approach do so on the authority of Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. 104, 110, 106 S.Ct. 445, 449, 88 L.Ed.2d 405 (1985), a case that did not involve appellate review of a federal district court's determination of voluntariness. A habeas corpus case in which a state prisoner was seeking to have the federal district court overturn his conviction on the ground that it rested on a coerced confession, Miller held that 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2254(d), which requires federal courts in habeas corpus proceedings to presume that state courts' "factual" findings are correct, is inapplicable to the issue of voluntariness. "[T]he ultimate issue of 'voluntariness' is a legal question requiring independent federal review." 474 U.S. at 110, 106 S.Ct. at 449. This is a different matter from whether a federal court of appeals should review de novo a determination of voluntariness made not by a state judge in a state trial but by a federal district judge in a federal trial. Since the relation between federal and state courts and the relation between federal appellate and federal trial courts are not symmetrical, the two questions need not be answered the same way. Miller is designed to provide a state prisoner with generous federal review of the constitutional question whether he was convicted with the aid of a coerced confession. It has nothing directly and, as it seems to us at any rate, very little indirectly to do with the scope of appellate review of determinations made by federal judges.

Whether a particular confession or other statement was "voluntary" or "involuntary" is a classic instance of a "mixed question of fact and law," that is to say, of the application of a legal standard (that of voluntariness) to "the facts" as a layman would understand them, such as what the agent said to Baldwin, whether it was true, and how much Baldwin knew about how the criminal justice system works. This court, consistent with decisions by the Supreme Court, McDermott Int'l Inc. v. Wilander, 498 U.S. 337, 356, 111 S.Ct. 807, 818, 112 L.Ed.2d 866 (1991); Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., 496 U.S. 384, 401-05, 110 S.Ct. 2447, 2458-61, 110 L.Ed.2d 359 (1990); Pierce v. Underwood, 487 U.S. 552, 559-61, 108 S.Ct. 2541, 2547-48, 101 L.Ed.2d 490 (1988), has moved decisively to the position that appellate review of determinations of mixed questions of fact and law should be governed by the standard of clear error, and not by the de novo standard. E.g., G.J. Leasing Co. v. Union Electric Co., 54 F.3d 379, 381 (7th Cir.1995); Stevens v. United States, 49 F.3d 331, 334 (7th Cir.1995); Williams v. Commissioner, 1 F.3d 502, 505 (7th Cir.1993); United States v. Spears, 965 F.2d 262, 269-71 (7th Cir.1992); Mars Steel Corp. v. Continental Bank N.A., 880 F.2d 928, 933 (7th Cir.1989) (en banc). The reasons are several. The trial judge, because he is closer to the facts--the court of appeals gets them at second hand--knows more about the premise to which the legal standard (possession, negligence, good faith--or voluntariness, as in the Stevens case) is to be applied. He is also more practiced than appellate judges in assessing the significance of facts. And since the legal standard is a given, and only its application to a particular and perhaps unique set of facts is in question, de novo review is not necessary to produce a reasonable uniformity of the legal principles applied within the court's jurisdiction. Uniformity occurs at the level of the standard; it is impossible at the level of application because outcomes vary with the differing facts of different cases.

These considerations apply as forcefully to appellate review of determinations of voluntariness as they do to determinations of other mixed questions of fact and law. To our knowledge, no case or other appropriate source of guidance to judges has suggested a reason to suppose these considerations inapplicable, or even less applicable, to determinations of voluntariness. It is true that the issue of voluntariness is constitutional. But so is the issue of probable cause for a search or arrest, and, even closer, the issue of the voluntariness of a waiver of Miranda rights and the issue of the voluntariness of a consent to search; yet all three are issues in which appellate review in this circuit is for clear error, rather than being de novo. United States v. Spears, supra, 965 F.2d at 269-71; Bryan v. Warden, 820 F.2d 217, 219-20 (7th Cir.1987); cf. United States v. Price, 54 F.3d 342, 345 (7th Cir.1995). Consistency and common sense require that the issue of the voluntariness of a confession be treated the same way, and we so hold today.

Applying the standard of clear error to the present case, we must uphold the judge's ruling that Baldwin's statements were voluntary. Although courts until comparatively recently would sometimes say, quoting Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 542-43, 18 S.Ct. 183, 186-87, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897), that any confession wrung out of a suspect by promises or threats is involuntary, e.g., United States v. Costello, 750 F.2d 553, 555 (7th Cir.1984); United States v. Jackson, 918 F.2d 236, 241-42 (1st Cir.1990), that had ceased to be the actual test of involuntariness long before the formal interment of Bram in Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 285, 111 S.Ct. 1246, 1251, 113 L.Ed.2d 302 (1991). As we explained in United States v. Rutledge, supra, 900 F.2d at 1130, the proper test is whether the interrogator resorted to tactics that in the circumstances prevented the suspect from making a rational decision whether to confess or otherwise inculpate himself. A false promise of lenience would be an example of forbidden tactics, for it would impede the suspect in making an informed choice as to whether he was better off confessing or clamming up. But "government is not forbidden to buy information with honest promises of consideration." Id. at 1130. And as it is well known that the suspect's cooperation, by lightening the government's burdens of investigation and prosecution, is looked upon favorably by prosecutors and judges, what the agent told the defendant was very close to being a truism; it is not claimed to have been false and misleading; and the defendant was not a tyro or ignoramus, but a 39-year-old with a long history of involvement in the criminal justice system. The district court's conclusion that, in these circumstances, the statements were voluntary cannot be considered clearly erroneous.

Because this decision overrules a previous decision of the court (Hawkins ) and creates an intercircuit conflict, it was circulated to the full court in accordance with 7th Cir.R. 40(f). A majority of the active judges voted not to hear the case en banc, Judges Coffey, Flaum, Ripple, and Rovner dissenting.

AFFIRMED.

FAIRCHILD, Circuit Judge, concurring.

I concur in affirmance. Applying the de novo standard, I have no difficulty in concluding that Baldwin's decision to make a statement was not unconstitutionally induced.

Looking at the issue of voluntariness as a question of a mental state, I can agree that it is anomalous not to treat it as an issue of fact. Issues as to intent, knowledge, wilfulness and the like, are treated as issues of fact. On review of a trial court finding on those issues, the appellate court is deferential, rejecting the finding only if clearly erroneous.

In the light of Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. 104, 106 S.Ct. 445, 88 L.Ed.2d 405 (1985), however, I do not think we are free to hold that the constitutional issue of voluntariness is an issue of fact. Miller, of course, was a habeas proceeding, challenging a state conviction, and not a federal criminal case. The analysis, said the Court, is whether "tactics for eliciting inculpatory statements must fall within the broad constitutional boundaries imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of fundamental fairness." Id. at p. 110, 106 S.Ct. at p. 449. Is the issue different when the accused relies on the due...