U.S. v. Williams

• Decision Date: 30 January 2006
• Docket Number: No. 04-50182.,04-50182.
• Citation: 435 F.3d 1148
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Tashiri Wayne WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

435 F.3d 1148

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Tashiri Wayne WILLIAMS, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 04-50182.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted May 6, 2005.

Filed January 30, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Carlton F. Gunn, Deputy Federal Public Defender, Los Angeles, CA, for the defendant-appellant.

Beong-Soo Kim, Assistant United States Attorney, Criminal Complaints Section, Los Angeles, CA, for the plaintiff-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California; Margaret M. Morrow, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CR-03-00985-MMM-01.

Before: BROWNING, FISHER and BYBEE, Circuit Judges.

FISHER, Circuit Judge:

Tashiri Williams ("Williams") appeals a district court order denying his motion to suppress a written confession that he gave to United States Diplomatic Security Service ("DSS") agents during interrogation. According to a DSS investigation report, the agents interrogated Williams in two steps — first, they asked him questions until he confessed; then, immediately after his oral confession, they read him his Miranda rights and asked him to write down what he had previously told them. The district court suppressed Williams' oral statements because they were elicited in violation of Miranda, but admitted his postwarning written confession on the ground that the statement "was voluntarily made." We reverse.

Under the Supreme Court's recent decision in Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600, 124 S.Ct. 2601, 159 L.Ed.2d 643 (2004), rendered after the district court's ruling, a trial court must suppress postwarning confessions obtained during a deliberate two-step interrogation where the midstream Miranda warning was objectively ineffective. Because the district court did not have the benefit of Seibert, it did not determine whether the agents deliberately withheld the Miranda warning, and if so, whether the warning finally given effectively apprised Williams that he had a "genuine choice whether to follow up on [his] earlier admission." Id. at 616, 124 S.Ct. 2601 (Souter, J., plurality opinion). We therefore remand to the district court for further findings consistent with this opinion.

I.

On July 11, 2003, Williams filed a passport application at the United States Passport Office in Los Angeles, California. The application he submitted contained his own identification information, but the photographs he attached were those of his acquaintance, Hussein Iddrissu ("Iddrissu"). A fraud manager noticed the discrepancy and notified DSS agents. Four days later, when Iddrissu arrived at the Passport Office to pick up the completed passport, DSS Special Agents O'Neil and Dobbs stopped him for questioning. During questioning, they requested that Iddrissu call Williams and ask him to come to the office.

Williams and Iddrissu's brother, Hassan, arrived at the government building shortly after it closed, around 6 p.m. According to the investigation report (prepared by Agent Dobbs), the agents met Williams and Hassan at the building entrance, took them into the DSS offices and separated the two men for questioning. The agents escorted Williams into a reception area and began interrogating him.¹ They started by showing Williams his passport application. Williams immediately responded, "[t]hat's not my picture." Agent O'Neil then told Williams that he had a choice: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way.... I think we have enough to arrest you now and let the courts figure it out, or you can talk to us and tell us what's going on and, you know, it might be better for you in the long run." Williams complied and told the agents that he and Iddrissu had planned a joint trip to London and taken passport pictures together for the trip. The pictures, Williams explained, must have been inadvertently switched.

Agent O'Neil called Williams' account a "bullshit story" and described to him how criminal charges could affect his professional ambitions. In response, Williams changed his story and admitted to submitting Iddrissu's photograph on the passport application.

After this oral confession, Agent O'Neil read Williams his Miranda rights, gave him a waiver of rights form and asked him to write a statement.² When Williams asked what he should write, both agents declined to specify, though Agent Dobbs testified that in response to such questions agents generally tell suspects that they should write "what you've told us." Williams wrote: "There is nothing I can say, but I made a mistake. I just tried to get a passport without my picture for someone else. I just don't want this to be on my record."

A federal grand jury indicted Williams on three counts: (1) conspiracy to make a false statement in a passport application in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371; (2) making a false statement in a passport application in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1542; and (3) making a false statement within the jurisdiction of the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. Before trial, Williams moved to suppress both his oral and his written statements. The district court granted suppression of the oral confession because "the government [had] not met its burden of showing by a preponderance of the evidence that Williams waived his Miranda rights before he made[the] incriminating statements" to the agents. However, the court denied Williams' motion to suppress the written confession because neither his oral statements nor written confession were coerced and his written confession "was voluntarily made." After trial, a jury found Williams guilty of all three felony charges and the district court sentenced him to four years of probation, including six months of home detention.

II.

The adequacy of a Miranda warning and the voluntariness of a suspect's statements are questions of law that are reviewed de novo. United States v. San Juan-Cruz, 314 F.3d 384, 387 (9th Cir.2002); United States v. Bautista, 362 F.3d 584, 589 (9th Cir.2004). "The admission of statements made in violation of a person's Miranda rights is reviewed for harmless error." United States v. Butler, 249 F.3d 1094, 1098 (9th Cir.2001).

III.

"In order to combat [the pressures inherent in custodial interrogation] and to permit a full opportunity to exercise the privilege against self-incrimination, the accused must be adequately and effectively apprised of his rights." Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 467, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). A Miranda warning functions both to reduce the risk that an involuntary or coerced statement will be admitted at trial and to implement the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause. Id. at 457-58, 86 S.Ct. 1602; see also Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760, 790, 123 S.Ct. 1994, 155 L.Ed.2d 984 (2003) (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Thus, if a suspect in custody does not receive an adequate warning effectively apprising him of his rights before he incriminates himself, his statements may not be admitted as evidence against him. Miranda, 384 U.S. at 479, 86 S.Ct. 1602. Williams contends that the midinterrogation Miranda warning he received did not adequately apprise him of his rights and therefore his written confession should not have been admitted.

A.

The Supreme Court has twice addressed the admissibility of a confession obtained after a Miranda warning but preceeded by the suspect's earlier, unwarned incriminating statements. In Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 301, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985), Elstad, a burglary suspect, made incriminating comments to a police officer at his home without first receiving a Miranda warning. Officers then took him to the county sheriff's office, placed him in an interrogation room, read him his Miranda rights and questioned him at length. See id. During this interrogation, and approximately 30 minutes after making his original inculpatory comments, Elstad expanded significantly on his earlier statements and made a full confession. Id. at 301-02, 105 S.Ct. 1285.

Before the Supreme Court, Elstad argued that his confession should be suppressed as "fruit of the poisonous tree" because, although made after a proper Miranda warning, his confession was tainted by the earlier unwarned comments. Id. at 303, 105 S.Ct. 1285. In a related argument, Elstad asserted that the coercive impact of his unwarned statement — inherent in a defendant's having "let the cat out of the bag" — required suppression because the statement compromised the voluntariness of his postwarning statement. Id. at 302-04, 105 S.Ct. 1285. Focusing on the voluntariness of Elstad's unwarned comments, the Court rejected both arguments. Id. at 306-14, 105 S.Ct. 1285. The Court reasoned that "absent deliberately coercive or improper tactics in obtaining the initial statement, the mere fact that a suspect has made an unwarned admission does not warrant a presumption of compulsion" with respect to the postwarning confession. Id. at 314, 105 S.Ct. 1285. Rather, "[o]nce warned, the suspect is free to exercise his own volition in deciding whether or not to make a statement to the authorities." Id. at 308, 105 S.Ct. 1285. The Court thus held that a "suspect who has once responded to unwarned yet uncoercive questioning is not thereby disabled from waiving his rights and confessing after he has been given the requisite Miranda warnings." Id at 318, 105 S.Ct. 1285.³

As Justice O'Connor explained in her Seibert dissent, Elstad also held that "if [the prewarning] statement is shown to have been involuntary, the court must examine whether the taint dissipated through the passing of time or a change in circumstances." Seibert, 542 U.S. at 628, 124 S.Ct. 2601 (emphasis added).⁴ Similarly, Elstad requires the court to suppress a postwarning statement if the suspect demonstrates that his statement was involuntary despite the Miranda warning. Elstad, 470 U.S. at 318, 105 S.Ct. 1285 (explaining that "the finder of fact must examine the...