Wilson v. Coon, 86-1493
| Decision Date | 17 February 1987 |
| Docket Number | No. 86-1493,86-1493 |
| Parties | Terry Lynn WILSON, Appellant, v. Greg COON, Sheriff of Grundy County, Missouri, Trenton, Missouri, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit |
Roy W. Brown, Kearney, Mo., for appellant.
Before McMILLIAN, ARNOLD and BOWMAN, Circuit Judges.
Terry Lynn Wilson appeals the District Court's 1 denial of his petition for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2254. Wilson was convicted in state court of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. Although he has served his sentence, this appeal is not moot, because collateral consequences attach to the conviction.
The only issue raised is whether Wilson was in custody for purposes of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), when a state police officer, Trooper Christensen, questioned him without first advising him of his rights to counsel and to remain silent. The facts were developed at trial in state court, and we presume that they are correct. 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2254(d). Christensen arrived at the scene of a two-car collision at which an ambulance and two medical attendants were already present. Christensen saw Wilson sitting near the bottom of an embankment about 30 or 40 feet from the wrecked cars. When the medical personnel tried to attend to Wilson, Christensen saw him crawling on his hands and knees, flailing his arms, and belligerently refusing medical attention. Christensen assisted the medical attendants, and, while at least one attendant restrained Wilson and examined him for injuries, Christensen asked Wilson whether he had driven one of the cars involved in the collision. Wilson first denied driving but then quickly admitted that he had. Over Wilson's objection, this statement was introduced at trial to show that he had operated a vehicle.
The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed Wilson's conviction in an unpublished opinion. It ruled that Wilson was not entitled to Miranda warnings before Christensen questioned him, in part because he was not in custody at that time. After the Supreme Court of Missouri refused both direct and collateral review of his case, Wilson filed this habeas petition in federal court. The District Court denied the writ without conducting an evidentiary hearing, relying instead on the state-court opinion and on the portions of the state-court transcript appended to the petition. Based on that record, the District Court held that Wilson was not in custody for purposes of Miranda. In this Court, Wilson accepts as correct the facts on which the District Court relied; he argues only that the Court's legal conclusion was wrong.
At the outset we note that the record contains no indication that Trooper Christensen himself took Wilson into custody. There is no evidence suggesting that Christensen detained Wilson or ordered the medical attendants to detain him. Ordinarily, the absence of these facts would end our examination of whether Wilson was in custody for Miranda purposes; here, however, the facts suggest another theory of custody. One of the ambulance attendants testified that he was physically restraining Wilson in order to examine him for injuries at the time Christensen questioned him. Thus, Wilson was literally in someone's custody when he was interrogated. If this custody was inherently coercive, and if Christensen took advantage of the inherently coercive situation to question Wilson, then, even though the situation was not created by law-enforcement officers, Miranda might apply.
We start from the proposition that the bare fact of physical restraint does not itself invoke the Miranda protections. The Supreme Court has recognized that a restraint on freedom of action does not ipso facto create a situation in which Miranda warnings are...
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