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In a unanimous decision in January, the Tennessee Supreme Court suppressed two confessions made by a convicted murderer: a first, non-Mirandized confession given when the suspect was not yet formally under arrest, and a second, Mirandized confession obtained by police immediately upon his subsequent arrest. The case, State v. Dailey,1 received significant public attention in Tennessee as it resulted in the release of a confessed killer.2 Some argued that the court went too far by releasing Dailey on a legal technicality, while others defended the decision as necessary to protecting the constitutional rights of the citizenry at large. Regardless of one’s view of the decision, State v. Dailey may have important ramifications in Tennessee, and perhaps beyond, for police interrogation tactics and the admissibility of confessions and other statements made to law enforcement.

I. Dailey’s Non-Mirandized & Mirandized Confessions

In April of 2004, Metro Nashville Police discovered a woman’s severely decomposed body with a piece of rope around her neck in an abandoned vehicle at Tommy’s Wrecker Service in Davidson County in central Tennessee.3 Detective Mike Roland conducted an investigation that led him to interview employees of the wrecking service. Although the search did not provide forensic evidence incriminating any of them, Detective Roland felt a “gut instinct” that one of the wrecker service’s employees, Kenneth C. Dailey, III, was involved in the woman’s death.

On this suspicion, Detective Roland arranged through Dailey’s employer for Dailey to come into the police station on the pretense that the police “needed to retake his fingerprints.”4 Detective Roland later acknowledged that the fingerprinting was unnecessary and that the real reason for the request was to interview Dailey further. Dailey complied with the request and arrived voluntarily at the police station. Detective Roland later acknowledged that, at this point, the police department lacked probable cause for an arrest.5

When Dailey arrived, Detective Roland met him and invited him to talk some more about the investigation. When Dailey agreed, an officer escorted him back to an interview room in the interior part of the building. Detective Roland greeted him there, then left for a moment to gather his paperwork, leaving the door open behind him. When he returned, he brought another officer with him and shut the door.6 The men began the interview, which was recorded on videotape.7

After a few minutes of casual conversation, the detective began to question Dailey more specifically. He first asked a few questions about Dailey’s weekend work schedule and his actions on the weekend before the victim’s body was found.8 He then moved on to a series of questions that indicated his suspicion of Dailey’s involvement in the crime. Detective Roland began by indicating to Dailey that the police had evidence that he was guilty of the crime and that it would be better for Dailey to talk to them. After a few more exchanges, Dailey responded to the questions and admitted to picking up the victim as a prostitute and then killing her.9

After hearing a short explanation of how the victim died, Detective Roland told Dailey that he would be charged with the crime and that he “want[ed] to make this official” by reading him his rights.10 The officers then read Dailey his Miranda rights. Twenty-one minutes had passed since the conversation began.11 Neither Detective Roland nor the other officer in the room informed Dailey that the statement he had given might not be admissible as evidence against him.

After having his Miranda rights read to him, Dailey repeated the substance of his confession with a few additional details. At the end of the conversation, the officers informed him that he would be charged with “standard criminal homicide.” The second confession only took eleven minutes.12

Dailey’s attorneys moved to suppress the incriminating statements Dailey had made to the police officers both before and after being given his Miranda warnings. When the motion was denied, Dailey entered a guilty plea to second degree murder, but reserved for appeal the certified question of whether the statements were taken in violation of his rights under the Tennessee Constitution and the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Federal Constitution. Dailey contended that his first confession was invalid under Miranda v. Arizona because it was given while he was in custody without the benefit of knowing his rights, and the second statement was barred by Missouri v. Seibert because it was forced by a two-tiered coercive interrogation technique of extracting a confession and then sanitizing it by reading Miranda rights after the fact.13 After going up to the Tennessee Supreme Court once on procedural grounds and being sent back down to the Court of Criminal Appeals for reconsideration, the issue returned to the supreme court on the merits in late 2008, with the court rendering its decision on January 2, 2009.

II. Court Suppresses Dailey’s Confessions

In addressing Dailey’s claim, the Tennessee Supreme Court analyzed the constitutional question first. The court began with a recitation of the background of the Miranda decision, explaining the importance of the right against self-incrimination in its historic context.14 In keeping with this backdrop, the Miranda Court held that, when a criminal suspect is “taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom by the authorities in any significant way,” the Constitution requires him to be afforded certain “procedural safeguards”—namely, the reading of the “Miranda Rights”—to protect his freedom against self-incrimination.15 This led the Tennessee Supreme Court to conclude that, if Dailey was in custody at the time of his first confession, the confession was inadmissible under the federal and state constitutions.16

To determine whether Dailey was in custody at the time of the first confession, the court applied its precedent, State v. Anderson, where the court had stated that the test for whether a person is in custody for Miranda purposes “is whether, under the totality of the circumstances, a reasonable person in the suspect’s position would consider himself or herself deprived of freedom of movement to a degree associated with a formal arrest.”17 The Dailey court noted that the custodial inquiry was “fact specific” and involved the application of a list of factors that aided an “objective assessment.”18

Applying the test and the factors, the court found that the preponderance of the evidence established that Dailey was, in fact, in custody at the time he made his first confession to the police.19 Key to the court’s decision were the fact that the tone of the questioning was “accusatory and demanding,” the fact that Dailey’s movements were constrained by his being in the back corner of a room with a single, closed door, and the fact that Dailey repeatedly denied the accusations and inferences made against him early in the questioning.20

Having determined that Dailey gave his first confession while in custody without the benefit of hearing his Miranda rights, the court turned to a more complicated issue: did the later Miranda warnings cure the first violation so that the second confession was admissible? For guidance, the court looked to Missouri v. Seibert, where the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether Miranda warnings could sanitize future confessions after a criminal defendant already confessed to the crime without being read his rights.21 Seibert was a fractured opinion, written by four different justices with no single opinion commanding the majority of the Court. The four-justice plurality opinion stated that “question-first” confessions were of a dubious nature because they “render[ed] Miranda warnings ineffective by waiting for a particularly opportune time to give them, after the suspect has already confessed.”22 Nonetheless, the plurality would hold that these confessions were made admissible under the Constitution if the late Miranda warning was effective, as determined by a five-factor test.23

Justice Kennedy concurred in the judgment, but did not join the plurality opinion. Finding that the plurality’s test “envision[ed] an objective inquiry from the perspective of the suspect” and therefore “cut[] too broadly,” he instead laid out a simpler inquiry: did the law enforcement officers actually coerce the suspect’s confession or otherwise undermine his ability to exercise his free will?24 Except for these instances of intentional manipulation, Kennedy’s test would hold late Miranda confessions admissible.

The Dailey court then turned to when it first applied the Seibert test to a confession last term in State v. Northern.25 In Northern, the court faced the difficult question of which Seibert test to apply to a two-step confession: the plurality’s test or Justice Kennedy’s narrower test? In the end, the Northern court found the distinction to be unnecessary, as the confession obtained in that case—one procured by sitting the defendant in an open area of the police station, surrounded by detectives discussing the crime— “was properly admitted under any of the competing tests.”26

The Dailey court also held that the distinction was not important to Dailey’s case, but for an entirely different reason: the second confession by Dailey was inadmissible under either Seibert test.27 The court found that all five factors of the Seibert plurality test indicated that the Miranda warning was not eff ective enough to allow the admission of the second confession and that Detective Roland acted intentionally to coerce Dailey’s second confession by using the two-step technique without there being any curative measures to make the Miranda warnings effective.28 In light of these holdings, the court concluded that Dailey’s “motion to suppress both of his statements should have been granted because his initial statement was taken in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and the tardy Miranda warnings did not function effectively so as to render his second statement admissible.”29

After holding that the second confession was inadmissible under the federal Constitution, the court offered an alternative holding—that Dailey’s second confession was also barred by the Tennessee Constitution. The court noted that “the test of voluntariness for confessions under Article I, [section] 9 [of the Tennessee Constitution] is broader and more protective of individual rights than the test of voluntariness under the Fifth Amendment.”30 This broad test for confessions includes consideration of nine factors that determine whether the statement was “knowing and voluntary”31 under “the totality of the circumstances.”32 The court quickly applied these nine factors and concluded that the confession was also inadmissible under Tennessee law.33

Notwithstanding the outcome in this case—the release of a confessed killer—the Tennessee Supreme Court ended its written opinion by emphasizing another concern: the importance of limiting the authority of law enforcement officers and “agents of our governments” when their actions intrude on the individual rights guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions.34 The court effectively decided that it would err on the side of protecting personal liberties by barring enforcement officers from utilizing an effective way of persuading defendants to confess to their crimes.

* Aaron Chastain is a student at Vanderbilt University Law School (J.D., anticipated 2010), where he serves as the Senior Notes Editor of Vanderbilt Law Review.

 

Endnotes

1 273 S.W.3d 94 (Tenn. 2009).

2 See, e.g., NewsChannel5, Police Video Helps Set A Convicted Killer Free, January 5, 2009, available at http://www.newschannel5.com/ global/story.asp?s=9621336&ClientType=Printable (last visited June 8, 2009).

3 The facts of this case come directly from the court’s opinion. 273 S.W.3d at 97-100.

4 Id. at 97.

5 Id.

6 Id.

7 The Tennessee Supreme Court viewed the tape as part of its review of the case and based most of its interpretation of the facts on it.

8 Id. at 98.

9 Id. at 99.

10 Id. at 100.

11 Id.

12 Id.

13 Miranda, 384 U.S. 436 (1966); Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004).

14 Dailey, 273 S.W.3d at 100-02.

15 Miranda, 384 U.S. at 478-79.

16 Dailey, 273 S.W.3d at 102.

17 937 S.W.2d 851, 852 (Tenn. 1996).

18 Dailey, 273 S.W.3d at 102.

19 Id. at 103.

20 Id.

21 542 U.S. 600 (2004).

22 Id. at 611.

23 Id. at 615.

24 Id. at 621-22 (Kennedy, J., concurring).

25 262 S.W.3d 741 (Tenn. 2008).

26 Id. at 760. The court further explained that “[i]n the absence of evidence that the interrogating officer deliberated [sic] employed such a strategy, a majority of the Seibert court-Justice Kennedy and the four dissenting justices-would apply Elstad to determine the admissibility of the defendant’s postwarning statement.” Id. Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 314 (1985), had held that “[a] subsequent administration of Miranda warnings to a suspect who has given a voluntary but unwarned statement ordinarily should suffice to remove the conditions that precluded admission of the earlier statement.”

27 Dailey, 273 S.W.3d at 107.

28 Id. at 108 & 109-10.

29 Id. at 110.

30 Id. (citing State v. Crump, 834 S.W.2d 265, 268 (Tenn. 1992)).

31 Dailey, 273 S.W.3d at 110 (citing State v. Smith, 834 S.W.2d 915, 920 (Tenn. 1992)).

32 273 S.W.3d at 110.

33 Id. at 112.

34 Id. at 113.

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