When Police Question Young Suspects

Two years ago, Justice Sotomayor delivered the opinion of the Court in JDB v. North Carolina, an important decision and one to which I had a personal connection.  When I had been practicing in the juvenile delinquency courts of North Carolina for only a year, UNC's Juvenile Justice Clinic was appointed to represent a young man who was the co-defendant to JDB, a 13-year-old special education student at one of our local middle schools (the one my older daughter currently attends).  Weeks earlier, the Chapel Hill juvenile police investigator at the time, DiCostanzo, had been stymied from questioning JDB at his home about a string of neighborhood burglaries (JDB's grandmother, who was his legal guardian, had not allowed it), so DiCostanzo went to Smith Middle School to talk to the boy there.  DiCostanzo had the school resource officer (a uniformed cop on detail to the school) take JDB out of his social studies class and bring him to a small conference room where they were joined by the assistant principal (the school disciplinarian) and another adult who was an administrative intern.  

Long story short -- the adults closed the door and began questioning JDB who initially denied any involvement in the crimes, but after they told him to "do the right thing" and threatened to place him in juvenile detention, he confessed.  Because DiCostanzo et al. didn't consider the questioning to be custodial, JDB's grandmother was never contacted (which was required for custodial interrogation of juveniles under the NC Juvenile Code), and he wasn't given Miranda or told he could leave, make a phone call, etc.  At the motion to suppress hearing in the local juvenile court, I sat and watched JDB's public defender expertly cross-examine DiCostanzo, clearly showing that as a result of JDB's age/youth/student status, no one in his position would have felt free to leave the conference room -- or, for that matter, challenge two police officers and school administrators.  Although I was angry when the suppression motion was denied, I was hardly surprised, as I had become long resigned to the fact that common sense rarely prevailed in juvenile court.  

About six years later, I paid the fee to join the USSC bar, drove up to D.C., and sat several rows away from the justices when the case was argued.  At one point, Justice Breyer asked with no small degree of sarcasm, "And what is the terrible thing, the awful thing that has to happen if the officer isn't sure whether this individual thinks he's in custody or not?  Suppose the officer just isn't sure.  What terrible thing happens?"  He paused and then said, "The terrible thing that happens is you have to give them a Miranda warning."  To which Justice Scalia responded, ""We don't want Miranda warnings to be given where they are unnecessary because they are only necessary to prevent coercion, and where there's no coercion, we want confessions, don't we?" To emphasize his point, he added, "It's a good thing to have the bad guys confess that they're bad guys, right?"  Breyer, of course, recognized the irony -- that giving Miranda has a negligible effect on most interrogations, particularly if the suspect is a 13-year-old boy questioned at school.  In contrast, Scalia didn't want criminal suspects -- no matter their age -- to have any perceived advantage.

I was heartened when the decision came down several months later and the liberal justices -- joined by Justice Kennedy -- reversed the denial of JDB's suppression motion (which the NC appellate courts had affirmed) and remanded the case to address whether interrogation was custodial taking into account the boy's age at the time.  In relying on Roper v. Simmons (ending the juvenile death penalty) and Graham v. Florida (ending JLWOP for non-homicide offenses), the Court held that "officers and judges need no imaginative powers, knowledge of developmental psychology, training in cognitive science, or expertise in social and cultural anthropology to account for a child’s age. They simply need the common sense to know that a 7-year-old is not a 13-year-old and neither is an adult." As can happen with even Supreme Court decisions, no action in the North Carolina courts has yet to be taken, as JDB is no longer a juvenile and perhaps feels no great incentive to pursue the matter.

I've been thinking of all of this of late, as I learned from Josh Tepfer and Steve Drizin of Northwestern Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth (CWCY) about several recent instances of interrogations of teenagers in Tennessee and elsewhere in which confessions were given in homicide cases only after the police made extreme threats, including promises that the suspect would face the death penalty if he didn't confess (a legal impossibility given Roper) or that the suspect would be raped in prison on a daily basis if he didn't confess.  The cases have been resolved in a variety of ways; in two matters the motions to suppress were supported by strong amicus briefs from CWCY, which led to favorable plea deals for the juveniles; in the case of 17-year-old Codey Miller, the confession was suppressed by the judge who called the interrogation practices of the police "mind-boggling"; in the case of 14-year-old Jonathan Ray, the confession was also suppressed, though the case has not yet been resolved; in the case of 19-year-old Carlos Campbell, the motion to suppress the confession was denied and it's unclear whether there will be an appeal; and in a recent decision by the Kentucky Supreme Court, the conviction of 17-year-old Garrett Dye was reversed and a new trial ordered after holding that his confession was involuntary.  

Because the fact patterns in these cases are clearly different than JDB, as the parties agreed that police questioning was custodial and Miranda warnings were given, the legal issues raised are also somewhat different (Was the Miranda waiver involuntary?  Was the right to counsel invoked?  Was the confession coered?), but the critical questions remain the same:  should the rules that apply to the questioning of juveniles, and the standards by which courts review interrogations of kids, be different than those for adult suspects?  If so, what should be different?  The principle reform has been mandatory recording (either audio or video) of the interrogations of suspects, whether juveniles or adults, something that has been successfully adopted in 17 states and Washington, D.C., either by legislatures or courts.  Mandating that juveniles be given counsel prior to custodial interrogation is a proposal that has yet to gain much traction (likely for pragmatic as well as philosophical reasons), with states preferring to provide "parental notification" before police can question youth, which rarely helps as most parents are as unfamiliar with how best to handle these situations as their children.  Given that most police officers receive fewer than 10 hours of juvenile interview and interrogation training over their entire careers, another proposal is that law enforcement should be regularly trained consistent with the best practices established by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and be directed not to use aggressive or deceptive strategies when questioning minors.  

Your thoughts?  Please share in the comments.