Rescue Me?: Supreme Court Of California Issues Confusing Opinion Comparing/Contrasting The Rescue Doctrine With The Public Safety Exception
In New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649 (1984), the Supreme Court found that there is a “public safety” exception to the requirement that police officers give suspects Miranda warnings when there is an “exigency requiring immediate action by the officers beyond the normal need expeditiously to solve a serious crime” and the officers’ questions “relate to an objectively reasonable need to protect the police or the public from any immediate danger.” A decade earlier, a California appellate court construed the Supreme Court of California’s opinion in People v. Modesto, 398 P.2d 753 (Cal.1965), as creating a “rescue doctrine” exception to Miranda. So, is the “rescue doctrine” exception coterminous with the “public safety” exception, or are there relevant differences between the two? That was the question that the Supreme Court of California had to answer in its recent opinion in People v. Davis, 2009 WL 151577 (Cal. 2009).
Davis was a large opinion, with the court addressing many factual and legal issues. If you want to read about all of them you here is a link to the court’ opinion. For purposes of this post, however, here are the relevant facts. 12 year-old Polly Hannah Klass was kidnapped from her home by Richard Allen Davis. When Davis abducted Polly, he told the two friends that were with Polly in her bedroom that he would not touch her and that “he was only doing this for the money.” The night of the abduction, Davis’ car became stuck in a ditch. Almost two months later, the owner of the property where Davis’s car became stuck in a ditch,
discovered, in a clearing a few feet from where defendant’s car had been stuck…, a pair of child-sized red knitted tights (knotted at the knee), an adult-sized dark sweatshirt (turned inside out), and a knotted piece of white silky cloth shaped like a hood.
Soon thereafter, authorities arrested Davis, and he invoked his right to counsel. At this time, however, no attorney was provided, and authorities had not yet been able to discover Polly’s whereabouts. Thus, four days later, and without Davis being given an attorney, and a sergeant, Sergeant Meese,
told defendant that if there was “any hope” that Polly was alive, defendant “ought to give thought to talking to” him. Defendant replied he did not know what Meese was talking about. Meese told defendant the police had “enough physical evidence to make the case” even without a statement from defendant, and that if defendant decided he wanted to talk he could give Meese “a call.” Meese then departed for the…crime scene, leaving his pager number with a corrections officer. After Meese’s departure, defendant (according to the testimony of a corrections officer at the jail) became very quiet, reserved, and “stone-faced,” looking at the ground.
About 15 minutes after Sergeant Meese’s departure, defendant told a corrections officer he wanted to talk to Meese. A corrections officer notified Meese, who decided not to speak to defendant on his cellular phone for fear that the call would be intercepted by the news media. Two hours later, Meese called the jail from a pay telephone and spoke to defendant, who said, “I fucked up big time.” When Meese asked if Polly was still alive, defendant said she was not.
Eventually, Davis was convicted of various crimes related to the kidnapping and murder of Polly, and he appealed, claiming, inter alia, that his incriminatory statements were taken in violation of his Miranda rights. The Supreme Court of California disagreed, finding that the “rescue doctrine” exception applied. But it did so in a weird way.
The court noted that its “rescue doctrine” exception predated the Supreme Court’s “public safety” exception. It then noted that in People v Riddle, 83 Cal.App.3d 563 (Cal.App. 1978), a California appellate court articulated a three-part test to determine applicability of the rescue doctrine:
1. Urgency of need in that no other course of action promises relief; 2. The possibility of saving human life by rescuing a person whose life is in danger; [and] 3. Rescue as the primary purpose and motive of the the interrogators.
In other words, according to the court in Riddle, there is a subjective element to the “rescue doctrine” exception under part 3 of the test that focuses on the motivations of he interrogators. Conversely, when the Supreme Court created the “public safety” exception in Quarles, it noted that the exception is objective and that “the availability of th[e] exception does not depend upon the motivation of the individual officers involved.”
The Supreme Court of California then noted that it had
described the rescue doctrine as “analogous” to, not subsumed within, the public safety exception….In the handful of post-Quarles cases involving the rescue of missing persons, California decisions have continued to apply the rescue doctrine independently of the public safety exception articulated by the high court.
Okay, so the court applied California’s subjectively focused “rescue doctrine” exception and not the objectively focused “public safety” exception, right? Wrong. Instead, the Supreme Court of California noted that it had
never adopted the Riddle test in determining applicability of the rescue doctrine. And that test’s consideration of the motivation of the interrogating officer has been undermined by the high court’s statement in Quarles (decided after Riddle ), that the applicability of the public safety exception, which is analogous to the rescue doctrine, “does not depend upon the motivation of the individual officers involved.”
Weird. It thus seems to me that, despite the Supreme Court of California’s statement(s) to the contrary, the “rescue doctrine” exception is indeed coterminous with the “public safety” exception. And, looking at the facts before it, that court found that the exception applied because, inter alia,
even though Polly had been missing for 64 days, it was objectively reasonable for Sergeant Meese to believe that defendant might have information that could lead to her rescue. When defendant abducted Polly, he told the two friends that were with Polly in her bedroom that he would not touch her and that “he was only doing this for the money,” implying that he was kidnapping Polly for ransom, not for murder. Moreover, none of the evidence recovered from the Pythian Road site (where defendant’s car had become stuck in a ditch on the night Polly was kidnapped and which the police examined on Nov. 28, 1993), or from defendant’s car (which the police seized when they arrested defendant on Nov. 30, 1993), indicated that Polly was dead.
-CM