Court rules teens not always entitled to Miranda rights

I don't think this is very fair and should be based on age. Just cuase your younger doesn't mean you can't have the same rights. Anyone not like this?

Court rules teens not always entitled to Miranda rights
By DAVID G. SAVAGE
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- The police need not always warn a teenage crime suspect of his rights before formally questioning him, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.

The 5-4 ruling gives police a bit more leeway to question suspects without giving them the famous Miranda warnings, and it says a suspect's youth is not reason enough to treat him with more caution.

The decision upholds the second-degree murder conviction of a Los Angeles County man who was 17 at the time of the crime.

Michael Alvarado was charged with being an accessory to the 1995 killing of a truck driver at a shopping mall in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Fe Springs. He was convicted based on tape-recorded comments he made during an interview with a Los Angeles County sheriff's detective.

At issue in the Supreme Court was whether those comments should have been excluded from his trial since Alvarado had not been warned of his rights.

In the past, the court has ruled that suspects who are "in custody" of the police must be told, before being questioned, that they have rights to remain silent and to see a lawyer. People are said to be in custody when they are in the control of the police and do not feel free to leave.

But deciding whether a suspect was in custody often comes down to a judgment call.

On Tuesday, the high court agreed with California judges who said Alvarado was not in custody when he was questioned at a police station.

Detective Cheryl Comstock, who was investigating the murder, had contacted Alvarado's parents and said she needed to speak with Michael. They took him out of school and to the station house. There, according to Alvarado's account, the police told his parents they would have to wait in the lobby while the detective questioned him for two hours.

Initially, Alvarado, 17, denied knowing about the shooting. Later, he admitted to standing outside the passenger's side of the truck when, to his surprise, Paul Soto pulled out a gun and shot the driver because he had refused to give up his keys. Alvarado also admitted he later helped hide the gun.

Soto and Alvarado were tried together, and both were convicted. Soto was sentenced to life in prison, and Alvarado got 15 years to life.

Two years ago, however, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Alvarado's conviction on the grounds that his interview with the detective should have been excluded from the trial.

Because Alvarado was in custody of the police, he should have been warned of his rights, the three-judge panel held.

California prosecutors appealed on behalf of the state warden. They were joined by Bush administration lawyers who said an interrogation such as this is essentially voluntary, and therefore outside the scope of the 1966 Miranda ruling.

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday in Yarborough v. Alvarado.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said the 9th Circuit judges should have deferred to the California judges who initially upheld Alvarado's conviction.

Alvarado was not arrested and taken to the station house, Kennedy noted. And he was not placed under arrest when he arrived. At the end of the interview, he was allowed to go home with his parents.

All of this is "consistent with an interrogation environment in which a reasonable person would have felt free to terminate the interview and leave," Kennedy wrote. "A suspect's age or experience is (not) relevant to the Miranda custody analysis." He was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said: "Would a reasonable person in Alvarado's position have felt free simply to get up and walk out of the small room in the station house at will during his two-hour police interrogation? I ask the reader to put himself, or herself, in Alvarado's circumstances and then answer that question." Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with him.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2604532