In People v. Case, the Supreme Court today affirms a death sentence for a double murder during a bar robbery. The court’s opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger rejects the defendant’s many appellate arguments, including the contention that he was prejudiced by the admission of evidence obtained in violation of his Miranda rights. The court does agree, however, that a $10,000 restitution fine should be reduced by $4,000.
The court concludes that the police violated the defendant’s rights — an officer conceded “it was his habit to continue to interrogate a suspect who invoked his Miranda rights to obtain statements that might be admissible to impeach the suspect,” a tactic the court says “is clearly improper” — but also that the admission of the defendant’s statements were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt and that testimony of witnesses who were identified by the defendant’s statements did not need to be suppressed because the “statements were not the product of police coercion.”
Justice Goodwin Liu — joined by pro tem Justice Victoria Gerrard Chaney — concurs and dissents. Unlike the majority, he believes that the record doesn’t support the trial court’s implicit finding that police did not deliberately disregard the defendant’s Miranda rights, a finding the majority leans on to support the admissibility of the witnesses’ testimony. However, Justice Liu agrees with the majority’s bottom line because, regardless of the defendant’s statements, the police “would have inevitably discovered the identities of those witnesses.”