What’s That You Say? A Lawyer? I Can’t Hear You!

State v. Chavarria-Cruz, Minn.Ct.App., 9/8/2009.  A grand jury indicted Mr. Chavarria-Cruz on charges of first degree premeditated murder, and first degree murder for the benefit of a gang.  Detective Hanson, the lead investigator, interrogated Mr. Chavarria-Cruz; he recorded the interrogation as he is required to do, using his police department’s recording equipment.  The Detective noticed that Mr. Chavarria-Cruz was difficult to understand because he was very soft spoken, often looked down when speaking, and had a pronounced accent.  The Detective apparently did nothing to remediate any of these deficiencies.

Thirty minutes into the interrogation, Mr. Chavarria-Cruz tells Detective Hanson “I think I need a lawyer.”  The recording equipment “heard” this statement; the transcriber had no apparent difficulty hearing it when typing the transcript.  Problem was, according to the detective, is that he didn’t hear it.  The trial court accepted this assertion, made a finding of fact that the detective didn’t hear the lawyer statement and then denied the motion to suppress everything that Mr. Chavarria-Cruz said after the lawyer statement.

At least for now, Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477 (1981) establishes a bright line rule:  once an accused says that he wants to deal with the police only through counsel, police interrogation must cease until counsel has been made available, unless the accused himself initiates further communication.  (But see, State v. Clark, 738 N.W.2d 316 (Minn. 2007).  The appellate court took a statement out of context from Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452 (1994) that whether an accused actually invoked his right to counsel is an objective inquiry.  That’s true enough when the question -  as it was in Davis - is whether the request for counsel was equivocal or not, but it doesn’t provide a legal rationale for the trial court’s finding that the detective didn’t hear the statement.  Objectively, when parsing an equivocal request for counsel, the inquiry is whether that request may reasonably be construed as a request for counsel.  Here, there’s nothing equivocal about Mr. Chavarria-Cruz’s statement:  “I think I need a lawyer.”  The only question was whether to believe the detective.  That’s a different analysis all together.

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

And the purpose of Scales, was what?