Berghuis v. Thompkins

Date: June 1, 2010

Citation: 560 US 370 (2010)

Issue: Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment

Significance: In a 5–4 decision, the Court upheld a Michigan Supreme Court ruling that a defendant had waived his Fifth Amendment Miranda rights and that his trial had not been tainted by poor counsel. In doing so, the Court placed limits on Miranda rights.

Background

In 1966, the Court issued a landmark ruling in Miranda v. Arizona that established certain statements police must make before questioning a criminal suspect. In order not to violate a person’s Fifth Amendment rights, police had to inform him or her of the right to remain silent, the right to have an attorney present, and the fact that anything the suspect said could be used against him or her in court. Failure to state these rights clearly could invalidate any confession that resulted from the questioning. Several cases since 1966 have reached the Court to challenge police practice in interrogations. Berghuis v. Thompkins was one such case.

In 2000, Van Chester Thompkins was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder and other charges. Detectives informed him of his Miranda rights. Thompkins did not acknowledge having heard his Miranda rights and refused to sign a form indicating that he understood them. He did not explicitly invoke the right to remain silent, but he was largely silent during the three-hour interrogation. Near its close, however, when asked if he prayed to God for forgiveness for killing the victim, he said "Yes." That statement was used at Thompkins’s trial as a confession, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Thompkins appealed the verdict, claiming that he had never waived his right to remain silent. He also claimed to have received ineffective counsel from his attorney, who had not asked the judge to caution the jury on interpreting the testimony of one prosecution witness. The Michigan Court of Appeals rejected that appeal, and a federal district court rejected his habeas corpus suit, which would have put his imprisonment in question. Federal appeals court overturned that decision, accepting both of Thompkins’s arguments. Warden Mary Berghuis—respondent in the federal suit that Thompkins filed—appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, which accepted the case.

Opinion of the Court

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the Court’s decision. Kennedy began by examining the Miranda claim. Kennedy pointed out that in Davis v. United States (1994), the Court had determined that to invoke Miranda rights, an accused had to "unambiguously" claim the right to remain silent. Since Thompkins "did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk with the police," he cannot claim to have invoked the right to do so, Kennedy said.

Kennedy next turned to the question of whether Thompkins had waived the right to remain silent. He concluded that Thompkins had been fully aware of his Miranda rights—the detectives had had him read the fifth right aloud—and that he voluntarily and knowingly responded when he answered the question about praying to God. Since he spoke in the context of an interrogation at which he had been informed of his rights, the justice said, his response constitute a waiver of the right to remain silent. Thus, the state appeals court had ruled correctly, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had not.

On the claim of ineffective representation, Kennedy said that precedent established that such a claim may only stand if the attorney was ineffective and that ineffectiveness affected the outcome of the trial. Kennedy concluded, "it seems doubtful" that the first grounds apply, and there was enough other evidence to convict Thompkins without the jury instruction. As a result, the decision overturned the Sixth Circuit’s ruling.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a stinging dissent that was joined by justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John Paul Stevens. The majority’s determination that an accused had to unambiguously invoke the right to remain silent while police could accept implicit waiver of that right "mark a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination that Miranda v. Arizona (1966), has long provided during custodial interrogation." Sotomayor wrote that in earlier cases, the Court had determined that the prosecution faced a "heavy burden" to prove waiver of Miranda rights. That burden, she said, was not met in this case.

Impact

The Miranda decision had been challenged and clarified in several prior cases, and Justice Kennedy drew on some of those cases as he used precedent to decide this one. Even in that context, Berghuis v. Thompkins clearly resulted in a weakening of the Miranda rules. The Court majority placed a significant burden on the accused: someone being questioned had to explicitly and unambiguously claim the intent to remain silent before police would have to end an interrogation. At the same time, it lessened the burden on police. They did not need to obtain an explicit waiver of the right to remain silent but could accept any response to questions, even one-word responses, as such a waiver. As a result, as attorney Lyle Dennison observed, the decision "decisively tilted the warnings procedure toward the police." Kit Kinports reviewed Berghuis in light of two other Miranda-related decisions issued by the Roberts court in the same term and agreed. This analyst also concluded that Berghuis formed a major weakening of Miranda protections.

Lawyer Meghan Morris agreed with the minority’s concern that the decision resulted in a significant weakening of Miranda rights. Further, she argued, the decision creates a dangerous "decision zone" between the time that police read an accused the Miranda rights and he or she explicitly and unambiguously invokes the right to remain silence. During this time—which can be lengthy—Morris warned, police may use deception and trickery to induce an accused to agree to a confession. Given the looseness with which the Court interpreted the Fifth Amendment in Berghuis, those confessions would stand despite holdings in the Miranda case warning against police use of deception. She proposed that the Court in the future would have to apply the Miranda safeguards against questioners’ trickery to protect suspects during this "decision zone."

Bibliography

Berghuis v. Thompkins. 560 US 370 2010. Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court of the U.S., 2004. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

"Berghuis v. Thompkins." Oyez. Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Tech, n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

Dennison, Lyle. "Analysis: Tilting Miranda Toward the Police." SCOTUSBlog. Scotusblog.com, 10 June 2010. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.

Holland, Brooks. "Miranda v. Arizona: 50 Years of Judges Regulating Police Interrogation." Insights on Law and Society 16.1 (2015): 4–11. Print.

Kinports, Kit. "The Supreme Court’s Love-Hate Relationship with Miranda." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101.2. (2011): 375–440. Print.

Mills, Brigitte. "Is Silence Still Golden? The Implications of Berghuis v. Thompkins on the Right to Remain Silent." Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 44.3 (2011): 1179–1195. Print.

Morris, Meghan. "The Decision Zone: The New Stage of Interrogation Created by Berghuis v. Thompkins." American Journal of Criminal Law 39.2 (2012): 271–299. Print.