Missouri v. Patrice Seibert. (542 U.S. 600)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 28, 2004 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 542 U.S. 600 · 124 S. Ct. 2601
- Decided
- June 28, 2004
- Term
- October Term 2003
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Souter
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Souter announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join. This case tests a police protocol for custodial interrogation that calls for giving no warnings of the rights to silence and counsel until interrogation has produced a confession. Although such a statement is generally inadmissible, since taken in violation of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966), the interrogating officer follows it with Miranda warnings and then leads the suspect to cover the same ground a second time. The question here is the admissibility of the repeated statement. Because this midstream recitation of warnings after interrogation and unwarned confession could not effectively comply with Miranda’s constitutional requirement, we hold that a statement repeated after a warning in such circumstances is inadmissible. I Respondent Patrice Seibert’s 12-year-old son Jonathan had cerebral palsy, and when he died in his sleep she feared charges of neglect because of bedsores on his body. In her presence, two of her teenage sons and two of their friends devised a plan to conceal the facts surrounding Jonathan’s death by incinerating his body in the course of burning the family’s mobile home, in which they planned to leave Donald Rector, a mentally ill teenager living with the family, to avoid any appearance that…
Excerpt of a 29,097-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.