Robert Edward Stansbury v. California (511 U.S. 318)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided April 26, 1994 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 511 U.S. 318 · 114 S. Ct. 1526
- Decided
- April 26, 1994
- Term
- October Term 1993
- Vote
- 9–0
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Per Curiam. This case concerns the rules for determining whether a person being questioned by law enforcement officers is held in custody, and thus entitled to the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436 (1966). We hold, not for the first time, that an officer’s subjective and undisclosed view concerning whether the person being interrogated is a suspect is irrelevant to the assessment whether the person is in custody. I Ten-year-old Robyn Jackson disappeared from a playground in Baldwin Park, California, at around 6:30 p.m. on September 28, 1982. Early the next morning, about 10 miles away in Pasadena, Andrew Zimmerman observed a large man emerge from a turquoise American, sedan and throw something into a nearby flood control channel. Zimmerman called the police, who arrived at the seene and discovered the girl’s body in the channel. There was evidence that she had been raped, and the cause of death was determined to be asphyxia complicated by blunt force trauma to the head. Lieutenant Thomas Johnston, a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, investigated the homicide. From witnesses interviewed on the day the body was discovered, he learned that Robyn had talked to two ice cream truck drivers, one being petitioner Robert Edward Stansbury, in the hours before her disappearance. Given these contacts, Johnston thought Stansbury and the other…
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