Supreme Court Issues Split Opinion on Fifth Amendment Protections

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Winter 2004

Supreme Court Issues Split Opinion on Fifth Amendment Protections

Chavez v. Martinez, No. 01-1444

On May 27, 2003, a fractured Supreme Court held that police interrogation of a suspect in the absence of Miranda warnings does not give rise to a claim for damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 if such a claim is based solely on violation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

This case required the Court to determine whether petitioner Chavez's conduct in interrogating respondent Martinez, violated the First or Fourteenth Amendments. While Martinez was being treated for gunshot wounds in the face, vertebrae, and leg, received during an altercation with police, he was interrogated by Chavez, a patrol supervisor. With Martinez drifting in and out of consciousness, Chavez repeatedly questioned him about the details of his encounter with the police. At no time did Chavez recite Miranda warnings. During the interrogation, Martinez admitted that he used heroin and had taken an officer's gun during the incident. Although he was never charged with a crime and his answers were never used against him in any criminal proceeding, Martinez filed a 1983 suit, alleging, among other things, that Chavez had violated his Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The district court held that Chavez was not entitled to qualified immunity, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed, finding that Chavez's questioning violated Martinez's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination even though his statements were not used in a criminal proceeding; and that a police officer violates due process when he obtains a confession by coercive conduct, whether or not the confession is later used at trial.

Justice Thomas announced the judgment of the Court, and delivered an opinion, in which Chief Justice Rehnquist joined in full, and Justices O'Connor and Scalia joined in part. Justice Souter concurred in the judgment and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to the Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process issue, in which he was joined by Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Ginsburg and Breyer. Justice Scalia, Stevens, Kennedy, and Ginsburg each also filed separate opinions, making a total of six opinions in the case.

Background

42 U.S.C. § 1983 provides for a civil action against any person who, under "color" of law, deprives another person of federal constitutional or statutory rights. Section 1983, however, also gives public officials qualified immunity from liability or damages if their conduct did not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights that a reasonable person would have known about.

The Court's decision applies the two-pronged analysis required to deny to a public official the defense of qualified immunity under §1983. For a public official to be stripped of qualified immunity, however, the plaintiff must make the case that: (1) the official's alleged conduct violated a constitutional right of the plaintiff; and (2) the constitutional right was clearly established by federal law.

Opinions

The Supreme Court reversed on the Fifth Amendment issue and remanded on the issue of whether Martinez could pursue a claim of liability for a substantive due process violation.

Justice Thomas's opinion announcing the judgment of the Court on the Fifth Amendment issue rested on the following grounds:

Martinez's Fifth Amendment rights were not violated because the Fifth Amendment applies only in cases where criminal proceedings have been initiated.
While incriminating statements obtained by unlawful methods of police questioning may not be used against the defendant at trial, no violation of the Fifth Amendment has been committed until such statements are actually used in a criminal trial. In other words, the questioning alone does not violate the defendant's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Even if Martinez had suffered a Fifth Amendment violation under Chavez's interrogation, such an event would not give rise to civil damages under §1983 for failure to give Miranda warnings. The procedural safeguards imposed by Miranda and its progeny are, according to Justice Thomas, merely prophylactic rules and not themselves rights protected by the Constitution.

Justice Souter concurred in the judgment and delivered an opinion that included the opinion of the Court with respect to the Fourteenth Amendment claim. Justice Souter's opinion on the Fifth Amendment claim was based on the following points, which in his view, address a degree of discretionary judgment greater than Justice Thomas acknowledged.

A §1983 damages action, though outside the core Fifth Amendment protection, could be recognized if a core guarantee, or the judicial capacity to protect it, would be placed at risk without such protection.
Martinez cannot make the requisite "powerful showing," subject to a realistic assessment of costs and risks, necessary to expand protection of the privilege against compelled self-incrimination to the point of the civil liability he is asking the Court to recognize.
His purely Fifth Amendment claim to damages opens up the risk of global application in every instance of interrogation producing a statement inadmissible under Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment principles, or violating one of the complementary rules we have accepted in aid of the privilege against evidentiary use. Martinez offers no limiting principle or reason to foresee a stopping place short of liability in all such cases.
The exclusionary rule provides sufficient protection for Fifth Amendment rights. Therefore, any claim for civil damages must rest on Martinez's Fourteenth Amendment claim of substantive due process rights and on a showing these Fourteenth Amendment rights are better protected by imposing civil damages on the offenders.
Based on the interrogation transcript, Martinez has a serious argument to support such a claim, and therefore, the case should be remanded so that Martinez may pursue it.

Because the Court held that Martinez's Fifth Amendment rights were not violated and remanded the Fourteenth Amendment, issue, the second prong in the qualified immunity analysis (i.e. whether the right asserted by Martinez was "clearly established" in the law), was not addressed.

The remaining opinions demonstrated how highly divided the Court was on the issues raised by this case.

In a part of the opinion joined only by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Thomas would have rejected the claim that Chavez's questioning violated Martinez's substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. In Justice Thomas's view, Chavez's questioning was not so "egregious" or "conscience shocking" as to amount to a due process violation, because it was justified by the government's interest in obtaining facts from a key witness that would have been lost had the witness died.

In Justice Stevens' view, the opposite conclusion was equally clear. Justice Stevens, who dissented from the judgment of the Court, but concurred in that part of Justice Souter's opinion remanding the case on the due process issue, included in his opinion a transcript of the interrogation, calling it "the functional equivalent of an attempt to obtain an involuntary confession from a prisoner by torturous methods."

Justice Kennedy, who concurred in part and dissented in part, while agreeing with Justices Thomas and Souter that failure to give Miranda warnings did not alone create a constitutional violation when unwarned interrogation follows, disagreed with the idea that a violation of the Fifth Amendment arises only once statements obtained through unconstitutional interrogation are introduced at trial. In Justice Kennedy's view, the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment applied the time and place at which police compel a suspect to make a statement and not just at judicial proceedings following the interrogation.

With respect to whether Chavez's violation of Martinez's Fifth Amendment rights gives rise to a claim under §1983, in Justice Kennedy's view, the form of interrogation used by Chavez exploited Martinez's pain and suffering with the purpose and intent of securing an incriminating statement. Although not all violations of a suspect's Fifth Amendment rights would give rise to a §1983 claim for damages, according to Justice Kennedy, those cases in which the suspect can show that there was either the fact or the perception that the suspect's pain was being used to induce a statement against the suspect's will can give rise to a §1983 claim.

Justice Scalia concurred with the Court's judgment that Martinez failed to show that his Fifth Amendment rights were violated, but would not have remanded to the Ninth Circuit for further proceedings on the substantive due process issue. In Justice Scalia's view, the Fourteenth Amendment issue (upon which Justice Scalia agrees with his fellow Justices Martinez's claim hinges) should have been decided against Martinez by the Supreme Court and not on remand to the Ninth Circuit.

Justice Ginsburg joined the opinion of the Court, expressed in Part II of Justice Souter's opinion, that the case should be remanded to the Ninth Circuit for resolution of the claim under the Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process protections, but would have affirmed the Ninth Circuit's decision on the Fifth Amendment claim. Agreeing with Justice Kennedy that Chavez's interrogation of Martinez violated the Fifth Amendment from the moment of the compelled interrogation, regardless of whether Martinez's statements were later submitted as evidence in criminal proceedings, she cites as support a case where the Court found, on strikingly similar facts, that certain statements by a seriously wounded suspect were involuntary because they were made during interrogation while the suspect lay on his back in an intensive care unit with tubes and a breathing apparatus. In Justice Ginsburg's view, the compelled interrogation in this case gave rise to a claim under §1983 because it is "a clear instance of the kind of compulsion no reasonable officer would have thought constitutionally permissible."

Implications

The split opinions of the Court raise a number of issues regarding the fate and rights of the hundreds of people reportedly detained and questioned, but not charged in connection with the government's anti-terrorist efforts. The federal government's war against terrorism has brought a new urgency to the questions raised by the Chavez case.