Opinion

Dunaway v. New York

  • 442 U.S. 200
  • 99 S. Ct. 2248
  • 60 L. Ed. 2d 824
  • 1979 U.S. LEXIS 126
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Filed
Jun 5, 1979
Status
Published
Author
Stevens
On the bench
Brennan, White, Stevens, Rehnquist, Powell
Cited by
3,069 cases

Declined to follow by People v. Wise, 82 A.D.2d 869 (1981)

finding that detention for custodial interrogation “intrude[d] so severely on interests protected by the Fourth Amendment as necessarily to trigger the traditional safeguards against illegal arrest,” and finding that officers “violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments when, without probable cause, they seized petitioner and transported him to the police station for interrogation”

How later courts described this case

  • finding that detention for custodial interrogation “intrude[d] so severely on interests protected by the Fourth Amendment as necessarily to trigger the traditional safeguards against illegal arrest,” and finding that officers “violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments when, without probable cause, they seized petitioner and transported him to the police station for interrogation”
  • holding that, while an inculpatory statement given after Miranda warnings may be voluntary under the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination, the statement violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures if the defendant’s arrest was illegal and there was an insufficient attenuation between the unlawful arrest and the statement
  • finding Fourth Amendment violation where police lacked probable cause but made functional equivalent of arrest because, instead of "question[ing] [suspect] briefly where he was found," police took him "from a neighbor's home to a police car, transported [him] to a police station, ... placed [him] in an interrogation room[, and] ... never informed [him] that he was `free to go'"
  • holding that the petitioner was seized without probable cause based only on a tip from a jail inmate that admittedly did not supply enough information to obtain a warrant, brought to police headquarters and placed in an interrogation room where he was questioned “in the hope that something might turn up,” and confessed without any intervening circumstances

Written by the judges who cited it.

Later courts went against this

  • Declined to follow by People v. Wise, 82 A.D.2d 869 (1981)

    ) However, we decline to apply the rule of Dunaway v New York (supra) to cases in which a defendant’s appeal has already been taken-and exhausted.
    Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New YorkJun 15, 1981Read it

Distinguished

  • Distinguished by United States v. Henderson, 303 F. App'x 30 (2008)

    Henderson cites Kaupp v. Texas, 538 U.S. 626, 123 S.Ct. 1843, 155 L.Ed.2d 814 (2003), and Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979), but those cases are inapposite.
    Court of Appeals for the Second CircuitDec 17, 2008Read it
  • Distinguished by United States of America, State of California, Intervenor v. Raphyal Crawford, AKA Aarmyl Crawford, 372 F.3d 1048 (2004)

    With a certain prescience, we distinguished Brown and Dunaway because, “[i]n each of those cases, the defendant was arrested without probable cause,” whereas Manuel was “totally different from Dunaway and Brown because probable cause [to arrest] was amply established before the officers began their interrogation.
    Court of Appeals for the Ninth CircuitJun 21, 2004Read it
  • Distinguished by United States v. Hopson, 134 F. App'x 781 (2004)

    Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979), upon which Hopson relies, is inapposite.
    Court of Appeals for the Sixth CircuitMay 20, 2004Read it
  • Distinguished by State v. Purvey, 129 Md. App. 1 (1999)

    442 U.S. 200, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979), which is inapposite to the facts at hand.
    Court of Special Appeals of MarylandNov 1, 1999Read it

The opinion

Mr. Justice Stevens,

concurring.

Although I join the Court’s opinion, I add this comment on the significance of two factors that may be considered when determining whether a confession has been obtained by exploitation of an illegal arrest.

The temporal relationship between the arrest and the confession may be an ambiguous factor. If there are no relevant intervening circumstances, a prolonged detention may well be a more serious exploitation of an illegal arrest than a short one. Conversely, even an immediate confession may have been motivated by a prearrest event such as a visit with a minister.

The flagrancy of the official misconduct is relevant, in my judgment, only insofar as it has a tendency to motivate the defendant. A midnight arrest with drawn guns will be equally frightening whether the police acted recklessly or in good faith. Conversely, a courteous command has the same effect on the arrestee whether the officer thinks he has probable cause or knows that he does not. In either event, if the Fourth Amendment is violated, the admissibility question will turn on the causal relationship between that violation and the defendant’s subsequent confession.

I recognize that the deterrence rationale for the exclusion *221 ary rule is sometimes interpreted quite differently. 1 Under that interpretation, exclusion is applied as a substitute for punishment of the offending officer; if he acted recklessly or flagrantly, punishment is appropriate, but if he acted in good faith, it is not. 2 But when evidence is excluded at a criminal trial, it is the broad- societal interest in effective law enforcement that suffers. The justification for the exclusion of evidence obtained by improper methods is to motivate the law enforcement profession as a whole — not the aberrant individual officer — to adopt and enforce regular procedures that will avoid the future invasion of the citizen’s constitutional rights. For that reason, exclusionary rules should embody objective criteria rather than subjective considerations.

See, e. g., MR. Justice RehNquist, dissenting, post, at 226.

I would agree that the officer’s subjective state of mind is relevant when he is being sued for damages, but this case involves the question whether the evidence he has obtained is admissible at trial.

This is a copy of a public record, reproduced as it was published. It is not legal advice, and it may not be the version a court would rely on. Check the official source before you cite it.

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