The Looney Left Wing

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST:

Michael Blaine Shatzer was imprisoned at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown for child sexual abuse in 2003 when police asked him about allegations in another case: that he had sexually abused his 3-year-old son.

Shatzer refused to answer questions and asked for a lawyer. A police officer stopped the questioning, and the case went dormant.

Nearly three years later, Shatzer's son was old enough to offer new details, and a different police officer returned to prison to question Shatzer. This time, he waived his Miranda rights and made incriminating statements that led to his conviction.

But the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, said Shatzer's statements could not be used. It pointed to a 28-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision that said once a suspect asks for an attorney, "he is not subject to further questioning until a lawyer has been made available or the suspect himself reinitiates conversation."

The rule was to protect a suspect from self-incrimination in case police tried to badger him into a confession before he, as Justice Antonin Scalia said Monday, "lawyered up."

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, supported by the United States, said there was no allegation in Shatzer's case that police badgered him into a confession. He said that police should be able to question a suspect again once there is a "break in custody" -- in this case, that police stopped questioning Shatzer and released him back into the prison's general population.

In that case, Gansler said, police were free to ask him again about the molestation allegations and use his statements, since he did not ask for an attorney the second time.

Justices seemed generally supportive of Gansler's point that police should have been allowed to question Shatzer again, but they had a hard time agreeing on how the rule should be changed.

Roberts worried that police could repeatedly question and dismiss a suspect who asks for a lawyer.

"You know, just sort of catch-and-release, until he finally breaks down and says, 'All right, I'll talk,' " Roberts said.

Public defender Celia A. Davis, representing Shatzer, said the court should not change a rule that sets clear guidelines for law enforcement.

Creating exceptions, she said, "introduces uncertainty into the determinations of what constitutes custody and what length of time might be adequate to excuse the protection."

But the justices wondered what could be done about a suspect who asks for a lawyer, never actually receives one or is convicted, and then is questioned years later, perhaps for a different crime.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. posed this hypothetical: What if someone was arrested for joy riding in Maryland, invoked his Fifth Amendment protection, and was never convicted? Could police in Montana question him as a murder suspect in Montana 10 years later?

When Davis said no, Alito replied: "And you don't think that's a ridiculous application of the rule?"


APPARENTLY NOT.