High Court Vacates Murder Conviction
The Supreme Court today threw out a murder conviction where the police obtained a confession following an illegal arrest. The case is Kaupp v. Texas and you can read the full opinion here. The state had claimed the defendant was merely being detained, not arrested. The Court found otherwise.
Even “an initially consensual encounter . . . can be transformed into a seizure or detention within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.” (“[A]t some point in the investigative process, police procedures can qualitatively and quantitatively be so intrusive with respect to a suspect’s freedom of movement and privacy interests as to trigger the full protection of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments”). It cannot seriously be suggested that when the detectives began to question Kaupp, a reasonable person in his situation would have thought he was sitting in the interview room as a matter of choice, free to change his mind and go home to bed.
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