Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Thursday, June 21, 2012

 

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S.C. to Review Conviction of Driver Detained After Fatal Car Crash

C.A. Panel Said Detention ‘Tantamount to Arrest,’ Defendant Should Have Received Miranda Warnings

 

By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer

 

The California Supreme Court will decide whether a driver detained after a traffic collision that resulted in a child’s death should have been given Miranda warnings.

The justices, at their weekly conference in San Francisco, voted unanimously to review a March 19 First District Court of Appeal ruling that reversed the conviction of Richard Tom.

Div. Three said it was prejudicial error to allow a police officer to testify that Tom never asked about the condition of the occupants of the vehicle with which his Mercedes E320 crashed in February 2007. That testimony should not have been admitted, the panel said, because “post-arrest, pre-Miranda silence” cannot be used as substantive evidence of guilt.

Prosecutors have called the ruling “an extreme and unwarranted expansion of Miranda.”

Tom was sentenced to seven years in prison following his 2008 San Mateo Superior Court conviction for vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence. Prosecutors said Tom was drunk and speeding when he broadsided a vehicle making a left turn in Redwood City.

The driver of the other vehicle, Lorraine Wong, suffered a broken rib and finger, and her 8-year-old daughter, Sydney Ng, was killed. Another daughter, 10-year-old Kendall Ng, spent a week in the hospital with injuries to her forehead, arm, and neck.

Held at Scene

Following the collision, Tom was held at the scene for more than an hour, and asked if he could walk to his home, which was less than a block away. An officer told him he could not leave, the investigation was ongoing, and he was later placed in a patrol car for about 20 minutes before being taken to the police station.

A prosecution expert on accident reconstruction testified that Tom was driving at least 67 miles per hour—in a 35 mph zone—at the time of the crash. The defense expert countered that he was going no faster than 52 miles per hour.

Jurors found him guilty of gross vehicular manslaughter, as a lesser offense of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. They found him not guilty of driving while impaired and driving with an excessive blood alcohol level.

Justice Martin Jenkins, writing for the Court of Appeal, said that while Tom was not under formal arrest, the circumstances of his detention were such that the failure to give Miranda warnings rendered any testimony regarding his statements, or the lack thereof, inadmissible.

‘Increasingly Coercive’

During the period that he was kept at the scene, the justice wrote, “the atmosphere surrounding defendant’s detention became increasingly coercive,” so that “any reasonable person would interpret those restraints ‘as tantamount to a formal arrest.’”

The justice acknowledged that federal appeals courts have split as to whether evidence of a defendant’s post-arrest, pre-Miranda silence is admissible.

The better rule, Jenkins said, is that such evidence should be excluded in order to protect the “core Fifth Amendment values” of the right to silence and the right not have one’s silence used to infer guilt.

The U.S. Supreme Court, Jenkins acknowledged, has allowed the use of evidence of a defendant’s silence for impeachment of the defendant’s testimony, and has also permitted proof of pre-arrest silence as substantive evidence of guilt. But the high court has never extended those holdings to evidence of post-arrest silence, Jenkins said, nor are there sound policy reasons for such an extension.

The justice reasoned that allowing such evidence “tends to obfuscate the truth-telling function of the criminal trial,” because it has minimal probative value, can be highly prejudicial, and may force the defendant to give up his right to self-incrimination “in order to refute the negative inferences inevitably drawn by the prosecution from post-arrest silence.”

Jenkins went on to say that the evidence was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Under these circumstances—an emotionally charged case, involving the death of one child and serious injury to another, and hinging on competing theories of accident reconstruction yielding widely different estimates of defendant’s speed at the point of impact—the prosecutor’s argument urging the jury to consider defendant’s failure to ask about the welfare of the occupants of the other vehicle as substantive evidence of his guilt was highly prejudicial,” the jurist wrote.   

Other Action

In other conference action, the justices declined to hear a dispute over whether AT&T charges excessive rates for unpublished landline telephone numbers. Div. Five of this district’s Court of Appeal upheld Judge Anthony Mohr’s conclusion that the plaintiffs’ claims in Willard v. AT&T Communications of California, Inc., (2012) 204 Cal.App.4th 53 involved complex policy questions that should be addressed to the Legislature or to an administrative agency.

The plaintiffs charged that forcing them to pay $1.25 per month for nonpublished service and $1 per month for unlisted service was an unlawful business practice because it was unconscionable, since it was non-negotiable and exceeded the actual cost to AT&T of providing the services, and violated their right to privacy under the state Constitution. But the high court voted 5-0 not to hear the case, with Justices Marvin Baxter and Kathryn M. Werdegar recused.

 

Copyright 2012, Metropolitan News Company