Case Summary - Ronald Lee Wilson v. State

Police discovered the body of a murdered man with a magazine clip for a pistol found near the body. When police received information implicating Wilson in the murder, they arrested him on unrelated misdemeanor warrants. During the interrogation, the detective fabricated a forensic lab report to convince Wilson to respond to his questioning. The report stated that Wilson’s fingerprints were found on the magazine clip retrieved from the crime scene even though no legible prints were found on the clip. Wilson initially denied committing the murder, but the officer showed him the report and repeatedly emphasized it as evidence of Wilson’s guilt. “Let me remind you, I’ve got that report. Those guys are experts. They’re like DNA experts. They’re like experts. What they say is the truth, and we got you.” Thereafter, Wilson admitted that he had shot the victim.

Wilson moved to suppress the confession arguing that the detective’s conduct violated §37.10 of the Penal Code, therefore the Texas exclusionary rule in article 38.23 of the Code of Criminal Procedure barred admission of his confession. The trial court denied the motion to suppress, ruling that the confession was admissible. In the court of appeals, Wilson argued that the confession was inadmissible for a number of reasons, including violation of §37.09 of the Penal Code. The State did not object to the failure to raise this argument at the trial court in the court of appeals. The court of appeals reversed, holding that the detective had violated §37.09 of the Penal Code so the confession should be suppressed under article 38.23. [Here’s a link to the court of appeals case information if you’re interested.]

A five-judge majority affirmed the court of appeals. Judge Cochran, joined by Judges Price, Womack, Johnson, and Holcomb, first explained that the State had never complained that Wilson failed to raise his §37.09 argument in the trial court although it could have done so in the petition for discretionary review. Thus, there was no issue before them concerning the propriety of the court of appeal’s reliance upon §37.09, tampering with evidence, as opposed to §37.10, tampering with a governmental record, in resolving Wilson’s Texas exclusionary statute claim.

Judge Cochran went on to reject the State’s argument that §37.09 is not a crime related to gathering, creating, or destroying evidence. The State argued that the statute is designed to prevent individuals from defrauding the government. However, according to the majority, the terms of the statute prohibit police officers from using fabricated documents to affect the course of their investigation. Thus, in the majority’s view, using a fabricated document to get a confession is “exactly the type of law violation that the Texas Legislature intended to prohibit when it enacted article 38.23 . . . violation of §37.09 (or §37.10) to obtain a confession or other evidence is at the core of conduct proscribed by the Texas exclusionary statute.

Moreover, while the United States Supreme Court and the CCA have long stated that police may used “trickery and deception” during an interrogation, using false documents is not “just another form of trickery” because it carries a risk that the falsified document may find its way into the court system and possibly be mistaken for a real report. The majority acknowledged that an undercover officer commits a controlled buy he is in possession of a controlled substance, but Judge Cochran then went on to explain that the Legislature specifically exempted officers from criminal liability for that offense.

Finally, Judge Cochran detailed that the detective violated §37.09 of the Penal Code. The detective never testified that he thought his conduct was reasonable in believing that presenting a dummy report was lawful, but even if he had, a “good faith” or “pure motive” violation of Texas penal laws concerning the acquisition of evidence does not render article 38.23 inapplicable to the evidence obtained as a result of that violation. The detective’s subjective belief that his conduct was lawful or reasonable would not render the Texas exclusionary statute inapplicable to his violation of section 37.09. [cough, cough, 9.21, cough, cough]

Judge Meyers dissented because he did not believe the detective had violated the law. The detective created a report that indicated the latent prints belonged to the defendant when the prints were, in reality, inconclusive. However, his guess as to the ownership of the prints turned out to be right because the defendant confessed to the crime. No one joined him in his opinion.

Judge Keasler, joined by Judge Hervey and Presiding Judge Keller, dissented because the issue had not been preserved and the court of appeals was obligated to address preservation regardless of the State’s failure to complain about it. Judge Hervey, joined by Judge Keasler and Presiding Judge Keller, dissented to note Wilson’s lack of standing to challenge the alleged illegality. According to Hervey, a defendant lacks standing to complain that evidence was illegally obtained for state exclusionary rule purposes unless the defendant’s personal or property rights are illegally violated in the obtainment of evidence against him. Deciding that Wilson has no standing would also make it unnecessary to put the detective in the same league as police officers who use throw-down guns and manufacture evidence to frame innocent people. It would also prevent them from proclaiming the detective guilty of a third-degree felony offense that the detective had no opportunity to defend himself against at the suppression hearing.

Commentary: I hate to say this, but this opinion actually reads like a court of appeals opinion that the CCA would normally reverse. Because the trial court denied the motion to suppress, the court of appeals and the CCA were supposed to look for ways to uphold the case so long as it was correct under any theory of law. Reversing a case based upon a violation of a penal statute that was never argued to the trial court seems to run counter to that perspective. Pointing out that the detective never said he thought his conduct was lawful really fails to give proper deference to the trial court’s implicit findings of fact. The fact that he did what he did and explained it with candor would seem to give rise to the reasonable inference in the trial court that he reasonably believed his conduct was lawful. And at any rate his silence on the issue doesn’t suggest he intended to violate the law.

That’s not to say that the concerns about falsifying documents in interrogation are inconsequential. Judge Cochran is right about the danger that such documents might end up being mistaken for the Real McCoy. But the appropriate inquiry there should be whether the use of the false document exceeded the limits placed on the use of trickery or deception in securing a confession. Does the use of such a document make it more likely that the confession was false or unreliable? That’s the question the Court should’ve been asking. I guess the problem for them was that there wasn’t a way for them to get there so they chose this way instead.

I’m kind of ambivalent about the standing argument. I mean, I see it. The violation of the law really didn’t implicate Wilson’s personal or property rights. Part and parcel to this is the idea that the evidence obtained (the confession) did not exist prior to the illegality (the use of the report). However, it does seem counter-intuitive to suggest that a defendant lacks standing to challenge the admission of his own confession. The disconnect may be that challenges to confessions are generally thought of as challenges to voluntariness rather than as invasions of privacy so “standing” isn’t really used with confessions. Maybe it is, I haven’t researched it out a lot, but I couldn’t find anything applying standing to confessions. But I’m not using WestlawNext so that’s probably my problem.

Or maybe the real problem I have is with the seemingly bright line rule regarding exceptions to the exclusionary rule. According to the majority, controlled drug buys don’t run afoul of article 38.23 because there’s an exception built into the statute for police officers to possess controlled substances. However, no such exception was written into §37.09, so this conduct violates article 38.23. Well, um, in Miles v. State, Judge Cochran seemed pretty keen on the idea that the justifications in the front of the Penal Code should also be considered in an article 38.23 analysis.

In Miles, the CCA endorsed the idea that violations of traffic laws by ordinary citizens trying to stop a drunk driver would be okay if they reasonably believed the conduct was authorized by law. They came up with the rule that a police officer could do it, so an ordinary citizen should be able to as well without running afoul of article 38.23. In several footnotes they noted the potential applicability of statutory justifications for the conduct such as “public duty” (§9.21) and “necessity” (§9.22). But these justifications aren’t even considered in Wilson? Given that the Court acknowledges that some small amount of trickery and deception can be used to persuade a defendant to confess without running afoul of the Constitution, it does seem at least arguable that the officer reasonably believed his conduct was authorized by law. [Interestingly, Judge Price and Johnson concurred in Miles to argue . . . wait for it . . . standing. However, they both joined the majority in Wilson.]

I guess that’s why I think they should’ve squarely addressed whether the use of the document rendered the confession involuntary rather than dick around with the already way-too-confusing article 38.23. And hey, they could probably have used the same preservation-of-error slight-of-hand to address it if the defendant failed to do so in the trial court. I think that would’ve resulted in a much cleaner opinion. As it stands now, I don’t think this opinion provides any more of a clear over-arching principle that helps practitioners easily understand which law violations run afoul of article 38.23. We’re still stuck taking each law at a time. And it creates a skin-tag in the law of preservation of error that they'll have to keep explaining.