Supreme Court Upholds Police's Right to Coercive Torture

A fractured Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a police officer did not violate the rights of a gravely wounded farm worker by interrogating him at the hospital without reading him his Miranda rights.

But Oliverio Martinez may still be allowed to collect damages on grounds that his constitutional due process rights were violated by the 1997 hospital room questioning, the court said in sending the case back to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Martinez was shot five times by police and then subjected to a lengthy interrogation as he awaited medical treatment. He was never told of his rights, and he says a police sergeant kept questioning him even after he said that he did not want to answer.

Martinez, who was never charged with a crime, was left blind and paralyzed. He sued the City of Oxnard and the police sergeant under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983, claiming that the coercive interrogation violated his right to be free from self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment, as well as his substantive Fourteenth Amendment due process right.

A 5-4 majority in the case, which resulted in six separate opinions, held that the Ninth Circuit was wrong in denying qualified immunity to the officer on the Fifth Amendment question. There was no Fifth Amendment violation, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, because the suspect's right not to be a witness against himself is not at issue unless and until the suspect is charged with a crime and his statements are sought to be introduced in evidence.

He was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia, and in a separate opinion by David Souter and Stephen Breyer.

http://www.metnews.com/articles/mart052803.htm