The Supreme Court today affirms the death sentence in People v. Flores for the 2001 murders by a gang member of three San Bernardino County teens who resisted joining the defendant’s gang. Among many other things, the court’s majority opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger finds the superior court erroneously allowed some expert testimony about gangs, but it concludes the error was harmless.
Justice Goodwin Liu — joined by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar — dissents, saying the penalty, but not the conviction, should be overturned. The disagreement among the justices concerns the admission, during the penalty phase, of defendant’s videotaped confession to a fourth, unrelated murder. The dissenters say the confession was made after the defendant invoked his right under Miranda to remain silent.
When the defendant was asked by a detective if he wanted to talk, the defendant answered “No” or “Nah,” but he later confessed after further questioning. The majority holds that it wasn’t clear what defendant was saying he didn’t want to talk about and that, in continuing to converse with the defendant, “the officer acted reasonably in clarifying defendant’s intent” behind the negative response to what the majority says was the detective’s “poorly framed question.” The “defendant’s ‘[n]o,’ in context, was susceptible of more than one possible interpretation,” the majority says.
The dissenters accuse the majority of using “speculative reasoning” to “set[ ] a dangerous precedent.” They claim that, instead of holding “‘No’ means no,” the court “undertakes an exquisite parsing of the interrogation and conjures ambiguity from an implausible reading of ordinary language and from signals so faint as Flores’s fleeting smile on a grainy videotape.” Justice Liu writes, “I am unsure how an ordinary person (or even an Oxford don) could have more clearly expressed his desire to remain silent.”
