State v. Knapp

285 Wis.2d 86

2005 WI 127

700 N.W.2d 899

STATE of Wisconsin, Plaintiff-Appellant-Cross-Respondent, v. Matthew J. KNAPP, Defendant-Respondent-Cross-Appellant.

No. 2000AP2590-CR.

Supreme Court of Wisconsin.

Oral argument February 16, 2005.

Decided July 14, 2005.

For the plaintiff-appellant-cross-respondent the cause was argued by William L. Gansner, assistant attorney general, with whom on the briefs was Peggy A. Lautenschlager, attorney general.

For the defendant-respondent-cross-appellant there was a brief by Robert G. LeBell, Milwaukee, and oral argument by Robert G. LeBell.

¶ 1. LOUIS B. BUTLER, JR., J.

This case is on remand from the United States Supreme Court,¹ which vacated our decision in State v. Knapp, 2003 WI 121, 265 Wis. 2d 278, 666 N.W. 2d 881 (Knapp I). In Knapp I, this court concluded that physical evidence obtained as the direct result of a Miranda² violation is inadmissible when the violation was an intentional attempt to prevent the suspect from exercising Fifth Amendment rights. Id., ¶ 78. In light of United States v. Patane, 542 U.S. 630, 124 S. Ct. 2620 (2004), in which a plurality of the Court concluded that the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine does not extend to derivative evidence discovered as a result of a defendant's voluntary statements obtained without Miranda warnings, the United States Supreme Court vacated and remanded our decision for further consideration.

¶ 2. We conclude that the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine applies under the circumstances of this case under Article I, Section 8 of the Wisconsin Constitution. Where physical evidence is obtained as the direct result of an intentional Miranda violation, we conclude that our constitution requires that the evidence must be suppressed. Therefore, we reverse the circuit court's order.³

I

¶ 3. The following facts remain undisputed for purposes of this appeal. In the early morning hours of December 12, 1987, Resa Scobie Brunner (Resa) was murdered in her home in Watertown, Wisconsin. On the afternoon of December 12, around 2 p.m., her husband, Ervin J. Brunner (Brunner), found Resa's body lying in their bedroom, beaten to death with a baseball bat.

¶ 4. An autopsy conducted the next day established Resa's time of death as between 2:15 and 4:30 a.m. Brunner claimed that he had been with another woman, Sharon Maas (Maas), the evening of December 11 and had slept at his parents' house in Clyman, Wisconsin, that night. Brunner told police that he and Maas were in a bar in Sullivan, Wisconsin, until 2 a.m., and then they drove directly to his parents' house without stopping in Watertown.

¶ 5. The police investigation revealed that on the night of Resa's murder, Knapp and Resa were seen drinking together in a Watertown bar and then eating together in a Watertown restaurant after the bar closed. When they were leaving the restaurant, although they got up to leave at the same time, Knapp left first, as Resa had to go back to pay her check.

¶ 6. On December 12, the police confirmed that Knapp was on parole, with a condition being that he not consume alcohol. When Knapp's parole officer learned that Knapp had been drinking, he ordered an apprehension request and requested that the police arrest Knapp.

¶ 7. On December 13, Detective Timothy Roets (Roets) of the Watertown Police Department went to Knapp's apartment to arrest him on the apprehension request. When Roets arrived at the inner-door to Knapp's apartment, he saw Knapp through the door's window and told Knapp to open the door because he had a warrant for Knapp's arrest on a parole violation. Knapp picked up a phone to call his attorney. Knapp eventually hung up the phone, stepped back, let Roets in, and told Roets he was trying to call his attorney. Roets told Knapp that he had to go to the police station, but Roets never read Knapp the Miranda warnings.

¶ 8. Before leaving for the police station, Knapp and Roets went to Knapp's bedroom so Knapp could put on some shoes. While in the bedroom, Roets questioned Knapp about the clothes Knapp had been wearing the prior evening, and Knapp pointed to a pile of clothing on the floor. Roets seized the clothes and took Knapp to the police station.

¶ 9. In that pile of clothing was a blue sweatshirt. The sweatshirt contained human blood on one of the arm cuffs and near the top of the zipper. An analysis conducted in 1988 determined that Resa could not be eliminated as the source of the blood.

¶ 10. After Roets arrested Knapp and transported him to the police station, Roets questioned Knapp further but still did not give him Miranda warnings. Roets told Knapp that it was his responsibility to advise everybody of their constitutional rights that may have had contact with Resa just prior to her death. At that point, Knapp stated he did not want to write or sign any statements, as he had been previously told by an attorney not to speak to police. Roets still did not give the Miranda warnings, however. In response to questioning, Knapp told Roets about his whereabouts from the prior evening, including his encounter with Resa at a bar and how after the bar closed Resa talked him into getting something to eat. While walking to the restaurant, Knapp stated that he witnessed Resa get into a fight with another woman, from which Resa got a bloody nose. Knapp said that he helped her wipe away the blood by using the sleeve of his sweatshirt. When it occurred to Knapp that he was not being questioned as a witness but rather as a suspect, he again said he would not write or sign a statement without a lawyer. At that point, Roets took Knapp to a holding cell.

¶ 11. Given the little evidence the State had linking Knapp to the crime, 12 years passed before the State charged him for Resa's death. In the meantime, in addition to investigating Knapp's involvement, the police investigated others. Knapp asserts that a likely suspect of Resa's murder is her husband, Brunner. Prior to the time of the murder, Resa and Brunner had been married for only six months, and they told various witnesses that they were having marital problems. The night of Resa's murder, Brunner slept with Maas. The week before the murder, Brunner found Resa sitting with another man in his truck, dragged Resa out of the truck, and told police officers he would "knock her out" if he ever caught Resa cheating on him again. Additionally, Brunner told his stepdaughter the night of the murder that he and Resa were fighting. Earlier that evening Resa called her daughter and told her to go to their home and take the key off of the porch. Brunner admitted he might not have had a key to his home that evening. During a fight with a girlfriend a few years later, Brunner stated that he wished he "had a bat." Brunner also stated during a polygraph examination that he killed his wife.

¶ 12. Sometime in 1998, the Department of Justice's Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) began investigating the case, and in the summer of 1999 it located new witnesses who implicated Knapp in Resa's murder. Knapp's ex-girlfriend, Sandra Huebner, stated that in 1995 Knapp battered her and said, "I'll do to you what I did to her." Also, Pedro Blas-Jasso told an investigator that Knapp confessed to him ten to 15 times that he killed Resa. Most significantly, while the 1988 analysis of Knapp's sweatshirt indicated that Resa could not be excluded as the source of the blood, recent forensic DNA tests established that the blood was Resa's.

¶ 13. On November 12, 1999, the State charged Knapp with first-degree intentional homicide for Resa's death. Knapp filed a motion to suppress, among other things, the sweatshirt that contained Resa's blood, making several arguments for its exclusion. Regarding the grounds involving the illegal fruit of a Miranda violation, the following exchange between the State and Roets occurred:

[State]: In talking with him at the—in the office, I mean, you knew that he was in custody, right?

[Roets]: Yes, I did.

[State]: And you knew that, in order to interview him effectively in custody, you needed to Mirandize him, correct?

[Roets]: Yes, sir.

[State]: You knew you hadn't been able to do that, right?

[Roets]: That's correct.

[State]: But you continued to talk to him.

[Roets]: Yes, sir.

[State]: You were seeking information.

[Roets]: Yes, I was.

[State]: Were you trying to keep the lines of communication open?

[Roets]: Yes.

¶ 14. On cross-examination, Knapp emphasized that Roets had not even given him Miranda warnings at the apartment through the following exchange:

[Counsel for Knapp]: It was your conclusion in the apartment that [Knapp] was really trying to call his attorney. You can't dispute that, right?

[Roets]: Oh, yeah, he was trying to call his attorney.

[Counsel for Knapp]: And you, as [the State] characterized it, wanted to [] "keep the lines of communication open," so you did not respond in that—say to him, "I am going to give you your rights now," right?

[Roets]: That's right.

[Counsel for Knapp]: You abandoned the notion of reading him his constitutional rights based on what he told you relative to wanting an attorney, right?

[Roets]: That's accurate, yes.

[Counsel for Knapp]: And you wanted to keep the lines of communication open and you were concerned, were you not, that if you had Mirandized him at that point that he might not make a statement, right?

[Roets]: That's accurate.

. . . .

[Counsel for Knapp]: Okay. Well, you didn't, again, read him his rights, and were concerned that he would exercise his rights based on what he told you about wanting an attorney present because you told him—you never told him he was a suspect; you told him you just want his help?

[Roets]: I told him that yes, sir.

¶ 15. The Jefferson County Circuit Court, Honorable Randy R. Koschnick, denied the suppression motion. Knapp appealed. ¶ 16. This court accepted the court of appeals' certification to determine whether physical evidence obtained as the direct result of a Miran...