A Hamilton County suspect’s rights under the Ohio and U.S. constitutions were not violated when, after he was appointed a lawyer, he met with police, signed a written waiver to speak with them, and confessed to several crimes, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled today.
In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court found the Hamilton County Common Pleas Court wrongly suppressed the evidence obtained from Isiah Morris regarding his involvement in an April 2022 shooting. The decision reversed a First District Court of Appeals affirming the trial court’s decision that held the Ohio Constitution prevented Morris from being interviewed without a lawyer present.
A decision by the U. S. Supreme Court, Montejo v. Louisiana (2009) had held that a waiver of the right to counsel by a suspect during a police interrogation was sufficient to waive the Sixth Amendment right to counsel at that interview. In upholding the motion to suppress, the First District found that the Ohio Constitution did not allow for such a waiver and required the entire police interview be suppressed.
Writing for the Court majority, Justice R. Patrick DeWine explained that Ohio’s constitutional provision providing for the right to a lawyer “in any trial, in any court,” does not apply to a police interrogation that took place before Morris was formally charged with any crime.
“When Ohioans adopted Article 1, Section 10 in the 1851 Constitution, a competent speaker of the English language would not have understood ‘trial’ to include a preindictment police interrogation. We therefore hold that the right to counsel in that provision did not attach before or during the investigatory interview in this case,” he wrote.
The Court also analyzed the trial court’s ruling that after 40 minutes into the interview, Morris reinvoked his Sixth Amendment right under the U.S. Constitution when he asked detectives, “Like, I can’t talk to a lawyer?” The majority found the statement and subsequent comments by Morris did not meet the standard of making an “unambiguous” and “unequivocal” request to speak to a lawyer.
Justices Joseph T. Deters, Daniel R. Hawkins, and Megan E. Shanahan joined Justice DeWine’s opinion.
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy agreed that the Ohio Constitution did not require Morris’s statements to be suppressed. However, the Supreme Court should not have ruled on whether his Sixth Amendment rights were violated, she stated.
Chief Justice Kennedy wrote that the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office raised four issues when it contested the trial court’s decision to suppress the confession. The First District upheld the suppression of evidence based on the Ohio Constitution and did not address the prosecutor’s argument that Morris’s Sixth Amendment rights were not violated. According to the dissent, the Supreme Court should have remanded the issue to the First District rather than rule that Morris’s rights under the Sixth Amendment were not violated.
Since the Court chose to decide the Sixth Amendment question, she argued that Morris did invoke his right to counsel in two statements he made to detectives.
“Morris asked, ‘Like I can’t talk to a lawyer?’ That by itself was sufficient to invoke the right to counsel,” she wrote. And when a detective told him that anyone could speak to an attorney, Morris again invoked his right to counsel when he responded, “[Y]eah, cause that’s, we goin’ to do that cause I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Justice Jennifer Brunner joined part of Chief Justice Kennedy’s dissent. Ninth District Court of Appeals Judge Jill Flagg Lanzinger, sitting for Justice Patrick F. Fischer, joined the chief justice’s dissent.
