How an Arrest in Queens Led to the Public Safety Exception

No straight line connects Benjamin Quarles and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, or stretches from Bayside, Queens, to Copley Square in Boston, or links a largely forgotten gun charge against an accused rapist in 1980, to a horrific terrorist bombing that inflicted mass casualties and left three people dead this month.

But one knotty legal thread does tie them together: the “public safety exception” to the Miranda warning against self-incrimination that the police are supposed to issue before questioning a suspect.

The issue is not whether a suspect can be questioned before he is warned of his rights, but rather whether the answers are admissible in court. Prosecutors would have to prove that some imminent threat to public safety justified the failure to tell suspects of their right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer before being interrogated.

The public safety exception was carved out by Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, in 1982.

The Court of Appeals upheld lower court rulings that a gun seized by the police was not admissible as evidence because officers had failed to read Mr. Quarles his Miranda rights beforehand. Mr. Wachtler dissented. But the Queens district attorney at the time appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which ruled that “overriding considerations of public safety’’ might warrant questioning suspects without first advising them of their rights.

“I wrote an opinion, later embraced by the Supreme Court, that created an ‘emergency exception’ to Miranda, allowing the police to defuse a dangerous situation before administering the warning,” Mr. Wachtler recalled in a 2010 Op-Ed essay in The New York Times. “But resolving immediate emergencies is about as far as we should go in delaying the Miranda reading or creating exceptions to it.”

The United States Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling in the Quarles case is at the heart of any challenge to the admissibility of Mr. Tsarnaev’s acknowledgment to F.B.I. agents that he was involved in the Boston bombings before he was advised of his rights. (The link between the Quarles case and the Boston bombings case was reported by DNAinfo.com

The Quarles case began in 1980 when a woman flagged down a patrol car in Queens, and said an armed man had raped her and had then fled inside a supermarket on Francis Lewis Boulevard. He was cornered there by police officers who frisked him, handcuffed him and, spotting an empty shoulder holster, asked, “Where’s the gun?”

Mr. Quarles gestured toward a carton of Wisk liquid detergent, where a .38-caliber snub nose pistol was recovered. Then an officer pulled a card from his wallet and read Mr. Quarles his rights.

“From the point of view of a criminal law defense attorney you’re dealing with a complaint that says he was in possession of a loaded weapon and he had an empty holster and that he admitted to police that the gun was his and that he had bought it in Florida, so what’s left?” said Steven J. Hyman, who represented Mr. Quarles.

“Then I’m sitting at the hearing on whether the statements were voluntary and was the gun properly seized and an exceptionally honest police officer says they frisked him, handcuffed him, asked him where’s the gun and then gave him the Miranda warning,” Mr. Hyman recalled. “A case that was clearly a disaster from a defense point of view suddenly had issues.”

The rape charge was dropped because the woman never went to court. A State Supreme Court justice said that because the weapon was seized after the suspect was handcuffed and questioned about its whereabouts, it could not be admitted as evidence.

The prosecutor appealed. The ruling was unanimously upheld by the Appellate Division and then 4 to 3 by the state Court of Appeals, but, in effect, was reversed by the United States Supreme Court, 5 to 4, on the basis of Mr. Wachtler’s exception.

The Supreme Court said the exception would not apply if the suspect was subject to “actual coercion.” That was the finding later made by a Supreme Court justice in Queens who decided - “much to my amazement,” Mr. Hyman acknowledged - that a suspect could infer he was being coerced because he was surrounded at the time by a half-dozen police officers.

Mr. Hyman’s surprise was reflected in Mr. Quarles’s decision to a plea agreement, and he was eventually sentenced to probation.

“I haven’t seen him since,” Mr. Hyman said. (A Benjamin Quarles, who would have been 25 in 1980 and was from Bayside, is listed in official records as having died in 2003.)

Mr. Hyman suggested that the application of the public safety exception to the Boston bombing case might be vulnerable in court. “The whole thrust of the Quarles case is spontaneity, legitimate instinct, not interrogation,” he said.

“In Boston there could be some bombs still floating someplace, but it was no longer a situation of immediate danger,” Mr. Hyman added. “They ask him about accomplices, motives. That’s not public safety; that’s a criminal investigation. They have a right to ask. The question is, would it be admissible? I believe it is not.”

Joanna Wright, a law clerk to a judge on the United States Court of Appeals and the author of a 2011 Columbia Law Review article on the public safety exception, said, “I suspect the government would argue that to the extent that Tsarnaev worked in concert with others or had information about potential future attacks, an imminent threat still existed and therefore the exemption was justified.”

“The standard Quarles set,” Ms. Wright added, “was whether or not the suspect answered questions posed by law enforcement that were ‘reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety’ and later case law explained that there must be ‘immediate danger.’”