DC: Custody for Miranda and Fifth Amendment purposes may be different than custody for Fourth Amendment purposes

Custody for Miranda and Fifth Amendment purposes may be different than custody for Fourth Amendment purposes. Morton v. United States, 2015 D.C. App. LEXIS 516 (Oct. 29, 2015):

This court has acknowledged that “the task of defining ‘custody’ is a slippery one.” White, 68 A.3d at 279 (citing In re D.W., 989 A.2d 196, 201 (D.C. 2010)). Indeed, there is no bright-line rule “to save courts from ‘occasionally [having] difficulty deciding exactly when a suspect has been taken into custody.'” Id. (quoting Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420, 441, 104 S. Ct. 3138, 82 L. Ed. 2d 317 (1984)). In In re I.J., this court observed that confusion may arise in differentiating between a Fourth Amendment seizure analysis and a Fifth Amendment custody analysis. In re I.J., 906 A.2d at 257 (quoting Miley v. United States, 477 A.2d 720 (D.C. 1984)) (“[E]xperience demonstrates that the reach of Miranda is sometimes blurred in circumstances involving a Terry encounter and the parameters of the terms ‘custody’ and ‘arrest’ may change with the context.”); see Turner, 761 A.2d at 851 (“On a fundamental level, ‘seizure’ and ‘custody’ are not synonymous.”) (internal citation omitted). The fact that an encounter may be a reasonable seizure within the scope of Terry for Fourth Amendment purposes does not automatically and necessarily remove it from Miranda’s Fifth Amendment protections. See White, 68 A.3d at 284 (citing In re D.W., 989 A.2d at 201 (“[I]t is clear … that an individual may be in custody even when he has not been formally arrested.”)). The court in In re I.J. explained this in the following way:

Should the circumstances so dictate, a person may be seized—stopped, frisked, handcuffed, detained, transported in a police vehicle to another location (including a police station) and briefly questioned—so as to allow a Terry investigation on reasonable articulable suspicion without the encounter being deemed an arrest, within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, requiring probable cause. However, if the same tactics that may be permitted by the Fourth Amendment would cause a reasonable person in the suspect’s situation to believe that his freedom of action has been curtailed to a degree associated with formal arrest, there is custody that triggers the additional protections of the Fifth Amendment.

906 A.2d at 260. Accordingly, we proceed in our analysis of the present case with awareness that the standard that applies in Fourth Amendment versus Fifth Amendment contexts is distinct and may produce different outcomes.