Bell v. Norris, No. 07-3432.
In December 1992, Albert Bell, a sixteen-year-old, and his accomplice, Terry Sims, robbed a grocery story. Bell served as a decoy to distract a store employee who Sims subsequently shot and killed. A second store employee began screaming, and Sims shot and killed the employee while Bell took money from a cash register. After the robbery and murders, the two left the store, discarded the murder weapon, and drove to a friend’s home.
Police initially considered Bell a potential witness and interviewed him, with his mother present, on January 5, 1993. Officers did not give Bell Miranda warnings, and he denied any involvement in the robbery or murders, denied having been with Sims on the night of the murders, and made no inculpatory statements. After the first interview, police interviewed another witness who contradicted Bell’s claim that he had not been with Sims on the night in question.
The second interview occurred on January 8, 1993, and officers isolated Bell in an interrogation room, read him Miranda warnings, obtained verbal confirmation that he understood each of his Miranda rights, and had him sign a written form waiving his rights. Bell placed his initials after each warning on the waiver form and signed the bottom of the form. During the second interview, Bell confessed to his involvement in the crimes and drew police a map of where to find the murder weapon.
Bell was tried as an adult and convicted of two counts of felony murder. He is currently serving two consecutive life sentences. His case has undergone multiple state appeals, and Bell eventually filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court, seeking relief based on several issues, which the trial court denied. Bell then filed an appeal with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which the court granted regarding Bell’s claim that the state court erred in concluding that he knowingly and intelligently waived his Miranda rights before making statements to police.
The Eighth Circuit noted that the Supreme Court of the United States has adopted a totality-of-the-circumstances test for determining whether a person has knowingly and intelligently waived his Miranda rights:
First, the relinquishment of the right must have been voluntary in the sense that it was the product of a free and deliberate choice rather than intimidation, coercion, or deception. Second, the waiver must have been made with a full awareness of both the nature of the right being abandoned and the consequences of the decision to abandon it.
Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (“AEDPA”), the court was required the follow the state court’s findings of fact unless those findings were unreasonable. Because Bell was a reasonably intelligent sixteen-year-old, had prior exposure to the juvenile justice system, expressed that he understood the words of the Miranda warnings, and waived his rights verbally and in writing, the court held that Bell had presented insufficient evidence to overcome the presumption of correctness of the state trial court’s factual findings. The court affirmed the decision of the trial court.
