Dee Walter Mitchell, Jr. v. Christian Pfeiffer, Warden
DueProcess
Where police interrogation of a juvenile murder suspect violates due process
QUESTIONS PRESENTED 1. Where police interrogators induce an unwilling 15-year-old murder suspect to incriminate another by (1) omitting to advise him of his Miranda rights, (2) interrogating him for hours in the middle of the night, (3) explaining who it is they want him to incriminate and suggesting to him a factual scenario they will accept, (4) threatening that if he does not cooperate, the other person will certainly incriminate him, and the police and the courts will accept that other person's statements, and the juvenile will have to spend the rest of his life in prison; whereas, if he does cooperate, his cooperation will show the court that he is worthy of rehabilitation instead of life imprisonment, have the juvenile suspect's statements been coerced and made unreliable, so that the use of his trial testimony against petitioner at his trial violated his Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment right to due process of law? 2. Where, following such coercion by the police, the prosecution enters into a written agreement with the juvenile that if he testifies against the person he has incriminated in his coerced statements, he will be allowed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter with a guaranteed maximum of 13 years, instead of life imprisonment, and the juvenile testifies that he believes he must testify consistently with what he said in the coerced statements in order to keep the benefit of his agreement with the prosecution, is his testimony so unreliable that its admission in evidence violates the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights of the person incriminated by the testimony? . L