In a unanimous decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that police officers must read K-12 students their Miranda rights before interrogating them in a school setting.
The case stems from an incident at a Two Rivers middle school in which a 12-year-old seventh grade student, referred to in the case under the pseudonym Kevin, touched the groin of a classmate. Kevin was pulled out of class to be interviewed in a small room dedicated for use by school resource officers. After an initial interview around 10 minutes, Kevin was allowed to leave before being interviewed again about an hour later by the officers and a vice principal. The boy was not able to call his parents and was not informed he was allowed to leave the room.
While he was in the room, a uniformed officer stood in front of the door and the school resource officer doing the interview lied by saying there were witnesses to the incident. Police officers are allowed to lie during interviews to elicit a confession.
Kevin said during both interviews that he had touched the boy’s groin but that it was an accident.
Kevin was later charged with fourth-degree sexual assault and in a bench trial was found delinquent by a Manitowoc County Circuit Court judge.
The boy appealed the ruling, arguing that the statements he made during the interview were inadmissible because he had not been read his Miranda rights.
In the majority decision, authored by Justice Janet Protasiewicz and joined by the Court’s three other liberal-leaning justices, the Court found that taking Kevin to the room for questioning amounted to being in police custody and he should have been read his rights.
The ruling found that the interview statements weren’t admissible. However it also found that the evidence for the delinquency finding did not rely on the statements so the circuit judge’s decision was upheld.
“While Kevin sat across from one officer who questioned him, another fully uniformed and armed officer stood positioned in front of the door. The questioning officer asked him about an alleged sexual assault. She told him — untruthfully — that there were witnesses,” Protasiewicz wrote. “She also accusingly told him ‘it happened.’ No one told him he could reach out to his parents or any other adult. No one told him he was free to leave. No one told him he did not need to answer questions.”
“But in the end, a 12-year-old boy was questioned in a closet-like law-enforcement office with two police officers, one who was fully uniformed and standing in front of the door,” she continued.
Ryan Cox, the legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, which filed an amicus brief in the case, said the ruling would protect the constitutional rights of children.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is a major victory for the due process rights of Wisconsin students,” Cox said in a statement to the Wisconsin Examiner. “The ruling means that, in deciding whether a student must be read their Miranda rights during a police interrogation in a school setting, Wisconsin courts must consider the reasons why a child in the student’s position would feel coerced and not free to leave. This decision upholds students’ Fifth Amendment right to protect themselves against self-incrimination during encounters with law enforcement. Students retain their constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent and seek counsel when interacting with law enforcement, even in the school environment. Police are not exempt from their responsibilities to uphold the rights of a person simply because the student is a minor in a school environment. The Court affirmed this fundamental principle and protected Wisconsin students across the state from coercive and unconstitutional police conduct.”
In a concurring opinion joined by the other two conservative leaning justices, Justice Brian Hagedorn said the issue was made larger than it should have been, writing that the majority transformed “a rather ordinary schoolhouse questioning” into a matter of constitutional import.
Hagedorn wrote that a seventh grader would likely see being questioned by police as intimidating but recognize that school resource officers are trusted parts of the school community.
“Would a reasonable 12-year-old in this situation feel some pressure? Absolutely. But was this the kind of hostile, inherently coercive questioning that animated the court in Miranda? It was not,” Hagedorn wrote. “A reasonable person in Kevin’s position would not see SROs as unfamiliar and antagonistic adults. The reasonable person would see them as dedicated and familiar faces — intimidating to be sure — but nonetheless present to keep everyone safe.”
Communities across Wisconsin have had fights over the presence of school resource officers for years. Officers were removed from Milwaukee Public Schools in 2016 at the request of community members, but returned last year by state legislators under a provision of a law providing local governments with increased state financial support. Opponents of SROs have argued the presence of cops in schools makes Black students in particular targets of inappropriate monitoring at school, which is supposed to be a safe place for them to learn.
In his opinion, Hagedorn wrote that the ruling was a close call but that he wanted to distinguish between a true police interrogation and the normal functions of school discipline.
“These facts give some support to the idea that a reasonable person in Kevin’s situation would have felt pressured to confess,” Hagedorn wrote. “Under my read of the cases, however, more is required to approximate the coercive environment at issue in Miranda. Someone in Kevin’s shoes would certainly feel the weight of adult condemnation. His conscience might even call him to come clean in the face of a serious infraction. But this normal human experience should not so quickly be placed on par with the uniquely coercive station house questioning to which Miranda applies.”
