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State v. Sawyer6/13/2001
s an appellate court limited to deferential review, to usurp the trial court's role by applying our own totality of the circumstances test and recharacterizing voluntariness as a "legal conclusion" rather than a finding of fact in order to vacate a ruling granting a motion to suppress. We have deferentially reviewed and affirmed voluntariness findings and denials of motions to suppress, even where a fair reading of the record indicated significant coercion. See Coombs, 1998 ME 1, 11, 704 A.2d at 391; State v. Kremen, 2000 ME 117, 754 A.2d 964. Grants of motions to suppress and findings that the State has failed to meet its burden of proof should be accorded the same deferential review.
If we respect the high standards of proof imposed on the State and if we respect the narrow scope of our review of trial court findings that a proponent's burden of proof has not been met, the trial judge's findings that the voluntariness of Sawyer's statement was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt must be affirmed.
The question regarding the sufficiency of the evidence to support probable cause to arrest presents a different issue. The officer was at the scene, he observed the various individuals involved, and indisputably he heard Sawyer state that he was the operator of the motor vehicle. Probable cause may be based on a wide variety of information, some of which may be inadmissible at trial. While finding against the State on the voluntariness issue, the court made no finding of official misconduct. Because there was no finding of official misconduct incident to the arrest of Sawyer, and considering all the evidence available to the officer at the time, the officer had probable cause, as a matter of law, to believe that Sawyer had operated the vehicle in violation of the law. Thus, I concur in the result as to the Court's ruling on the suppression of the arrest.
Accordingly, I would affirm the ruling of the trial court regarding suppression of the statement, but I concur in the result regarding suppression of the arrest.
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