“I Don’t Want to Talk No More” Unambiguous Invocation to Remain Silent

Police were in error and violated the suspect’s right to remain silent when they continued questioning him after he said “I don’t want to talk no more, man” 

Jones v. Harrington, 2016 BL 235726, 9th Cir., No. 13-56360, 7/22/16.

The Ninth Circuit overruled a Californian appellate court that initially found that a suspect did not invoke his right to remain silent because after saying “I don’t want to talk no more, man,” he quickly followed up by stating “You don’t want to hear what I’m telling you.” The Californian court held that the initial refusal to talk, in the context of the entire conversation, was only him expressing his frustration, not an invocation of the right to remain silent.

The circuit court, however, disagreed. The court held that the Californian court erred because responses by a suspect after their invocation of the right to remain silent cannot be relied on to establish whether the invocation was ambiguous or not. The Ninth Circuit relied on Smith v. Illinois, which held “once a suspect clearly invokes his right to counsel, officers may not continue to question him and use his answers to those questions to cast retrospective doubt on the clarity of his initial invocation.”

http://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/document/Jones_v_Harrington_No_1356360_2016_BL_235726_9th_Cir_Aug_31_2015_