State of Minnesota, Respondent,

This opinion is nonprecedential except as provided by
Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A23-1935

State of Minnesota,
Respondent,

vs.

Alton Dominique Finch,
Appellant.

Filed December 2, 2024
Affirmed
Connolly, Judge

Hennepin County District Court
File No. 27-CR-23-4503

Keith Ellison, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; and

Wynn Curtiss, Hopkins City Attorney, Minneapolis, Minnesota (for respondent)

Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appellate Public Defender, Erik I. Withall, Assistant Public
Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)

Considered and decided by Frisch, Presiding Judge; Connolly, Judge; and Cochran,
Judge.
NONPRECEDENTIAL OPINION
CONNOLLY, Judge
Appellant challenges on direct appeal his conviction for driving after revocation,
arguing that the district court erred in denying appellant’s motion to suppress his confession
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made after a Miranda warning because he had made a prior confession before the warning.
Because we see no error, we affirm.
FACTS
About 11:00 a.m. on February 28, 2023, Officer A.S. in a squad car saw a gold car
fail to stop at a stop sign. The driver appeared to be a woman wearing a headscarf. A.S.
turned on the squad car’s flashing lights and pursued the car, which pulled into a driveway.
When A.S. arrived, the gold car was empty. A.S. radioed that the driver had run away and
walked around the house, looking for the driver.
When A.S. returned to the squad car, appellant Alton Finch was standing next to it.
A.S. asked appellant who owned the gold car, and appellant said he did. When A.S. asked
if appellant had been driving the car, appellant answered, “No, [the] dude just ran that way”
and pointed away from the house. Appellant told A.S. that he had been a passenger in the
gold car and that an African -American man wearing black pants had been the driver .
Appellant produced a Wisconsin ID and told A.S. the driver’s first name was Brandon and
appellant did not know his last name. Appellant seemed out of breath and hit himself in
the head. He also told A.S. that he owned the house to which the driveway led. A.S. again
asked appellant who owned the gold car, and appellant said he had just bought it.
A.S. thought appellant actually was the driver and that, because he had already fled
once, he was likely to flee again. He therefore put appellant in handcuffs and told appellant
he was detaining him, not arresting him. A sergeant arrived and stayed with appellant
while A.S. entered appellant’s information on the computer and radioed that other officers
could stop the search for the driver. A.S. then questioned appellant further; appellant said
3
he got out of the car and went the same way the driver did. A.S. tol d appellant there was
only one set of tracks in the snow.
A third officer arrived and stayed with appellant while A.S. and the sergeant went
to look at the single set of footprints. The sergeant then asked appellant which door he
used to get out of the car, and appellant said the passenger side. The sergeant said that was
not true. Two other officers arrived and were standing with appellant as A.S. explained
that the only set of footprints was on the driver’s side of the car . Appellant then said, “I
quit. I lied. I’m the driver.” He said he had lied because his license had been revoked, he
was in the process of trying to get it back, and he did not want a ticket.
A.S. arrested appellant, put him in the back of the squad car, and conversed with the
sergeant as they walked around the house. A.S. then got into the squad car and told
appellant they were going to talk a little; after about a minute, A.S. reminded appellant that
he was under arrest and read him his Miranda rights. Appellant said that, in light of those
rights, he wanted to talk.
Appellant then said he did not go through a stop sign, did not see A.S. behind him,
did not see the squad car, and did not run away. He said he had lied about not being the
driver to avoid getting a ticket for driving after revocation. Appellant was charged with
felony fleeing a police officer other than in a motor vehicle and with misdemeanor driving
after revocation.1

1 He was later acquitted of the felony but convicted of the misdemeanor.
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Appellant moved to suppress his statements to A.S. and the sergeant, arguing that
the statements were the result of unlawful detention, were elicited without a Miranda
warning, and were tainted by the illegal detention of appellant. Following an evidentiary
hearing on the motion, the district court filed an order and memorandum. The district court
found that A.S.’s testimony was credible and corroborated by the video o f the incident. It
concluded that: (1) A.S. had a reasonable, articulable suspicion to believe appellant fled by
means other than a motor vehicle; (2) the investigatory detention of appellant was
permitted; (3) the handcuffs were lawful as part of the investigatory detention; (4) the
handcuffs were an excessive restraint once other officers were on the scene to prevent
appellant’s flight, when the detention became a de facto arrest; (5) appellant’s statements
prior to the Miranda warning were inadmissible, and (6) appellant’s statements after the
Miranda warning were admissible.
Appellant’s motion to suppress was thus granted in part and denied in part. On
appeal, appellant argues that it was reversible error to deny his motion to suppress his post-
Miranda statements.
DECISION
The issue of whether a suspect is in custody and therefore
entitled to a Miranda warning presents a mixed question of law
and fact qualifying for independent review. An appellate court
reviews a [district] court’s findings of historical fact relating to
the circumstances of the interrogation pursuant to the clearly
erroneous test but makes an independent review of the [district]
court’s determination regarding custody and the need for a
Miranda warning. We grant considerable, but not unlimited,
deference to a [district] court’s fact-specific resolution of such
an issue when the proper legal standard is applied.

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State v. Stirling, 834 N.W.2d 162, 167-68 (Minn. 2013) (quotations and citations omitted).
The district court here determined that appellant was legitimately detained while only one
officer, A.S., was present and that the handcuffs were a legitimate means of detention
because appellant had already fled once. But once other officers who could prevent
appellant’s flight arrived, the handcuffs became a means of de facto arrest, not merely of
detention.
As the district court explained:
Just after the cuffing, [H.] approached and stood with
[appellant] as [S.] checked [appellant’s] record and found that
he had a revoked license. [S.] then began interrogating
[appellant] about lying, trying to get him to admit that he was
the driver. At this point, two uniformed officers stood in front
of [appellant], who was seated against a squad car in handcuffs,
two squad cars blocked the driveway, and [appellant] had
remained on the scene since he encountered [S.] The concern
for flight had been all eviated and the handcuffs should have
been removed, or Miranda read, before questioning. . . .

. . . .

Because [appellant] was in custody at this time and because
police were interrogating him without having given him a
Miranda warning, his statements in response to this [pre -
Miranda] interrogation must be suppressed.

But the district court went on to conclude that appellant’s “post Miranda statements
were voluntary and not tainted by the unlawful interrogation.” The criteria for
voluntariness of a statement are “the defendant’s age, maturity, intelligence, education,
experience, and ability to comprehend; the length and legality of the detention, and whether
the defendant was deprived of physical needs or denied access to friends.” State v. Ezeka,
946 N.W.2d 393, 404 (Minn. 2020). The district court stated, “[t]he re cord shows that
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[appellant’s] post-Miranda statement was voluntary, and he does not argue otherwise.” On
appeal, appellant does not claim that he lacked any of the criteria set out in Ezeka.
The district court compared this case to Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 318 (1985)
(holding that “a suspect who has once responded to unwarned yet uncoercive questioning
is not thereby disabled from waiving his rights and confessing after he has been given the
requisite Miranda warnings”) and contrasted it with State v. Bailey, 677 N.W.2d 380, 392
(Minn. 2004) (holding that “where a suspect is apprehended under coercive circumstances,
is subjected to lengthy custodial interrogation before being given a Miranda warning, does
not have the benefit of a significant pause in the interrogation after the Miranda warning
is given, and essentially repeats the same inculpatory statements after the Miranda warning
as before, the statements made after the Miranda warning are inadmissible ”). After
concluding that the facts in appellant’s case “are distinguishable from Bailey and much
more like [those in ] Elstad,” the district court admitted appellant’s post -Miranda
statements.
We agree with this conclusion. In Elstad, the defendant, 18, was implicated in the
burglary of a neighbor’s home. Elstad, 470 U.S. at 300. The police went to the defendant’s
home, spoke to his mother, and asked the defendant to join them in the living room after
he got dressed. Id. Then one officer said that he felt the defendant might be involved in
the burglary, and the defendant said, “Yes, I was there.” Id. at 301.
In Bailey, the defendant was suspected of murder.
[His] unwarned [pre -Miranda] statements were made during
interrogation in the detective’s car immediately after he was
arrested at gunpoint, placed against the squad car, patted down
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for weapons, handcuffed, and placed in the back seat. These
facts make it clear that [he] was in “custody” and that the first
interrogation was accompanied by coercion.

Bailey, 677 N.W.2d at 391.
Bailey distinguished Elstad, noting that in Elstad, as here, “it was not clear that
police questioning involved the custodial interrogation necessary to trigger a Miranda
warning.” Id.
“[I]t is an unwarranted extension of Miranda to hold that a
simple failure to administer the warnings unaccompanied by
any actual coercion or other circumstances calculated to
undermine the suspect’s ability to exercise his free will, so
taints the investigatory process that a subsequent voluntary and
informed waiver is ineffective for some indeterminate period.
Though Miranda requires that the unwarned admission must
be suppressed, the admissibility of any subsequent statement
should turn in these circumstances solely on whether it is
knowingly and voluntarily made.”

Id. at 389 (quoting Elstad, 470 U.S. at 309). Elstad rejected the defendant’s contention
that “his confession was tainted by the earlier failure of the police to provide Miranda
warnings and must be excluded as ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’” because “the alleged ‘fruit’
of a noncoercive Miranda violation [was] neither a witness nor an article of evidence but
the accused’s own voluntary testimony.” Id. at 305, 308.
Bailey is also distinguishable here: appellant was suspected of running a stop sign,
not of murder; unlike the two officers in Bailey, A.S. did not pull a gun and arrest appellant,
but handcuffed and detained him after he had fled; appellant was not put into a police car
and driven to a police station while being interrogated; the entire encounter from A.S.’s
meeting appellant to the Miranda warning lasted only 22 minutes; and, as the district court
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observed, “the break of six minutes between placing [appellant] in the squad car and
reading him Miranda rights rendered a distinct change in the pace and tenor of the events
that was absent in Bailey.”
Appellant also relies on Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600, 604 (2004) (holding that
a police protocol for giving no warnings until after an interrogation produced a confession,
then getting the suspect to repeat the confession, made the second confession inadmissible)
which was decided three months after Bailey. But Seibert is also distinguishable. The
suspect in that case was the mother of a 12 -year-old with cerebral palsy who had died in
his sleep; she feared charges of neglect because of the bedsores on the boy’s body. Seibert,
542 U.S. at 604. She and her other sons agreed to set fire to the mobile home containing
the body and a mentally ill teenager, Donald, who lived with the family, so the body’s
condition would not be discovered and the boy would not appear to have been left alone;
Donald died in the fire. Id.
An officer who had been instructed to refrain from giving a Miranda warning went
to the hospital where the woman was with another son who had been burned in the fire and
woke her at three a.m. Id. at 604-05. She was taken to a police station, left alone for 15 to
20 minutes, then questioned for 30 to 40 minutes while the officer squeezed her arm and
repeated, “Donald was also to die in his sleep.” Id. at 605. After the woman admitted this,
she was given a 20 -minute coffee and cigarette break, then the o fficer gave her Miranda
warnings and obtained a signed waiver of rights from her ; she also repeated her statement
on video after being confronted with her confession. Id. She was charged with first-degree
murder. Id. The officer testified that he made a conscious decision to withhold Miranda
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warnings, because he had been taught to question first, then give the warning, then repeat
the question until the suspect repeated the answer that had already been given. Id. at 605-
606. Nothing resembling the interrogation in Seibert happened here.
Based on the circumstances of this case, the district court did not err in concluding
that the post-Miranda statements admitting that appellant was the driver were voluntarily
and in denying appellant’s motion to suppress the post-Miranda statements.
Affirmed.