People v. Potter (Cal. Ct. App. - July 14, 2021)

This is certainly good police work, and at some level, I'm impressed with the talent of the officers here.  They suspected that the defendant had molested his five-year old daughter, and they interrogated him until he (essentially) confessed.  They first got him to admit that he had been molested himself as a child, used that fact to purportedly empathize with his situation, and used his purported love for his daughter and care for her welfare to get him to admit to improper touching (and write a note apologizing).  During all of this, the police made clear that the defendant was "free to leave" if he wanted, and thus didn't advise him of any of his Miranda rights -- which might have made him more suspicious of the officers' claims that they were simply looking out for his welfare and seeking to "understand" why he did what he did and ostensibly put it in the best possible light.

It was a masterful manipulation of someone's psychological state.  Resulting in a confession that likely seems truthful.  Well done.

On the other hand, I couldn't help feeling somewhat bad about the whole thing.  The only reason the guy here confessed was because he was actually torn up inside about what he'd done.  (As well as not at all sophisticated about what the police officers were doing to him.)  There's zero way a person who was truly and completely evil would have fallen for these tricks or confessed.  A person without remorse might well have gotten off entirely; by contrast, the defendant here goes to prison for 15 years to life.

We obviously want child molesters to be punished and incapacitated.  It just feels inequitable that tactics like this enable the worst of the worst to escape, yet convict those who are (at least in part) remorseful for what they've done.

I'll add one doctrinal point about the opinion.  Justice Hoch holds that the interrogation wasn't custodial because (in large part) the officers told defendant that he was free to leave if he wanted.  Now, that's not a bright-line rule, and there are other opinions that hold that interrogations remain custodial (and thus require Miranda warnings) even when officers said the exact same thing.  The facts of Torres -- rendered by the Court of Appeal a couple years ago -- are incredibly to those in the present case.  The Court of Appeal held there that Miranda warnings were required.  Justice Hoch says that the facts of the present case are distinguishable.  But, in truth, they're not.  Maybe Potter (the current opinion) is right, or maybe Torres (the prior opinion by Justice Nares) is right, but they're almost assuredly not both right.  Justice Hoch's attempt to distinguish Potter just doesn't work.  If it was custodial there, it's custodial here, and if it's not custodial here, it shouldn't have been custodial there.

Courts of Appeal are allowed to disagree with each other.  This is one of those cases where I thought the more forthright answer would be to simply admit that horizontal precedent went the other way but say it was wrongly decided, rather than attempt to distinguish the cases.