High court rejects conviction appeal
Toolbox
By PATRICK McARDLE STAFF WRITER - Published: November 27, 2009
The Vermont Supreme Court rejected a request from a convicted arsonist and sex offender that would have allowed him to challenge some of his convictions from 2007 because the state's highest court found he was not in police custody when he confessed to setting fires in Rutland.
James Oney, 38, was sentenced to serve 30 months to six years in jail after pleading no contest in 2007 to four felony counts of arson for fires set in April, May, June and July 2006 and two misdemeanor counts of attempted arson for incidents in July 2006.
However, Oney has contended since before he entered into a plea agreement that his rights were violated. Oney said when police questioned him on July 26, 2006, they continued to speak to him after he asked for a lawyer and failed to inform him of his rights, commonly known as Miranda rights.
Oney's appeal on the issue was denied by a Rutland District Court judge in 2007 and again on Wednesday in a decision issued by the Vermont Supreme Court with Justice Denise Johnson dissenting.
Writing for the majority, Justice John Dooley said the "key" to the case was whether Oney was in custody at the time of his confession.
Police said they had made it clear to Oney that he was not in custody and could leave at any time when he was being questioned on July 26, 2006, but Oney claimed he believed he was in custody from about 11:30 p.m. because a police officer told him that he wanted to talk to Oney "for a little while longer."
The Rutland District Court found that Oney had gone with police voluntarily that night to be questioned and "the police could not have made it any clearer to him that he was there voluntarily," according to Dooley.
However, Oney said, he believed that the circumstances had changed because he had confessed to three crimes.
Dooley said that shouldn't have made Oney believe he couldn't leave because the crimes were, or appeared at the time to be, relatively minor.
"In this case, of the three crimes defendant initially admitted to, two were misdemeanors. While the third resulted in a felony charge, at the time of the interview, one sergeant told defendant that he believed any charge resulting from his confession would be a misdemeanor," Dooley said.
The Vermont Supreme Court found that the officer's statement about speaking to Oney longer "merely expressed the officer's request and did not negate all the other police statements that (Oney) was free to leave at any time."
As long as Oney was not in custody, police were not obligated to inform him of his Miranda rights or halt questioning when he asked for an attorney.
In her dissent, Johnson said "totality of the circumstances" led her to the "overwhelming" conclusion that Oney was in custody since 11:26 p.m. on July 26, 2006.
She cited his trip to the police station in a police cruiser "late at night" and questioning in a small, windowless room behind closed doors.
"Under this kind of accusatory and aggressive questioning, a reasonable person in (Oney's) position would not have felt able to interrupt the questioning and leave the interview. Instead, the use of such tactics compounded the coercive nature of the encounter such that (Oney's) only apparent recourse was to attempt to defend himself by denying wrongdoing," Johnson said.
Johnson said the Rutland District Court and her colleagues had implied a person was only in custody "when he explicitly asks to leave and is told in no uncertain terms that he cannot."
"This narrow definition of custody is contrary to Vermont and federal case law as well as the fundamental notions of justice on which Miranda is premised," she said.
The Vermont Supreme Court decision comes after Oney is already scheduled to be released from his current prison sentence.
Oney's situation has caused some controversy, however, because due to a 1991 conviction for lewd and lascivious conduct with a child, the Vermont Department of Corrections had denied his release twice since January. Oney had proposed two places where he could live, one in Rutland and one in Bennington, but both were found to be too close to where children congregate. The Bennington address was denied by the state and the Rutland address because of a city ordinance.
patrick.mcardle@rutlandherald.com
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