A New Jersey appeals court vacated the convictions of a Passaic man charged with murder in a fatal drive-by shooting that occurred months before his 18th birthday, finding a cumulation of errors during a police interrogation tainted his trial.
The three-judge panel ordered a new trial for Christopher Reynoso, ruling that infrequent translations limiting his Spanish-speaking mother’s role in the interrogation and police’s failure to provide Reynoso and his mother an opportunity to confer about his Miranda rights required the court to toss his convictions.
The panel also criticized police for implying to Reynoso during his interrogation that if he asked to speak to an attorney, he might be charged and detained.
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“When the circumstances militating against the State are viewed together, we are led to conclude that the prosecution did not meet its burden of proving that defendant’s waiver of rights and ensuing statement were given voluntarily under New Jersey law,” Judge Ronald Susswein wrote for the panel.
Reynoso was convicted in 2022 of murder, attempted murder, and other charges related to a 2017 drive-by shooting. During a 2017 interrogation, Reynoso inadvertently provided inculpatory evidence by describing the clothing he was wearing, including a description of pants that police said matched those seen in video footage related to the shooting, Friday’s ruling says.
The pants were significant because police had little other evidence to identify the shooter, and his involuntary admission implicated Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
At the outset of the interrogation, police erred by saying that they had not yet decided to detain Reynoso and suggesting that decision may have depended on whether he stopped their questioning to consult with an attorney, the ruling says.
Though the remark was not, by itself, enough to immediately suppress the interrogation, it undermined Reynoso’s Miranda rights and counted against authorities in the court’s calculus, according to the ruling.
“Suggesting negative consequences — immediate incarceration — for invoking a constitutional right is a quintessential example of burdening that right,” the judges ruled, adding Reynoso’s immediate response made clear he took the detective’s statement as a promise of consequence.
The opposite suggestion — that authorities may have been lenient if Reynoso did not seek legal counsel — would also have been improper, the court said.
The interrogation also ran afoul of New Jersey Supreme Court precedent that requires authorities to give juveniles a meaningful opportunity to consult with their parent about their rights after they are given a Miranda warning.
The state argued a private consultation was unnecessary because Reynoso was aware of and understood his rights without discussing them with his mother, but the judges said that wasn’t a decision police could make.
“It is not for police to decide that a private post-warning consultation is unnecessary based on their assumption that a juvenile interrogee understands their rights,” Susswein wrote for the court.
The Supreme Court’s ruling came years after the shooting and interrogation, but prosecutors did not challenge its application to Reynoso’s case. His first trial was upended by the pandemic and ended in a mistrial, and he was not convicted until he was retried in 2022.
Reynoso’s mother did not speak proficient English, and a lack of regular translations limited her ability to buffer her son, then a minor, against police interrogation tactics, the court found.
Rather than translating the interrogation in real time, police instead provided occasional and irregular summaries of the conversation. That was a problem, Friday’s ruling says, because it allowed officers to edit or redact the conversation’s substance.
“With constitutional rights at stake, a parent is entitled to more than a Cliff Notes abstract of the interrogation dialog,” the judges said.
The periodic translations also prevented Reynoso’s mother from responding to specific questions posed to her son or to discrete answers he gave.
Though the court stopped short of suggesting simultaneous translations were needed to pass constitutional muster, it said more regular, contemporaneous translations would have assuaged problems created by the language barrier.
Still, the mother’s participation in the interrogation — that included urging her son not to cover for friends and backing his request that police obtain footage from area surveillance cameras — offset those issues somewhat, but not totally, the court ruled.
The investigation’s apparent faults included a conversation between Reynoso and his mother, which, unbeknownst to the two, was recorded and later played for the jury, the judges said.
The court said the recording appeared to violate New Jersey’s wiretapping laws, but did not rule on the matter because Reynoso did not claim the eavesdropping tainted his interrogation on appeal.
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