A Hamilton County suspect’s rights under the Ohio and U.S. constitutions were not violated when, after he was appointed a lawyer, he met with police, signed a written waiver to speak with them, and confessed to several crimes, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled today.

In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court found the Hamilton County Common Pleas Court wrongly suppressed the evidence obtained from Isiah Morris regarding his involvement in an April 2022 shooting. The decision reversed a First District Court of Appeals affirming the trial court’s decision that held the Ohio Constitution prevented Morris from being interviewed without a lawyer present.

A decision by the U. S. Supreme Court, Montejo v. Louisiana (2009) had held that a waiver of the right to counsel by a suspect during a police interrogation was sufficient to waive the Sixth Amendment right to counsel at that interview. In upholding the motion to suppress, the First District found that the Ohio Constitution did not allow for such a waiver and required the entire police interview be suppressed.

Writing for the Court majority, Justice R. Patrick DeWine explained that Ohio’s constitutional provision providing for the right to a lawyer “in any trial, in any court,” does not apply to a police interrogation that took place before Morris was formally charged with any crime.

“When Ohioans adopted Article 1, Section 10 in the 1851 Constitution, a competent speaker of the English language would not have understood ‘trial’ to include a preindictment police interrogation. We therefore hold that the right to counsel in that provision did not attach before or during the investigatory interview in this case,” he wrote.

The Court also analyzed the trial court’s ruling that after 40 minutes into the interview, Morris reinvoked his Sixth Amendment right under the U.S. Constitution when he asked detectives, “Like, I can’t talk to a lawyer?” The majority found the statement and subsequent comments by Morris did not meet the standard of making an “unambiguous” and “unequivocal” request to speak to a lawyer.

Justices Joseph T. Deters, Daniel R. Hawkins, and Megan E. Shanahan joined Justice DeWine’s opinion.

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy agreed that the Ohio Constitution did not require Morris’s statements to be suppressed. However, the Supreme Court should not have ruled on whether his Sixth Amendment rights were violated, she stated.

Chief Justice Kennedy wrote that the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office raised four issues when it contested the trial court’s decision to suppress the confession. The First District upheld the suppression of evidence based on the Ohio Constitution and did not address the prosecutor’s argument that Morris’s Sixth Amendment rights were not violated. According to the dissent, the Supreme Court should have remanded the issue to the First District rather than rule that Morris’s rights under the Sixth Amendment were not violated.

Since the Court chose to decide the Sixth Amendment question, she argued that Morris did invoke his right to counsel in two statements he made to detectives.

“Morris asked, ‘Like I can’t talk to a lawyer?’ That by itself was sufficient to invoke the right to counsel,” she wrote. And when a detective told him that anyone could speak to an attorney, Morris again invoked his right to counsel when he responded, “[Y]eah, cause that’s, we goin’ to do that cause I don’t know what you are talking about.” 

Justice Jennifer Brunner joined part of Chief Justice Kennedy’s dissent. Ninth District Court of Appeals Judge Jill Flagg Lanzinger, sitting for Justice Patrick F. Fischer, joined the chief justice’s dissent.

Voluntary Interview Takes Contentious Turn
Morris was arrested for his involvement in several shootings. After his arrest, he made an initial appearance in municipal court. He was charged with several gun-related offenses. The court informed him of the charges against him, appointed a lawyer, and set his bail.

The same day, Morris joined Cincinnati Police Detective Brett Gleckler and another detective in an interview room at the Hamilton County jail. Morris had not yet been indicted or arraigned on any charge, and the interrogation was captured on Gleckler’s body camera.

Gleckler began the interview by making sure Morris understood his Miranda rights, which Morris said he did. Gleckler then made Morris read a police department notification form that restated the Miranda warnings, including his right to remain silent, his right to speak with a lawyer for advice or to have a lawyer with him, and the right to stop answering questions at any time. Morris signed the form.

The interrogation proceeded for nearly two hours. For the first 40 minutes, Morris answered questions about an April 2022 shooting. Police showed Morris security camera photos of him fleeing the crime scene and said they had his DNA on the gun recovered from the scene. Morris confessed to the shooting and confirmed the gun was his and that he “took it from somebody.”

Detectives told Morris his gun had “been busy,” and Morris responded that he obtained the gun in April. Police began to focus on a February 2022 shooting. Morris then vehemently denied any involvement and again asserted he only obtained the gun in April. The detectives continued to press Morris, telling him his DNA was on the gun, and a video showed the February shooter walked like Morris and wore similar clothes.

“It sounds like y’all are trying to put something else on me that I don’t got nothing to do with,” Morris insisted.

Then the following 10-second exchange occurred. Morris asked, “Like, I can’t talk to a lawyer?” Gleckler responded, “Anybody can talk to a lawyer.” After a pause, Gleckler repeated, “Anybody can talk to a lawyer.”

Morris shook his head and stated, “[Yeah] cause that’s – we goin’ to do that because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The interrogation continued for another hour and 14 minutes, and Morris never again mentioned a lawyer. He continued to insist he was not involved in the February shooting but did confess to stealing a man’s phone after trying to sell him marijuana.

After his confession, Morris was indicted on 14 counts, with many related to the April shooting and the phone theft, but none related to the February shooting.

Suspect Seeks to Suppress Statements
Morris asked the common pleas court to suppress all statements he made during the interrogation, arguing his right to a lawyer under the Ohio and U.S. constitutions was violated. The trial court agreed and made his confession inadmissible at his trial.

The prosecutor appealed to the First District. In a 2-1 decision, the appeals court ruled that, under Article 1, Section 10 of the Ohio Constitution, the police could not initiate an interview with Morris without his lawyer being present, and so the statements from the interview were properly suppressed.

The prosecutor appealed to the Supreme Court, raising three issues. The prosecutor argued that the Ohio Constitution did not bar the interview, that Morris waived his right to an attorney at the beginning of the interview, and that he did not clearly invoke his federal rights to an attorney 40 minutes into the interview.

Supreme Court Analyzed Constitutional Rights
Justice DeWine explained that both the Sixth Amendment and the Ohio Constitution guarantee a criminal defendant the right to a lawyer, but differ in the timing of when that right begins. The Sixth Amendment states that the right to counsel attaches “[i]n all criminal prosecutions.”

In its Montejo decision, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the right to a lawyer’s presence at all “critical” stages of a prosecution, and that it attaches “once the adversary judicial process has been initiated.” Once Morris appeared before a judicial officer, who informed him of the formal accusation against him and imposed restrictions on his liberty, he had a right to have an attorney’s assistance, the Court stated.  But under Montejo, Morris validly waived that right to counsel when he participated in the interview after being informed of his right to counsel, the opinion stated.

The Court explained that the Ohio Constitution is interpreted based upon the original public meaning of its language. The original public meaning is the meaning that a competent speaker of the English language would have ascribed to its content at the time a provision was adopted, the Court noted.

The Ohio Constitution guarantees a right to counsel “in any trial, in any court,” the opinion stated. The Court found that the definition of “trial” in 1851 was the same as it had been since the 1700s. Dictionary definitions from the time indicate “a trial requires the presentation of evidence to a neutral decisionmaker.”

The detectives’ interrogation of Morris was not a trial. The detectives were not presenting evidence, but rather were acquiring evidence from Morris, the opinion stated. And it was not occurring before a neutral decisionmaker or anyone examining the facts of the case.

“Thus, a voter who approved the 1851 Constitution would not have understood Article I, Section 10 right to counsel to apply to the police interrogation in this case,” the opinion stated.

Court Examined Whether Rights to Lawyer Were Requested
The Court examined Morris’s statements to determine whether he reinvoked his rights mid-way through the interview. Even though a defendant has waived his rights, he may reinvoke his rights by asking for an attorney during a police interrogation, the Court explained. But under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1994 Davis v. United States decision, a suspect must make an unambiguous and unequivocal request for counsel, the opinion noted.

“The question is whether a reasonable police officer would have clearly understood a suspect’s statements to be a request for counsel,” the Court stated.

The majority opinion stated there were some questions as to what Morris said after he asked if he could talk to a lawyer. The opinion indicated the camera footage revealed that Morris said “Yeah cuz that’s – you know we ain’t goin’ do that cuz I don’t know what you talkin’ ‘bout.” The lower courts did not include the word “ain’t” in their findings of what Morris said, but even if the trial court was correct and Morris did not say “ain’t,” his response was ambiguous and equivocal, the Court stated. It was not clear if Morris was referring to talking to his lawyer or stating that he was continuing to insist the police were trying to pin a shooting on him that he had nothing to do with, the opinion noted. Also, it was not clear if Morris meant he wanted to speak with a lawyer at that time, or whether he was going to speak to his lawyer in the future about the police accusations, the opinion explained.

In the full context of a two-hour interview, the brief exchange was not enough for a reasonable officer to understand Morris was making a request for a lawyer at that moment, the Court concluded.

In reaching this conclusion, the majority responded to the dissent’s claim it lacked jurisdiction to address the question of whether Morris invoked his right to a lawyer under the Sixth Amendment.  The majority noted that the dissenting justice was among the four members of the Court who voted to accept jurisdiction for the Court to decide that issue. The majority further explained that “the jurisdictional provisions relied on by the dissent refer to jurisdiction over orders and judgments (that is, cases), not individual issues” and because the issue was decided by the trial court and appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, the Sixth Amendment question was properly before the Supreme Court. The majority also discussed prior Supreme Court cases, indicating it has been longstanding practice that the Court may properly decide such issues.

The Court instructed the trial court to vacate its order suppressing the evidence and to conduct further proceedings.

Appeals Court Must Address Issue First, Dissent Maintained
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Kennedy detailed the history of the adoption of the 1851 Ohio Constitution and subsequent reforms to the judiciary approved by Ohio voters. The Supreme Court became the state’s court of last resort in 1851, and since then, it has had only limited authority to review alleged errors by trial courts. The courts of appeals are granted the power to rule on assignments of errors challenging the judgments and final orders of trial courts, she wrote.

The First District in this case affirmed the suppression of Morris’s statements solely on state-law grounds without addressing the prosecutor’s claim that detectives did not violate Morris’s rights under the Sixth Amendment. The dissent concluded that the Supreme Court is violating the state constitution by reviewing a trial court’s decision directly, as the majority does today, without the issue first being addressed by the First District.

The chief justice also wrote that the majority created “an alleged issue of fact” by claiming that Morris said “ain’t” when neither the parties to the case nor the lower courts believed that Morris used that word. “(I)f it were true that the majority is relying solely on the trial court’s determination of what Morris said, then why does the majority go out of its way to express disagreement with what the trial court actually found?”

The dissent pointed out that it made no sense for Morris to ask whether he could talk to an attorney, and then, in his next sentence, say he did not want to talk to his lawyer. Morris had just calmly confessed to other crimes before vehemently denying any involvement in the February shooting, the dissent noted.

“After speaking with Morris for 45 minutes, becoming accustomed to the way he talked, and observing the dramatic change in Morris’s demeanor when accused of the February shooting, a reasonable police officer knowing the full context of Morris’s interview would have known he wanted to speak with a lawyer,” the chief justice wrote.

Although the chief justice believed that the Court should not consider the Sixth Amendment issue in the first instance, her dissent stated that Morris invoked his Sixth Amendment rights, so that anything he said after he asked for a lawyer should be suppressed.

2023-1614. State v. Morris, Slip Opinion No. 2026-Ohio-1519.

View oral argument video of this case.

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