Booking questions
Washington Supreme Court:
Public records – Plaintiff sex offenders seeking to enjoin county from releasing their records to a public records requester cannot use pseudonyms, or seal the records, unless GR 15 and the Ishikawa factors are satisfied. Here, GR 15 and the Ishikawa factors were not satisfied because plaintiffs’ identities as sex offenders (including those adjudicated as juveniles) was already public information. Although SSODA evaluations are exempt from the PRA, plaintiffs’ identities appear in publicly available lists of sex offenders, which the requester compiled using public records. Therefore, plaintiffs did not have a legitimate privacy interest. Does v. Thurston County, No. 102976-4 (June 12, 2025).
Division III:
Booking questions – Answers to booking questions, asked after an invocation of the right to remain silent, are inadmissible if the officer who asked the question was aware that the response might be probative of the Defendant’s guilt. State v. Butler, No. 40152-9-III (June 10, 2025).
Foreign case of interest:
Miranda – A suspect who voluntarily sits in the passenger seat of an unlocked, unmarked police vehicle parked at his home and submits to questioning by two armed, (mostly) plainclothes officers for 41 minutes was not in such a “police-dominated” atmosphere to be “custodial and require Miranda warnings, even though he was never told he was free to go or whether he was under arrest for not. United States v. Nahkai, No. 24-4058 (10th Cir. June 3, 2025).
(Editor’s note: It would have been best practice to advise the suspect that the door was unlocked and he was free to leave.)