Kuhlmann v. Wilson

In Kuhlmann v. Wilson, 477 U.S. 436, 91 L. Ed. 2d 364, 106 S. Ct. 2616 (1986) an inmate entered into an arrangement with a police detective to become an informant and report statements made by the defendant. The Court's opinion does not reveal the nature of this arrangement. The inmate was placed in the cell with the defendant for the purpose of learning the identity of the defendant's accomplices. The inmate was instructed not to ask questions but to "keep his ears open" for the names of other perpetrators. The inmate-informant followed these instructions, and in the course of time, the defendant made incriminating admissions. The Supreme Court implicitly assumed that the inmate was a government agent but found no constitutional violation because the inmate did nothing to elicit the defendant's incriminating statements. The Supreme Court found that no Sixth Amendment violation occurred because government agents did not take any action that would have constituted "the functional equivalent of interrogation": As our recent examination of this Sixth Amendment issue in Moulton makes clear, the primary concern of the Massiah line of decisions is secret interrogation by investigatory techniques that are the equivalent of direct police interrogation. Since "the Sixth Amendment is not violated whenever - by luck or happenstance - the State obtains incriminating statements from the accused after the right to counsel has attached," citation omitted, a defendant does not make out a violation of that right simply by showing that an informant, either through prior arrangement or voluntarily, reported his incriminating statements to the police. Rather, the defendant must demonstrate that the police and their informant took some action, beyond merely listening, that was designed deliberately to elicit incriminating remarks. Id. at 459. In Kuhlmann, the government agent was the inmate informant, who simply listened to what the defendant had to say.