Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004), concerned "a police protocol for custodial interrogation that called for giving no warnings of the rights to silence and counsel until interrogation had produced a confession." (Id. at p. 604.) There, the police woke the defendant in the middle of the night at the hospital where her son was being treated. (Ibid.) The arresting officer followed instructions not to give the defendant Miranda warnings. (Ibid.) After arrival at the police station the officer questioned the defendant for 30 to 40 minutes without Miranda warnings. (Id. at pp. 604-605.) The officer gave the defendant Miranda warnings only after she had confessed to the crime. (Id. at p. 605.) The officer then activated a tape recorder, obtained a Miranda waiver, and confronted the defendant with her prewarning statements. (Ibid.) The United States Supreme Court concluded this "question-first tactic effectively threatens to thwart Miranda's purpose of reducing the risk that a coerced confession would be admitted . . . ." (Id. at p. 617.) The defendant was arrested and transported to a police station, where she was questioned by an officer for 30 to 40 minutes without being advised of her Miranda rights. Seibert, 542 U.S. at 604-605. The officer later testified that he made a "conscious decision" to withhold Miranda warnings and used the "question-first" interrogation technique he had been taught. Id. at 605-606. An officer utilizing the question-first technique would "question first, then give the warnings, and then repeat the question 'until the officer gets the answer that the suspect already provided once.'" Id. at 606. During the interrogation, the officer squeezed the defendant's arm and repeated statements suggesting the defendant's involvement in the crime. Id. at 604-605. After the defendant made incriminating statements, she was allowed to take a 20-minute break to smoke and drink coffee. Id. at 605. The officer then issued Miranda warnings to the defendant, obtained a signed waiver from her, and resumed questioning of the defendant, which he now recorded. Id. During this warned second phase of questioning, the officer mentioned that they had been talking about the incident and then confronted the defendant with her previous unwarned statements. Id. The officer "acknowledged that the defendant's ultimate statement was 'largely a repeat of information . . . obtained' prior to the warning." Id. at 606. The police woke the defendant up at 3:00 a.m., arrested her for murder, and took her to the police station for questioning. The police intentionally withheld the Miranda warnings and questioned the defendant for 30 to 40 minutes, until she confessed. Then they gave her Miranda warnings and continued the interrogation, confronted her with her pre-Miranda statements, and essentially repeated the same questions until she confessed again. (Seibert, at pp. 604-606.) The Supreme Court found that the police used a "strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings." (Id. at p. 616.) The Court noted, "The unwarned interrogation was conducted in the station house, and the questioning was systematic, exhaustive, and managed with psychological skill." (Ibid.) Furthermore, the same officer who conducted the first unwarned interview conducted the latter interview, and "said nothing to counter the probable misimpression that the advice that anything the defendant said could be used against her also applied to the details of the inculpatory statement previously elicited." (Ibid.) Moreover, "the impression that the further questioning was a mere continuation of the earlier questions and responses was fostered by references back to the confession already given." (Ibid.) The Court concluded that these circumstances challenged "the comprehensibility and efficacy of the Miranda warnings to the point that a reasonable person in the suspect's shoes would not have understood them to convey a message that she retained a choice about continuing to talk." (Id. at p. 617.) The defendant was awakened and arrested around 3:00 a.m., taken to the police station, and left alone in an interview room for 15 to 20 minutes. (Seibert, supra, 542 U.S. at p. 604.) An officer then questioned the defendant for 30 to 40 minutes without advising her of her Miranda rights, and obtained her confession to a murder. (Seibert, supra, at pp. 604-605.) After giving the defendant a 20-minute break, the interrogating officer returned to the same room where he had been interrogating the defendant, Mirandized her, and obtained a signed waiver of her Miranda rights. The officer then obtained the same confession from the defendant, in part by reminding her of her earlier confession. (Seibert, supra, at p. 605.) In a pretrial hearing to exclude the defendant's pre- and post-Miranda confessions, the interrogating officer admitted he made a "conscious decision" to withhold Miranda warnings until after the defendant confessed. (Seibert, supra, at pp. 605-606.) This was part of an interrogation technique the officer had been taught: "Question first, then give the warnings, and then repeat the question 'until I get the answer that she's already provided once.'" (Id. at p. 606.) The United States Supreme Court in a plurality opinion denounced the question-first technique used by the officer, stating that "by any objective measure, applied to circumstances exemplified here, it is likely that if the interrogators employ the technique of withholding warnings until after the interrogation succeeds in eliciting a confession, the warnings will be ineffective in preparing the suspect for successive interrogation, close in time and similar in content." Id. at 613. "Thus, when Miranda warnings are inserted in the midst of coordinated and continuing interrogation, they are likely to mislead and 'deprive a defendant of knowledge essential to his ability to understand the nature of his rights and the consequences of abandoning them.'" Id. at 613-614. The Court stated that "the threshold issue when interrogators question first and warn later is thus whether it would be reasonable to find that in these circumstances the warnings could function 'effectively' as Miranda requires." Id. at 611-612. The Court then considered five factors to be used in examining the effectiveness of Miranda warnings administered when suspects are so questioned first. The Court specifically considered: the completeness and detail of the questions and answers in the first round of interrogation; the overlapping content of the two statements; the timing and setting of the first and the second rounds of interrogation; the continuity of police personnel; the degree to which the interrogator's questions treated the second round as continuous with the first. Id. at 615. Viewing the facts in light of these five factors, the Court noted that "the warned phase of questioning proceeded after a pause of only 15 to 20 minutes, in the same place as the unwarned segment" and "the police did not advise the defendant that her prior statement could not be used." Id. at 616. The Court found that "when the police were finished there was little, if anything, of incriminating potential left unsaid." Id. The Court also found that "the impression that the further questioning was a mere continuation of the earlier questions and responses was fostered by references back to the confession already given," and concluded that "it would have been reasonable to regard the two sessions as parts of a continuum, in which it would have been unnatural to refuse to repeat at the second stage what had been said before." Id. at 616-617. The Court then held that the defendant's post-warning statements were inadmissible after concluding that "these circumstances must be seen as challenging the comprehensibility and efficacy of the Miranda warnings to the point that a reasonable person in the suspect's shoes would not have understood them to convey a message that she retained a choice about continuing to talk." Id. at 617. In a plurality opinion authored by Justice Souter and joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Bryer, the plurality identified the following as the relevant inquiry: "The threshold issue when interrogators question first and warn later is thus whether it would be reasonable to find that in these circumstances the warnings could function 'effectively' as Miranda requires. Could the warnings effectively advise the suspect that he had a real choice about giving an admissible statement at that juncture? Could they reasonably convey that he could choose to stop talking even if he had talked earlier? For unless the warnings could place a suspect who has just been interrogated in a position to make such an informed choice, there is no practical justification for accepting the formal warnings as compliance with Miranda, or for treating the second stage of interrogation as distinct from the first, unwarned and inadmissible segment." (Seibert, supra, 542 U.S. at pp. 611-612, ) In Missouri v. Seibert, the defendant was taken from her son's hospital room at 3 a.m. and brought to the police station for questioning concerning a fire that had occurred in her mobile home. She was questioned for 30-40 minutes without Miranda warnings and made incriminating statements. She was then given a 15-20 minute break. After the break, the officer turned on the tape recorder, read her the Miranda warnings and asked questions about her prior confession. The officer who obtained the confession testified at the suppression hearing that he used an interrogation technique he had been taught: question first, warn later and repeat the questions until he gets the answer he had obtained prior to warning the suspect. The Supreme Court found both statements were inadmissible because they were parts of a single, unwarned sequence of questioning. Id. at 612. The object of question-first is to render Miranda warnings ineffective by waiting for a particularly opportune time to give them, after the suspect has already confessed. Id. at 611. In Missouri v. Seibert, the Court assessed the constitutional propriety of a police protocol--the "question first" technique--whereby the authorities conducting custodial interrogation would intentionally withhold Miranda warnings until they extracted an incriminating statement from the suspect. There, defendant--later convicted of murder for the arson-related death of a teenage charge--was arrested and brought to the police station where she was questioned without Miranda warnings until she admitted that she knew the victim was to die in the fire. At the suppression hearing, the interrogating officer testified that, although defendant had been formally arrested, he intentionally withheld Miranda warnings, employing the "question first" protocol. After defendant made the incriminating statements, he administered Miranda warnings, obtained a waiver of rights, and resumed the interrogation, convincing defendant to repeat the prior statements. A majority of the Court found that the "question first" practice was an impermissible end run around the Miranda rule, necessitating suppression of the Mirandized statement unless the People could show, notwithstanding the police misconduct, that the Miranda warnings were effective. Employing a multifactored test, the Seibert plurality concluded that the Mirandized statement was inadmissible because "the unwarned interrogation was conducted in the station house, . . . the questioning was systematic, exhaustive, and managed with psychological skill" and "the warned phase of questioning proceeded after a pause of only 15 to 20 minutes, in the same place as the unwarned segment" (542 U.S. at 616). The plurality reasoned that, under these circumstances, "it would have been reasonable to regard the two sessions as parts of a continuum" (542 U.S. at 616-617). The U.S. Supreme Court examined the propriety of a police protocol whereby officers were instructed not to give Miranda warnings until their interrogation produced a confession that, although admittedly inadmissible, was then used to coerce "the suspect to cover the same ground a second time" after Miranda warnings were given. 542 U.S. at 604. A plurality of the Supreme Court held: "The impression that the further questioning was a mere continuation of the earlier questions and responses" creates a coercive environment, depriving a reasonable person of a true sense of choice to remain silent. Id. at 616-17. Therefore, post-warning statements obtained in such a fashion are inadmissible. Id. In Seibert, the court held that "the midstream recitation of Miranda warnings after interrogation and unwarned confession could not effectively comply with Miranda's constitutional requirement," and therefore, "a statement repeated after a warning in such circumstances is inadmissible." 542 U.S. at 604. The court held that "unless the warnings could place a suspect who has just been interrogated in a position to make an informed choice to stop talking, there is no practical justification for accepting the formal warnings as compliance with Miranda, or for treating the second stage of interrogation as distinct from the first, unwarned and inadmissible segment." Id. at 612. The court further reasoned that, "upon hearing warnings only in the aftermath of interrogation and just after making a confession, a suspect would hardly think he had a genuine right to remain silent, let alone persist in so believing once the police began to lead him over the same ground again. A more likely reaction on a suspect's part would be perplexity about the reason for discussing rights at that point, bewilderment being an unpromising frame of mind for knowledgeable decision." Id. at 613. In Missouri v. Seibert, the plurality concluded that whenever a two-step interrogation occurs, admissibility of the post-Miranda statements should depend on whether the Miranda warnings were effective "to accomplish their object." Seibert, 542 U.S. at 622-23 (Breyer, J., concurring). Justice Breyer, concurred with three of the other justices, concluding that his opinion of the three other justices could and should be read as providing that courts should exclude the post-Miranda statements in a two-stage interrogation as "'fruits' of the initial unwarned questioning unless the failure to warn was in good faith." Id. at 617-18 (Breyer, J., concurring). In contrast, Justice Kennedy, the fifth justice, concurred in the judgment, contending that the Elstad test would not apply if the two-stage interrogation was used deliberately to circumvent Miranda. Id. at 622 (Kennedy, J., concurring). A "two-stage" custodial interrogation occurs as follows. In the first stage, police interrogate a person in custody without having given the person his Miranda warnings and the person has made statements in response to that questioning. Then, in the second stage, the police give the person his Miranda warnings, the person waives his right to remain silent and the person repeats his prior statements in response to the police repeating the questions or lines of questions asked prior to the Miranda warnings being given. Seibert, 542 U.S. at 604. In Seibert, the Supreme Court in a plurality decision held that courts should review two-step interrogation cases by first determining whether the police deliberately withheld the Miranda warnings. Seibert, 542 U.S. at 622. The Court explained: Postwarning statements that are related to the substance of prewarning statements must be excluded unless curative measures are taken before the postwarning statement is made. Curative measures should be designed to ensure that a reasonable person in the suspect's situation would understand the import and effect of the Miranda warning and of the Miranda waiver. Seibert, 542 U.S. at 622. The Court gave two examples of curative measures: (1) a substantial break in time and circumstances between the pre-Miranda and post-Miranda statements or; (2) an additional statement by the police informing the defendant that the pre-Miranda statements are likely inadmissible. Id. An "unwarned interrogation was conducted in the station house, and the questioning was systematic, exhaustive, and managed with psychological skill." (Id. at p. 616.) Only after the appellant confessed did the police give her Miranda warnings and continue the interrogation, confronting her with the confession until she confessed again. (Id. at pp. 604-606.) Seibert held that the police used a "strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings" and that, under those circumstances, "a reasonable person in the suspect's shoes would not have understood the Miranda warnings to convey a message that she retained a choice about continuing to talk." (Id. at pp. 616-617.) The Supreme Court found that the police used a "strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings." (Siebert, at p. 616.) The Court noted, "The unwarned interrogation was conducted in the station house, and the questioning was systematic, exhaustive, and managed with psychological skill." (Ibid.) Furthermore, the same officer who conducted the first unwarned interview conducted the latter interview, and "said nothing to counter the probable misimpression that the advice that anything [the defendant] said could be used against her also applied to the details of the inculpatory statement previously elicited." (Ibid.) Moreover, "[t]he impression that the further questioning was a mere continuation of the earlier questions and responses was fostered by references back to the confession already given." (Ibid.) The Court concluded that these circumstances challenged "the comprehensibility and efficacy of the Miranda warnings to the point that a reasonable person in the suspect's shoes would not have understood them to convey a message that she retained a choice about continuing to talk." (Seibert, at p. 617.)