The New Jersey Appellate Division revisited the need for law enforcement to inform a criminal suspect of the charges he might be facing prior to any interrogation. Here, officers had compelling evidence for the charge of strict liability for drug-induced death when they arrested the defendant outside his apartment. Police questioned him first during the arrest and then again at the station house. Initially, the trial court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress both statements. But after the defendant filed a motion to reconsider in light of State v. Sims, the trial court ordered that the second statement be suppressed. The Appellate Division affirmed the suppression of that statement because the detectives withheld until after the interrogation was completed the fact that someone had died following the defendant’s act of distributing heroin. The Court ruled that the detectives in this case affirmatively misled the defendant as to his true status by providing a deliberately vague and incomplete answer to his question as to the reason why he was taken into custody. The Court stated, “It is one thing for police to withhold information. It is another thing entirely for them to provide an explanation that creates or reinforces a false impression as to the seriousness of the sentence that a defendant is facing.”
