Oregon v. Savinskiy

While defendant Yevgeniy Savinskiy was incarcerated and awaiting trial on pending criminal charges, law enforcement officers learned he solicited another inmate to harm the prosecutor and murder two of the anticipated witnesses for the prosecution. Without notifying the lawyer who was representing defendant on the pending charges, the officers arranged for the other inmate to secretly record defendant in a conversation about his new criminal activity, and the State later charged defendant with multiple new offenses arising out of that new criminal activity. The Court of Appeals held that the recorded questioning violated defendant’s Article I, section 11, right to counsel “[i] n all criminal prosecutions,” and precluded the State from using defendant’s incriminating statements to convict him of the new offenses. The Oregon Supreme Court disagreed: defendant’s Article I, section 11, right to counsel, which arose because of the initially pending charges, was not a right to limited police scrutiny of new criminal activity in which defendant was engaging to illegally undermine the pending charges. View "Oregon v. Savinskiy" on Justia Law