United States v. Allen Wauneka

This is the second appeal in this prosecution for crimes committed on an Indian reservation. The Government brought the first appeal, attacking a pretrial order that suppressed the defendant’s statements to federal investigators. We affirmed the district court’s finding that the defendant, Allen Wauneka, was subjected to custodial interrogation on January 20, 1984 at the time he was asked whether he had raped a nurse at Fort Defiance, Arizona in December of 1983. Accordingly, we excluded the confession to that crime that Wauneka gave after he was taken into custody but before he was administered the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 , 86 S.Ct. 1602 , 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). With respect to Wauneka’s post-warning statements, we remanded to the district court for reconsideration of their admissibility in light of Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298 , 105 S.Ct. 1285 , 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985). The district court, following the test laid down in Elstad , admitted Wauneka’s post-warning statements into evidence because it found that both his pre-warning and post-warning statements were voluntary. A federal jury then convicted Wauneka of two counts of rape and two counts of…