Page:United States Reports, Volume 542.djvu/653

614 a defendant of knowledge essential to his ability to understand the nature of his rights and the consequences of abandoning them." Moran v. Burbine,, 424 (1986). By the same token, it would ordinarily be unrealistic to treat two spates of integrated and proximately conducted questioning as independent interrogations subject to independent evaluation simply because Miranda warnings formally punctuate them in the middle.

Missouri argues that a confession repeated at the end of an interrogation sequence envisioned in a question ﬁrst strategy is admissible on the authority of Oregon v. Elstad,, but the argument disfigures that case. In Elstad, the police went to the young suspect's house to take him into custody on a charge of burglary. Before the arrest, one officer spoke with the suspect's mother, while the other one joined the suspect in a "brief stop in the living room," id., at 315, where the ofﬁcer said he "felt" the young man was involved in a burglary, id., at 301 (internal quotation marks omitted). The suspect acknowledged he had been at the scene. Ibid. This Court noted that the pause in the living room "was not to interrogate the suspect but to notify his mother of the reason for his arrest," id., at 315, and described the incident as having "none of the earmarks of coercion," id., at 316. The Court, indeed, took care to mention that the officer's initial failure to warn was an "oversight" that "may have been the result of confusion as to whether the brief exchange qualified as 'custodial interrogation' or may simply have reﬂected  reluctance to initiate an alarming police procedure before [an officer] had spoken with respondent's mother." Id., at 315–316. At the outset of a later and systematic station house interrogation going well beyond the scope of the laconic prior admission, the suspect was given Miranda warnings and made a full confession. Elstad, supra, at 301, 314–315. In holding the