Page:United States Reports, Volume 542.djvu/654

Rh second statement admissible and voluntary, Elstad rejected the "cat out of the bag" theory that any short, earlier admission, obtained in arguably innocent neglect of Miranda, determined the character of the later, warned confession, Elstad, 470 U.S., at 311–314; on the facts of that case, the Court thought any causal connection between the ﬁrst and second responses to the police was "speculative and attenuated," id., at 313. Although the Elstad Court expressed no explicit conclusion about either ofﬁcer's state of mind, it is fair to read Elstad as treating the living room conversation as a good faith Miranda mistake, not only open to correction by careful warnings before systematic questioning in that particular case, but posing no threat to warn ﬁrst practice generally. See Elstad, supra, at 309 (characterizing the officers' omission of Miranda warnings as "a simple failure to administer the warnings, unaccompanied by any actual coercion or other circumstances calculated to undermine the suspect's ability to exercise his free will"); 470 U.S., at 318, n. 5 (Justice Brennan's concern in dissent that Elstad would invite question first practice "distorts the reasoning and holding of our decision, but, worse, invites trial courts and prosecutors to do the same").

The contrast between Elstad and this case reveals a series of relevant facts that bear on whether Miranda warnings delivered midstream could be effective enough to accomplish their object: 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, the continuity of police personnel, and the degree to which the interrogator's questions treated the second round as continuous with the first. In Elstad, it was not unreasonable to see the occasion for questioning at the station house as presenting a markedly different experience from the short conversation at home; since a reasonable person in the suspect's shoes could have seen the station house questioning as a new and distinct experience, the Miranda