When Does the Sixth Amendment Right-to-Counsel Violation Take Place?
To determine whether the trial court should have suppressed the defendant’s statement, the Ventris Court embarked on an analysis of when the Sixth Amendment violation at issue would have taken place – was it at the time of the uncounselled interrogation in the cell, or was it at the time that the evidence was introduced at trial? The answer to this question is important, the Court explained, because, on the one hand, if the admission of Ventris’s confession itself constituted a Sixth Amendment violation, then there was no legal room for the lawful introduction of the confession, even for the limited purpose of impeachment. If, on the other hand, the violation had already begun and ended by the time of the trial (because it occurred in the jail cell when the conversation took place), then the exclusion of evidence would merely represent a deterrent remedy for the Sixth Amendment violation. Remedies, by their nature, are more flexible and are subject to courts’ cost/benefit analysis. If
