A Newark teen convicted in the killing of a café owner should have been read his Miranda rights before detectives took his statement because he was in police custody — even though investigators were treating him as a victim at the time.
Due to the error, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed Zakariyya Ahmad’s convictions and ordered a new trial for his alleged role in the slaying of Joseph Flagg in October 2013.
Ahmad was 17 when arrested for the crime. Flagg, of Union, was a father to four young children who worked as a contractor but ran the Chancellor Avenue breakfast joint on the side and often hired ex-convicts to help him in both ventures.
Zakariyya Ahmad in a 2021 New Jersey prison system photo.
The arguments before the high court centered on Ahmad’s interactions with police after they found him at a hospital with gunshot wounds on the day Flagg was killed.
Detectives later ordered him to a police station for a statement, which they videotaped, and never read him his Miranda warning because they did not consider him a suspect.
After finding other evidence in the case, including blood, ballistics and surveillance footage, detectives charged Ahmad and two other teens with the shooting of Flagg during a robbery that went awry. They were tried as adults.
Authorities said one of the suspects, Daryl Cline, fatally shot Flagg during the holdup and inadvertently wounded Ahmad. (Cline was convicted and remains imprisoned; the other suspect cooperated with prosecutors and took a plea deal in which he was sentenced as a teen.)
Prosecutors used Ahmad’s videotaped statement, which was 27 minutes, at his trial. It narrated his version of the events of the day Flagg was killed, and in it he said he was wounded when he stepped off a bus near the crime. He then flagged down a motorist, who took him to the hospital.
Ahmad’s mother cut off the interview when she saw a detective enter the interrogation room with what she believed was a forensic evidence kit.
A jury convicted Ahmad in 2017 of murder, manslaughter, robbery and several related crimes and a judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison. An appellate court upheld the case.
The state Public Defender’s Office argued to the Supreme Court that Ahmad was in police custody when investigators prevented him from leaving the hospital with his family and had no choice in the matter. He was put in the back of a marked police car after police told his mother she could not drive him home or to the police station herself.
Ahmad’s statement occurred while he was in custody, he was not read his rights and it should be tossed because of the damage it caused later at trial.
Prosecutors argued that they had other evidence showing Ahmad’s guilt, and at the time of his statement, he was viewed as a victim and possibly a witness.
The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling Ahmad was in custody the moment he left the hospital, the detectives should have given him the Miranda warning and it indeed caused him harm.
“Whether defendant was viewed as a victim by law enforcement at the time of questioning is not, and has never been, the relevant inquiry under Miranda for determining whether someone is in custody. Defendant’s statement should have been suppressed (at trial),” the high court wrote in a summary.
The high court also found the trial and appellate courts did not analyze the issue once Ahmad was in the police car.
“At that moment, looking objectively at the totality of the circumstances, it is difficult to conceive that any reasonable 17-year-old in defendant’s position would have felt free to leave; nor did any subsequent events do anything to lessen that impression,” the court said in a summary.
They found the error at trial harmful because it was used after a key prosecution witness changed their testimony, which was in line with Ahmad’s defense, leading his own statement to paint him as a liar. The prosecution then pounced on it, the high court noted.
“Here, (the prosecution) used defendant’s recorded statement to demonstrate that defendant told untruths to detectives when he was questioned. In summation, the prosecutor argued that the statement was unbelievable, not supported by the evidence, and comprised of inconsistencies and falsities,” it wrote.
The prosecution “unquestionably relied on defendant’s recorded statement in attempting to convince the jury that defendant was guilty of the offenses charged, so its admission cannot possibly be viewed as harmless.”
Ahmad, now 24, is currently at Northern State Prison, with a parole date in 2043.
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Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com.
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