[1] After John Fellers was indicted on February 24, 2000, by a grand jury, a police sergeant named Michael Garnett and a deputy sheriff named Jeff Bliemeister from the Lincoln, Nebraska Police Department and the Lancaster County Sheriff's Office respectively, came to his home to arrest him.

When the officers went into the living room, they advised him that they were here to question him on his involvement in a methamphetamine distribution conspiracy, a federal crime.

A waiver form was signed, the statements were reiterated, and Fellers admitted that he had loaned money to a female individual, even though he suspected that she was involved in drug transactions.

At the actual trial itself, Fellers was convicted by a jury for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed the initial verdict, concluding, Fellers argues that the district court should have suppressed his inculpatory statements made at the jail because the primary taint of the improperly elicited statements made at his home was not removed by the recitation of his Miranda rights at the jail.

The trial court suppressed Elstad's initial oral statement, but admitted his written confession.

In holding that the statement given at the sheriff's office was admissible, the Court stated: It [would be] an unwarranted extension of Miranda to hold that 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, so taints the investigatory process that a subsequent voluntary and informed waiver is ineffective for some indeterminate period.

2d 261 (1988), Fellers argues that the officers' failure to administer the Miranda warnings at his home violated his sixth amendment right to counsel inasmuch as the encounter constituted a post-indictment interview.

Finally, we conclude that the record amply supports the district court's finding that Fellers's jailhouse statements were knowingly and voluntarily made following the administration of the Miranda warning.

My disagreement, which does not affect the ultimate resolution of this case, concerns whether the arresting officers violated Fellers's right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment.

Because Fellers was under indictment at the time of his arrest, he had a constitutional right to the presence of counsel during police interrogation.

For purposes of this right, an interrogation takes place when agents of law enforcement deliberately attempt to elicit incriminating information from the indicted defendant.

Fellers knowingly and voluntarily waived his Sixth Amendment rights at the jail, and his subsequent statements were thus admissible at his criminal trial.

While there was no question that incriminating statements were "deliberately elicited" at the house, the fact that Fellers was formally indicted and the statements in the house were without presence of counsel and there was an absence of a Sixth Amendment waiver, meant that the Court of Appeals made an error in their decision that the officers' actions did not violate the Sixth Amendment.

Specifically, it relied on Oregon v. Elstad to hold that the jailhouse statement was admissible under the notion that it was "knowingly and voluntarily made".