CONFESSION
A statement by which an individual acknowledges
his or her guilt in the commission of a crime.
One vital function of the U.S. judicial system
is to determine the guilt or innocence of suspects
who have been accused of crimes. Confessions
can play a key role in making this
determination. Courts in the U.S. have recognized
the fallibility of inaccurate or involuntary
confessions—such as those that have been
obtained as the result of threats or trickery—
and have developed a body of law to prevent
untrustworthy confessions from jeopardizing a
criminal defendant’s CIVIL RIGHTS.
Confessions were always allowed as evidence
in early English common-law trials, even when
torture was used to elicit them. Not until the
mid–eighteenth century did judges in England
start to admit only confessions that they deemed
trustworthy. To determine the trustworthiness
of a confession, judges considered the circumstances
surrounding it, whether a threat or
promise coerced the suspect to confess, and
whether the suspect confessed voluntarily.
The U.S. Supreme Court first addressed the
issue of confessions in the 1884 case of Hopt v.
Utah, 110 U.S. 574, 4 S. Ct. 202, 28 L. Ed. 262.
Following the English common-law standard,
the Court looked at whether the suspect had
confessed voluntarily or as a result of a threat or
promise. The Court first invoked the U.S. Constitution
to support this voluntariness standard
in the 1897 case of Bram v. United States, 168
U.S. 532, 18 S. Ct. 183, 42 L. Ed. 568.
In Bram, the Court applied the FIFTH
AMENDMENT’S PRIVILEGE AGAINST SELFINCRIMINATION
to confessions in federal courts,
observing that any amount of influence exerted
to obtain a confession would render the confession
involuntary and thus inadmissible. The
Bram holding initially created a harsh standard
of confession admissibility. Later decisions
interpreting Bram lowered the standard by
requiring that a confession be excluded from
evidence only if the amount of influence that
had been used to obtain it actually called into
question the statement’s reliability.
In 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court considered
the issue of coerced confessions for actions in
state court, rather than federal court, in Brown v.
Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278, 56 S. Ct. 461, 80 L. Ed.
682. Brown involved three African-American
defendants who had confessed to the murder of
a white man only after being beaten and tortured
by state police. The Court, this time,
invoked the Fourteenth Amendment’s DUE
PROCESS guarantee in holding the confessions to
be inadmissible because the police had obtained
them in a way that violated basic liberty and justice
principles. The Court in Brown announced
a due process analysis to be employed by state
courts on a case-by-case basis to determine
whether, given the totality of the circumstances,
a suspect had confessed voluntarily. The analysis
was to include an assessment of the suspect’s
character and status as well as of the methods
used by the police.
Case-by-case determination of the kind
required by Brown proved to be unwieldy for
state courts because the method was so fact-specific.
Appellate courts had difficulty setting
effective precedents because case outcomes
depended solely on unique factual circumstances.
As a result, the police were left with little
guidance as to thew way to interrogate
suspects properly and lawfully.
By the mid-1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court
once again began to alter its approach to determining
the admissibility of confessions. Starting
with Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 84 S. Ct. 1489,
12 L. Ed. 2d 653 (1964), the Court held that the
Fifth Amendment privilege against SELFINCRIMINATION,
which previously had applied
only to federal actions, now applied to state
actions as well. Thus, the Court held, suspects in
state court were entitled to the same standards
governing confessions—initially set forth in the
Bram opinion—as were suspects in federal
court.
In MASSIAH V. UNITED STATES, 377 U.S. 201,
84 S. Ct. 1199, 12 L. Ed. 2d 246 (1964), the Court
continued to move away from the FOURTEENTH
AMENDMENT due process analysis that it had
employed in its previous decisions. In Massiah,
the Court held that the SIXTH AMENDMENT
grants criminal defendants the RIGHT TO COUNSEL during post-indictment interrogations, and
when this right is violated, confessions obtained
are inadmissible. In ESCOBEDO V. ILLINOIS, 378
U.S. 478, 84 S. Ct. 1758, 12 L. Ed. 2d 977 (1964),
the Court expanded this protection to preindictment
confessions, holding that the right to
counsel attaches when a police investigation
becomes accusatory.
Two years later, the Court handed down the
landmark decision MIRANDA V. ARIZONA, 384
U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966),
finding that police custody is inherently coercive,
and therefore that criminal suspects in
police custody must be informed expressly of
their constitutional rights before interrogation
begins. A suspect’s Miranda rights include the
right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present
during questioning.Any statements made by
the suspect may be used against him or her in a
court of law. The Court held in Miranda that a
suspect may waive any of these rights, but only if
the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly, and
intelligently. But Miranda left these criteria
essentially undefined, thus prompting a glut of
litigation concerning the validity of Miranda
waivers.
The Court attempted to clarify its position
in North Carolina v. Butler, 441 U.S. 369, 99 S.
Ct. 1755, 60 L. Ed. 286 (1979). Willie Thomas
Butler had spoken with the police after they had
advised him of his Miranda rights, then later
sought to have the court exclude his incriminating
statements because he had declined to sign a
waiver agreement. In ruling against Butler, the
high court adopted the “totality of the circumstances”
approach for determining whether a
waiver of Miranda rights is voluntary, knowing,
and intelligent. Butler, the Court found, had
implied a voluntary waiver through his words
and actions, thus making an express written
waiver unnecessary. Butler thus required courts
to determine the voluntariness of a suspect’s
waiver case by case. Butler further instructed
courts to invalidate seemingly voluntary waivers
in instances of apparent coercion, deceit, or
trickery on the part of police.
Another attempt at clarification came in
Moran v. Burbine, 475 U.S. 412, 106 S. Ct. 1135,
89 L. Ed. 2d 410 (1986), in which the Court held
that the suspect’s confession had been voluntary
and valid even though the police, after reciting
Miranda rights, had failed to inform him that
his attorney had been trying to contact him.
The Court in Burbine found that although the
police have a duty to convey Miranda rights,
including the right to an attorney, there is no
constitutional duty to inform a suspect when
that suspect’s attorney wants to confer. The
Court further held that Miranda rights belong
to the suspect, and therefore it was irrelevant
that the police in Burbine had deceived the suspect’s
attorney by falsely stating that they would
not interrogate the suspect. Burbine invoked a
two-pronged test for courts to apply in determining
waiver validity: (1) whether the suspect’s
choice to waive Miranda rights was free
and uncoerced; and (2) whether the suspect
fully understood the consequences of waiving
those rights.
Nine months later, the Court refined Burbine’s
first prong in Colorado v. Connelly, 479
U.S. 157, 107 S. Ct. 515, 93 L. Ed. 2d 473 (1986).
Francis Barry Connelly, who was diagnosed as
schizophrenic, made unsolicited murder confessions
to the police while he was in a psychotic
state. He continued to talk even after the police
read him the Miranda rights. In attempting to
exclude the confession at trial, Connelly’s attorney
argued that Connelly had no control over
his psychotic delusions, and that the confession
therefore had been involuntary.
Finding no POLICE MISCONDUCT, the high
court ruled against Connelly, stating that
“Miranda protects defendants against government
coercion leading them to surrender rights
protected by the Fifth Amendment; it goes no
further than that.” Connelly suggests that the
voluntariness of a waiver depends on the conduct
of the police, not the mental state of the
suspect. Yet the mental state of the suspect may
still play a role in Burbine’s second prong, which
considers the suspect’s awareness of Miranda
rights and the consequences of waiving them.
Legal commentators have criticized Miranda
and its subsequent line of decisions, stating that
criminal suspects seldom truly understand the
meaning or importance of the rights recited to
them. Studies have indicated that the Miranda
decision has had little effect on the numbers of
confessions and requests for lawyers made by
suspects in custody. What is more, critics of
Miranda cite concerns that the police might fabricate
waivers, as a suspect’s waiver of Miranda
rights need not be recorded or made to a neutral
party. Proponents argue that Miranda protects
criminal suspects and reduces needless litigation
by providing the police with concrete guidelines
for permissible interrogation.
Even though the idea behind Miranda rights
is to protect suspects in custody from police
coercion, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991 held
that coerced confessions nevertheless may be
used in court if their use is harmless—in other
words, if a jury would probably convict even
without them (Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S.
279, 111 S. Ct. 1246, 113 L. Ed. 2d 302). The
police suspected that Oreste Fulminante had
killed his 11-year-old stepdaughter, whose body
was found in an Arizona desert two days after he
had reported her missing. Before he was charged
with the murder, Fulminante had received a
prison sentence for an unrelated weapons-possession
charge. While in prison on that charge,
he confessed the murder to a fellow inmate, who
actually was a paid federal informant. The
informant had offered to protect Fulminante
from other inmates in exchange for hearing the
truth about the murder. Fulminante was subsequently
indicted for the killing, and his confession
was used at trial despite his objection. A
jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced
him to death. The U.S. Supreme Court applied
the harmful error test and found that the jurors
most likely would not have convicted Fulminante
had they not heard his coerced confession,
thus its use at trial was harmful. The Court
ordered the case back for a new trial, this time
without use of the confession.
Legal scholars have criticized the Fulminante
decision for failing to follow decades of legal
precedent holding that coerced confessions violate
the due process rights of criminal suspects
and that their use at trial necessitates automatic
reversal, whether they are harmful or not. Fulminante,
they argue, encourages the police to
ignore the civil rights of suspects and to coerce
confessions. Others argue that the decision is
correct because it focuses on achieving an accurate
determination of guilt or innocence regardless
of whether constitutional rights are violated.
Whatever its long-term effects, Fulminante will
not be the final word in the progression of U.S.
Supreme Court cases defining the law of confessions.
Recent Developments
In 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit fueled long-standing speculation
that Miranda would be overruled, when it held
that the admissibility of confessions in federal
court is governed not by Miranda, but by a federal
statute enacted two years after that decision.
The statute, 18 U.S.C.A. Section 3501, provides
that a confession is admissible if voluntarily
given. Congress enacted the statute in order to
overturn Miranda, the Fourth Circuit said, and
Congress had the authority to do so pursuant to
its authority to overrule judicially created RULES
OF EVIDENCE that are not mandated by the U.S.
Constitution. United States. v. Dickerson, 166
F.3d 667 (4th Cir. 1999).
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed. In an
opinion authored by Chief Justice WILLIAM
REHNQUIST, the Court said that, whether or not
it agreed with Miranda, the principles of STARE
DECISIS weigh heavily against overruling it now.
While the Court has overruled its precedents
when subsequent cases have undermined their
doctrinal underpinnings, that has not happened
to the Miranda decision, which the Court said
“has become embedded in routine police practice
to the point where the warnings have
become part of our national culture.” Although
the Court acknowledged that a few guilty defendants
might go free as the result of the application
of the Miranda rule, “experience suggests
that the totality-of-the-circumstances test
which Section 3501 seeks to revive is more difficult
than Miranda for law enforcement officers
to conform to and for courts to apply in a consistent
manner.” Dickerson v. United States, 530
U.S. 428, 120 S. Ct. 2326, 147 L. Ed. 2d 405
(2000).
In another decision, the Court actually
increased defendants’ constitutional rights when
it ruled that the protections provided by its
decision in Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123,
88 S. Ct. 1620, 20 L. Ed. 2d 476 (1968) (which
held that the introduction of a non-testifying
codefendant’s confession incriminating both
himself and the other defendant in a joint trial
violated the other defendant’s Sixth Amendment
right to cross-examine witnesses) were applicable
to a codefendant’s confession that substituted
blanks and the word deleted in place of the defendant’s
proper name. The Court said that redactions
that simply replace the defendant’s name
with an obvious substitute, such as deleted, a
blank space, a symbol, or other similarly obvious
indications of alteration, result in statements that
so closely resemble the unredacted statements in
Bruton that the law must require the same result.
The Court believed that juries will often react
similarly to unredacted confessions and to
poorly redacted confessions, as jurors often realize
that a poorly redacted confession refers specifically to the defendant, even when the
statement does not expressly link the defendant
to the deleted name. Additionally, the Court
stressed that by encouraging the jury to speculate
about the removed name, the redaction
might overemphasize the importance of the
confession’s accusation once the jurors figure
out the redacted reference. Gray v. Maryland,
523 U.S. 185, 118 S. Ct. 1151, 140 L. Ed. 2d 294
(1998)
In Martinez v. City of Oxnard, 270 F.3d 852
(9th Cir. 2001), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit ruled that violating a defendant’s
rights against coerced confessions can give rise
to a civil rights action against the police officer
who attempted to coerce the confession. Martinez
stemmed from a 45-minute emergencyroom
interrogation of a narcotics suspect who
had been shot five times by a police officer while
being subdued during the arrest. The suspect,
who was rendered blind in one eye and paralyzed
below the legs by the gunshot wounds,
sued the officer who had conducted the interrogation.
The officer interposed a defense of qualified
IMMUNITY, claiming that he could not be
sued for injuries suffered by the defendant while
the officer was simply doing his job.
The district court rejected the officer’s
defense and granted SUMMARY JUDGMENT to
the narcotics suspect on his civil rights claim
under 42 U.S.C.A § 1983. In affirming the district
court’s decision, the Ninth Circuit ruled that
a police officer may raise the defense of qualified
immunity only when he or she could have reasonably
believed that his or her conduct was
lawful under settled law. In this case, the record
revealed that the officer had doggedly tried to
exact a confession from the suspect without first
reading him the Miranda warnings, and that he
then had proceeded to ignore the suspect’s
repeated requests for the officer to cease the
interrogation until he was finished receiving
medical treatment for his life-threatening
injuries. No reasonable officer, the court concluded,
could have believed that interrogating
the suspect under those “extreme circumstances”
comported with the Fifth Amendment’s
prohibitions against coerced confessions, and
thus the officer was not entitled to assert qualified
immunity as a defense. Accordingly, the district
court’s grant of summary judgment against
the officer was affirmed. However, the U.S.
Supreme Court granted the officer’s petition for
certiorari.
FURTHER READINGS
Chertoff,Michael. 1995. “Chopping Miranda Down to Size.”
Michigan Law Review 93.
Green, Jana. 1992. “Arizona v. Fulminante: The Harmful
Extension of the Harmless Error Doctrine.” Oklahoma
City University Law Review 17.
Hourihan, Paul. 1995. “Earl Washington’s Confession: Mental
Retardation and the Law of Confessions.” Virginia
Law Review 81.
LaFave, Wayne R., and Fred L. Israel. 2001. Criminal Procedure.
6th ed. St. Paul,Minn.:West Group.
Stack, W. Brian. 1994. “Criminal Procedure—Confessions:
Waiver of Privilege against Self-Incrimination Held
Invalid Due to Police Failure to Inform Suspect of
Attorney’s Attempt to Contact Him—State v. Reed.”
Seton Hall Law Review 25.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Criminal Law; Criminal Procedure; Custodial Interrogation.
