INVOLUNTARY CONFESSION
An admission, especially by an individual who has been accused of a crime, that is not freely offered but rather is precipitated by a threat, fear, torture, or a promise.
The criminal justice system relies on confes-
sions by defendants to help prove guilt at trial or
to induce a guilty plea. POLICE INTERROGATION
of suspects has long been a controversial area of
U.S. CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, as critics charge
that coercion and trickery have unfairly and
unconstitutionally led to involuntary confes-
sions. The FIFTH AMENDMENT grants a suspect
the PRIVILEGE AGAINST SELF-INCRIMINATION,
yet many suspects confess anyway. Because
questioning of suspects takes place behind sta-
tion house doors, little empirical evidence is
available to document what usually occurs in a
police interrogation.
The 1931 federal WICKERSHAM COMMIS-
SION looked at police practices throughout the
United States. This commission raised the issue
of coercive interrogations, coining the term the
third degree to describe physical and mental
abuse inflicted on suspects during questioning.
From 1936 to the early 1960s, the U.S. Supreme
Court dealt with confessions admitted in state
criminal proceedings in terms of the fundamen-
tal fairness required by the Fourteenth Amend-
ment’s DUE PROCESS CLAUSE. The Court used a
“voluntariness” test, which depended on the
“totality of the circumstances,” to determine
whether a confession must be excluded from
evidence. This approach became difficult to
administer, as it called on courts to find and
appraise all relevant facts for each case.
Legal debate over the validity of confessions
gained momentum in the 1960s, as the U.S.
Supreme Court took a hard look at the consti-
tutionality of criminal procedure. In ESCOBEDO
V. ILLINOIS, 378 U.S. 478, 84 S. Ct. 1758, 12
L. Ed. 2d 977 (1964), Justice ARTHUR J. GOLD-
BERG stated that “a system of CRIMINAL
LAW enforcement which comes to depend on
the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less
reliable and more subject to abuses than a
system which depends on extrinsic evidence
independently secured through skillful investi-
gation.” In Escobedo the defendant’s confession
was suppressed because it was obtained in vio-
lation of his RIGHT TO COUNSEL at the time of
interrogation.
In 1966 the Supreme Court set out the
Miranda warnings (MIRANDA V. ARIZONA, 384
U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 1694),
which the police must communicate to a person
who is placed in their custody. The warnings
cover the right to remain silent, the fact that
anything said can and will be used against the
individual in court, the right to have a lawyer
during interrogation, the right to have an attor-
ney appointed if the individual cannot afford
one, and the right to exercise the privilege
against SELF-INCRIMINATION at any time during
interrogation. These warnings provide basic
avenues of inquiry for a court evaluating the
“voluntariness” of a confession.
Miranda has been criticized by those who
see it as an unfair restriction on law enforce-
ment. Nevertheless, empirical studies conducted
in the 1970s and 1980s have concluded that the
Miranda warnings have not appreciably reduced
