Confession

A confession is an admission of guilt. People confess to all kinds of human failings and frailties, real and imagined, to friends, family, strangers, pastors, therapists, reporters, bartenders, talk show hosts, and anyone else who will listen to them. There is some disagreement, however, as to how to define the term confession in the context of contemporary American criminal justice. Some commentators broadly define the term to include admissions of criminal behavior to private parties, admissions to law enforcement officials not of guilt but of other facts that may link a suspect to a crime, and exculpatory statements (e.g., a self-defense explanation) as well as guilty conduct (e.g., an attempt to mislead or flee from the police). It is preferable, however, to distinguish a confession from other kinds of self-incriminating actions.

It should be noted that many confessions are “spontaneous”—made before the onset of formal proceedings—such as the one that became the focus of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Colorado v. Connelly (1986). In this case, a mentally ill man approached a police officer in the street and, despite being warned of his right to remain silent, confessed to a murder and led police to the crime location. The Supreme Court held that although the defense could challenge the reliability of the confession at trial based on the defendant's mental condition, the confession was otherwise admissible because the police had done nothing to coerce the man into waiving his constitutional rights. Most of the controversy surrounding the use of confessions in criminal prosecutions has been generated in cases in which a criminal suspect has first acknowledged guilt while undergoing spoken or written admission of involvement in criminal conduct in response to interrogation by law enforcement authorities. Accordingly, a confession is best defined as a criminal suspect's spoken or written admission of guilt to one or more specific crimes while undergoing interrogation by law enforcement authorities.

Confessions have been used as evidence against criminal defendants since ancient times. The admissibility of the confessions of accused persons, however, has always raised concerns of fairness and accuracy. These concerns are reflected in modern American law, particularly in decisions of the United States Supreme Court.