Confessions

Legal History

Despite Blackstone's warning in the mid-18th century that confessions were not to be trusted, in the history of American jurisprudence, the acknowledgment of guilt by a defendant has traditionally been sufficient to win a conviction, even absent corroborating evidence.

Although the legal standard throughout the 19th century implied that confessions should be “voluntary,” no particular set of guidelines existed that defined the circumstances under which a confession would be considered coerced. Indeed, a series of lower and appellate court decisions well into the 20th century suggested that even confessions elicited under great duress could be entered into evidence. In an extreme example, the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that the confessions of three defendants were admissible although the men had been hanged, whipped, and tortured prior to voluntarily admitting their crimes (Brown v. Mississippi, 1936). Because the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination did not extend to the states, the Supreme Court had to rely on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude the guilty admissions of the three men.

Beginning in the 1940s, the Supreme Court began to give the lower courts some guidance on the construction of voluntariness tests that could take into account the “totality of the circumstances” under which a confession was elicited. The Court, in a variety of cases, outlined the factors governing admissibility. These considerations included defendant characteristics such as age, IQ, or mental state, and interrogation methods (e.g., the threat of violence, sleep deprivation, ignoring a suspect's request for counsel, etc.).

In rulings handed down over the next two decades, the Supreme Court mandated greater restrictions on the interrogatory process, prohibiting most police questioning prior to a court appearance, where, presumably, the judge would advise the defendant of his or her rights regarding self-incrimination. However, because these rulings involved the rights of federal defendants, the proviso did not apply to interrogations by state police.

The first attempt to nationalize interrogation guidelines came with the landmark ruling in Escobedo v. Illinois in 1964, which guaranteed the right to counsel during police questioning. However, narrow interpretations by the state courts of the ruling's applicability meant that it was of little practical use to most suspects, particularly indigent suspects who had no lawyer. Ernest Miranda, accused of a rape in Arizona, was one such subject. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the admission of confession evidence in Miranda's case, saying that the facts did not closely enough resemble the facts in Escobedo to necessitate suppression.

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