Competency to Confess

Competency to confess refers to a suspect's ability to make a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of the Miranda warnings at the time of police questioning. Confessions that are given after a suspect waives his or her Miranda rights are sometimes challenged on the basis that the suspect was not competent to confess, meaning that the suspect was not capable of making a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of the Miranda rights and therefore could not have understood, appreciated, and willingly waived those rights. A confession that is successfully challenged cannot be used in court against the defendant. Assessment of competency is therefore performed after the confession is given. This assessment is performed by a mental health professional (often a forensic psychologist) and takes into account the defendant's ability at the time of the interrogation to understand the warnings and make intelligent use of them and the psychological factors that could be relevant to the court in assessing the voluntariness of the waiver.

In the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any statement arising from the custodial interrogation of a suspect would be presumed involuntary and thus inadmissible unless the police provide the suspect with four warnings: (1) the suspect has the right to remain silent, (2) any statements made by the suspect can be used in court against him or her, (3) the suspect has the right to the presence of an attorney before and during the interrogation, and (4) an attorney will be provided free of charge if the suspect does not have the ability to pay for one. Many jurisdictions have added a fifth prong, that these rights can be invoked at any time during the interrogation process and that once they are invoked, the questioning must cease until an attorney is present. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Miranda decision opined that these rights must be waived knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. Case law has clarified the meaning of these three prongs.

The term competency to confess is a misnomer because it explicitly refers to one's ability to understand and appreciate the significance of the Miranda rights at the time of police questioning. It also refers to the psychological characteristics of a defendant that have an impact on the voluntariness of the Miranda waiver. Thus, this competency differs from other competencies (e.g., competency to stand trial, competency to consent to treatment) in that the mental health professional must examine the individual's competence at some point in the past. The court is not concerned with current or future competency with respect to Miranda warnings; rather, the court is concerned about whether the defendant was able to make a knowing and intelligent waiver at the time he or she was questioned by the police.

Also, not all three prongs needed to effectuate a valid Miranda waiver can be addressed completely by the mental health professional. Case law clearly indicates that for a waiver of rights to be deemed involuntary, there must be a showing of police misconduct. It has to be shown that the police were unduly coercive and overstepped their bounds in extracting a Miranda waiver. It is beyond the scope of a mental health expert's expertise to determine whether and how that threshold was crossed. Yet psychological expertise can be useful to the court in determining whether a suspect possesses psychological characteristics that increase his or her susceptibility to the effects of police conduct. Such characteristics include interrogative suggestibility, compliance, intellectual functioning, anxiety, memory, and sleep deprivation. There are [Page 119]a number of specialized tests that can assist the clinician in evaluating the psychological factors relevant to the voluntary prong of the Miranda waiver.

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