Fifth Amendment
Coerced Confessions and Testimony
Brown v. Mississippi (1936)
297 U.S. 278 (1936)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Hughes, joined by Devanter, McReynolds, Brandeis, Sutherland, Butler, Stone, Roberts, and Cardoza
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE HUGHES delivered the opinion of the Court.
The question in this case is whether convictions which rest solely upon confessions shown to have been extorted by officers of the State by brutality and violence are consistent with the due process of law required by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
Petitioners were indicted for the murder of one Raymond Stewart … and were then arraigned and pleaded not guilty. Counsel were appointed by the court to defend them. Trial was begun the next morning, and was concluded on the following day, when they were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Aside from the confessions, there was no evidence sufficient to warrant the submission of the case to the jury. After a preliminary inquiry, testimony as to the confessions was received over the objection of defendants’ counsel. Defendants then testified that the confessions were false and had been procured by physical torture. The case went to the jury with instructions, upon the request of defendants’ counsel, that, if the jury had reasonable doubt as to the confessions’ having resulted from coercion, and that they were not true, they were not to be considered as evidence. On their appeal to the Supreme Court of the State, defendants assigned as error the inadmissibility of the confessions. The judgment was affirmed. …
Defendants then moved in the Supreme Court of the State to arrest the judgment and for a new trial on the ground that all the evidence against them was obtained by coercion and brutality known to the court and to the district attorney, and that defendants had been denied the benefit of counsel or opportunity to confer with counsel in a reasonable manner. At about the same time, defendants filed in the Supreme Court a “suggestion of error” explicitly challenging the proceedings of the trial, in the use of the confessions and with respect to the alleged denial of representation by counsel, as violating the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The state court entertained the suggestion of error, considered the federal question, and decided it against defendants’ contentions. … We granted a writ of certiorari.
The opinion of the state court did not set forth the evidence as to the circumstances in which the confessions were procured. That the evidence established that they were procured by coercion was not questioned. The state court said:
“ … [C]learly and adequately stated in the dissenting opinion of Judge Griffith … showing both the extreme brutality of the measures to extort the confessions and the participation of the state authorities, we quote this part of his opinion … :
“The crime with which these defendants, all ignorant negroes, are charged was discovered … on Friday. … On that night, one Dial, a deputy sheriff, accompanied by others, came to the home of Ellington, one of the defendants, and requested him to accompany them to the house of the deceased, and there a number of white men were gathered who began to accuse the defendant of the crime. Upon his denial, they seized him and, with the participation of the deputy, they hanged him by a rope to the limb of a tree, and, having let him down, they hung him again, and when he was let down the second time, and he still protested his innocence, he was tied to a tree and whipped, and still declining to accede to the demands that he confess, he was finally released and he returned with some difficulty to his home, suffering intense pain and agony. The record of the testimony shows that the signs of the rope on his neck were plainly visible during the so-called trial. A day or two thereafter, the said deputy, accompanied by another, returned to the home of the said defendant and arrested him, and departed with the prisoner towards the jail in an adjoining county, but went by a route which led into the State of Alabama, and while on the way, in that State, the deputy stopped and again severely whipped the defendant, declaring that he would continue the whipping until he confessed, and the defendant then agreed to confess to such a statement as the deputy would dictate, and he did so, after which he was delivered to jail.”
“The other two defendants, Ed Brown and Henry Shields, were also arrested and taken to the same jail. On Sunday night … the same deputy, accompanied by a number of white men, one of whom was also an officer … came to the jail, and the two last named defendants were made to strip, and they were laid over chairs and their backs were cut to pieces with a leather strap with buckles on it, and they were likewise made by the said deputy definitely to understand that the whipping would be continued unless and until they confessed, and not only confessed, but confessed in every matter of detail as demanded by those present, and in this manner the defendants confessed the crime, and as the whippings progressed and were repeated, they changed or adjusted their confession in all particulars of detail so as to conform to the demands of their torturers. When the confessions had been obtained in the exact form and contents as desired by the mob, they left with the parting admonition and warning that, if the defendants changed their story at any time in any respect from that last stated, the perpetrators of the outrage would administer the same or equally effective treatment.”
. …
“All this having been accomplished, on the next day, that is, on Monday, April 2, when the defendants had been given time to recuperate somewhat from the tortures to which they had been subjected, the two sheriffs … came to the jail … to hear the free and voluntary confession of these miserable and abject defendants. The sheriff of the county of the crime admitted that he had heard of the whipping, but averred that he had no personal knowledge of it. He admitted that one of the defendants, when brought before him to confess, was limping and did not sit down, and that this particular defendant then and there stated that he had been strapped so severely that he could not sit down, and as already stated, the signs of the rope on the neck of another of the defendants were plainly visible to all. Nevertheless, the solemn farce of hearing the free and voluntary confessions was gone through with, and these two sheriffs and one other person then present were the three witnesses used in court to establish the so-called confessions, which were received by the court and admitted in evidence over the objections of the defendants duly entered of record as each of the said three witnesses delivered their alleged testimony. There was thus enough before the court when these confessions were first offered to make known to the court that they were not, beyond all reasonable doubt, free and voluntary, and the failure of the court then to exclude the confessions is sufficient to reverse the judgment. … ”
. …
“The defendants were brought to the courthouse of the county on the following morning, April 5th, and the so-called trial was opened, and was concluded on the next day … and resulted in a pretended conviction with death sentences. The evidence upon which the conviction was obtained was the so-called confessions. Without this evidence, a peremptory instruction to find for the defendants would have been inescapable. The defendants were put on the stand, and, by their testimony, the facts and the details thereof as to the manner by which the confessions were extorted from them were fully developed, and it is further disclosed by the record that the same deputy, Dial, under whose guiding hand and active participation the tortures to coerce the confessions were administered was actively in the performance of the supposed duties of a court deputy in the courthouse and in the presence of the prisoners during what is denominated, in complimentary terms, the trial of these defendants. This deputy was put on the stand by the state in rebuttal, and admitted the whippings. It is interesting to note that, in his testimony with reference to the whipping of the defendant Ellington, and in response to the inquiry as to how severely he was whipped, the deputy stated, ‘Not too much for a negro; not as much as I would have done if it were left to me.’. … ”
The State stresses the statement in Twining v. New Jersey [(1908]) that “exemption from compulsory self-incrimination in the courts of the States is not secured by any part of the Federal Constitution,” and the statement in Snyder v. Massachusetts [(1934]) that “the privilege against self-incrimination may be withdrawn, and the accused put upon the stand as a witness for the State.” But the question of … [c]ompulsion by torture to extort a confession is a different matter.
The State is free to regulate the procedure of its courts in accordance with its own conceptions of policy unless, in so doing, it “offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.” Snyder v. Massachusetts … Rogers v. Peck, [(1905)]. … The rack and torture chamber may not be substituted for the witness stand. The State may not permit an accused to be hurried to conviction under mob domination, where the whole proceeding is but a mask without supplying corrective process. … Nor may a State, through the action of its officers, contrive a conviction through the pretense of a trial which, in truth, is “but used as a means of depriving a defendant of liberty through a deliberate deception of court and jury by the presentation of testimony known to be perjured.” Mooney v. Holohan, [(1935)]. And the trial equally is a mere pretense where the state authorities have contrived a conviction resting solely upon confessions obtained by violence. The due process clause requires “that state action, whether through one agency or another, shall be consistent with the fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions.” Hebert v. Louisiana, [(1926]). It would be difficult to conceive of methods more revolting to the sense of justice than those taken to procure the confessions of these petitioners, and the use of the confessions thus obtained as the basis for conviction and sentence was a clear denial of due process.
. … In an earlier case, the Supreme Court of the State had recognized the duty of the court to supply corrective process where due process of law had been denied. In Fisher v. State, [(1926)] the court said, “Coercing the supposed state’s criminals into confessions and using such confessions so coerced from them against them in trials has been the curse of all countries. … The duty of maintaining constitutional rights of a person on trial for his life rises above mere rules of procedure, and wherever the court is clearly satisfied that such violations exist, it will refuse to sanction such violations and will apply the corrective.”
In the instant case, the trial court was fully advised by the undisputed evidence of the way in which the confessions had been procured. The trial court knew that there was no other evidence upon which conviction and sentence could be based. Yet it proceeded to permit conviction, and to pronounce sentence. The conviction and sentence were void for want of the essential elements of due process, and the proceeding thus vitiated could be challenged in any appropriate manner. It was challenged before the Supreme Court of the State by the express invocation of the Fourteenth Amendment. That court entertained the challenge, considered the federal question thus presented, but declined to enforce petitioners’ constitutional right. The court thus denied a federal right fully established and specially set up and claimed, and the judgment must be
Reversed.
Spano v. New York (1959)
360 U.S. 315 (1959)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Warren, joined by Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Clark, Harlan, Brennan, Whittaker, and Stewart
Concurrence: Douglas, joined by Black and Brennan
Concurrence: Stewart, joined by Douglas and Brennan
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is another in the long line of cases presenting the question whether a confession was properly admitted into evidence under the Fourteenth Amendment. As in all such cases, we are forced to resolve a conflict between two fundamental interests of society — its interest in prompt and efficient law enforcement and its interest in preventing the rights of its individual members from being abridged by unconstitutional methods of law enforcement.
. …
The State’s evidence reveals the following: Petitioner Vincent Joseph Spano … was drinking in a bar. The decedent, a former professional boxer weighing almost 200 pounds … took some of petitioner’s money from the bar. Petitioner followed him out of the bar to recover it. A fight ensued, with the decedent knocking petitioner down and then kicking him in the head three or four times. … After the bartender applied some ice to his head, petitioner left the bar, walked to his apartment, secured a gun, and walked eight or nine blocks to a candy store where the decedent was frequently to be found. He entered the store in which decedent … and a boy who was supervising the store were present. He fired five shots, two of which entered the decedent’s body, causing his death. The boy was the only eyewitness. …
… [T]he Bronx County Grand Jury returned an indictment for first-degree murder against petitioner. Accordingly, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. …
… [P]etitioner called one Gaspar Bruno, a close friend of 8 or 10 years’ standing who had attended school with him. Bruno was a fledgling police officer, having at that time not yet finished attending police academy. According to Bruno’s testimony, petitioner told him “that he took a terrific beating, that the deceased hurt him real bad and he dropped him a couple of times and he was dazed; he didn’t know what he was doing, and that he went and shot at him.” Petitioner told Bruno that he intended to get a lawyer and give himself up. Bruno relayed this information to his superiors.
The following day … petitioner, accompanied by counsel, surrendered himself. … His attorney had cautioned him to answer no questions, and left him in the custody of the officers. He was promptly taken to the office of the Assistant District Attorney, and, at 7:15 p.m., the questioning began. … The record reveals that the questioning was both persistent and continuous. Petitioner, in accordance with his attorney’s instructions, steadfastly refused to answer. Detective Motta testified: “He refused to talk to me.” “He just looked up to the ceiling and refused to talk to me.” . …
He asked one officer, Detective Ciccone, if he could speak to his attorney, but that request was denied. Detective Ciccone testified that he could not find the attorney’s name in the telephone book. He was given two sandwiches, coffee and cake at 11 p.m.
At 12:15 a.m. … after five hours of questioning in which it became evident that petitioner was following his attorney’s instructions, on the Assistant District Attorney’s orders, petitioner was transferred to the 46th Squad, Ryer Avenue Police Station. The Assistant District Attorney also went to the police station and to some extent continued to participate in the interrogation. Petitioner arrived at 12:30, and questioning was resumed at 12:40. …
But petitioner persisted in his refusal to answer, and again requested permission to see his attorney, this time from Detective Lehrer. His request was again denied.
It was then that those in charge of the investigation decided that petitioner’s close friend, Bruno, could be of use. He had been called out on the case around 10 or 11 p.m., although he was not connected with the 46th Squad or Precinct in any way. Although, in fact, his job was in no way threatened, Bruno was told to tell petitioner that petitioner’s telephone call had gotten him “in a lot of trouble,” and that he should seek to extract sympathy from petitioner for Bruno’s pregnant wife and three children. Bruno developed this theme with petitioner without success, and petitioner, also without success, again sought to see his attorney, a request which Bruno relayed unavailingly to his superiors. After this first session with petitioner, Bruno was again directed by Lt. Gannon to play on petitioner’s sympathies, but again no confession was forthcoming. But the Lieutenant a third time ordered Bruno falsely to importune his friend to confess, but again petitioner clung to his attorney’s advice.
Inevitably, in the fourth such session directed by the Lieutenant, lasting a full hour, petitioner succumbed to his friend’s prevarications and agreed to make a statement. Accordingly, at 3:25 a.m., the Assistant District Attorney … took his statement in question and answer form. … The statement was completed at 4:05 a.m.
But this was not the end. At 4:30 a.m., three detectives took petitioner to Police Headquarters in Manhattan. On the way, they attempted to find the bridge from which petitioner said he had thrown the murder weapon. … When petitioner recognized neither bridge as the one from which he had thrown the weapon, they … entered Manhattan via the Third Avenue Bridge, which petitioner stated was the right one, and then returned to the Bronx well after 6 a.m. During that trip, the officers also elicited a statement from petitioner that the deceased was always “on [his] back,” “always pushing” him, and that he was “not sorry” he had shot the deceased. All three detectives testified to that statement at the trial.
Court opened at 10 a.m. that morning, and petitioner was arraigned at 10:15.
At the trial, the confession was introduced in evidence over appropriate objections. The jury was instructed that it could rely on it only if it was found to be voluntary. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and petitioner was sentenced to death. The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction over three dissents … and we granted certiorari to resolve the serious problem presented under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Petitioner’s first contention is that his absolute right to counsel in a capital case, Powell v. Alabama [(1932)], became operative on the return of an indictment against him, for at that time he was in every sense a defendant in a criminal case, the grand jury having found sufficient cause to believe that he had committed the crime. He argues accordingly that, following indictment, no confession obtained in the absence of counsel can be used without violating the Fourteenth Amendment. … We find use of the confession obtained here inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment under traditional principles.
The abhorrence of society to the use of involuntary confessions does not turn alone on their inherent untrustworthiness. It also turns on the deep-rooted feeling that the police must obey the law while enforcing the law; that, in the end, life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves. Accordingly, the actions of police in obtaining confessions have come under scrutiny in a long series of cases. Those cases suggest that, in recent years, law enforcement officials have become increasingly aware of the burden which they share, along with our courts, in protecting fundamental rights of our citizenry, including that portion of our citizenry suspected of crime. … As law enforcement officers become more responsible and the methods used to extract confessions more sophisticated, our duty to enforce federal constitutional protections does not cease. It only becomes more difficult because of the more delicate judgments to be made. Our judgment here is that, on all the facts, this conviction cannot stand.
Petitioner was a foreign-born young man of 25 with no past history of law violation or of subjection to official interrogation, at least insofar as the record shows. He had progressed only one-half year into high school, and the record indicates that he had a history of emotional instability. He did not make a narrative statement, but was subject to the leading questions of a skillful prosecutor in a question and answer confession. He was subjected to questioning not by a few men, but by many … and the effect of such massive official interrogation must have been felt. Petitioner was questioned for virtually eight straight hours before he confessed, with his only respite being a transfer to an arena presumably considered more appropriate by the police for the task at hand. Nor was the questioning conducted during normal business hours, but began in early evening, continued into the night, and did not bear fruition until the not-too-early morning. The drama was not played out, with the final admissions obtained, until almost sunrise. In such circumstances slowly mounting fatigue does, and is calculated to, play its part.
The questioners persisted in the face of his repeated refusals to answer on the advice of his attorney, and they ignored his reasonable requests to contact the local attorney whom he had already retained and who had personally delivered him into the custody of these officers in obedience to the bench warrant.
The use of Bruno, characterized in this Court by counsel for the State as a “childhood friend” of petitioner’s, is another factor which deserves mention in the totality of the situation. Bruno’s was the one face visible to petitioner in which he could put some trust. There was a bond of friendship between them going back a decade into adolescence. It was with this material that the officers felt that they could overcome petitioner’s will. They instructed Bruno falsely to state that petitioner’s telephone call had gotten him into trouble, that his job was in jeopardy, and that loss of his job would be disastrous to his three children, his wife and his unborn child. And Bruno played this part of a worried father, harried by his superiors, in not one, but four different acts, the final one lasting an hour. …
We conclude that petitioner’s will was overborne by official pressure, fatigue and sympathy falsely aroused after considering all the facts in their post-indictment setting. Here, a grand jury had already found sufficient cause to require petitioner to face trial on a charge of first-degree murder, and the police had an eyewitness to the shooting. The police were not therefore merely trying to solve a crime, or even to absolve a suspect. … They were rather concerned primarily with securing a statement from defendant on which they could convict him. … When such an intent is shown, this Court has held that the confession obtained must be examined with the most careful scrutiny. … Accordingly, we hold that petitioner’s conviction cannot stand under the Fourteenth Amendment.
. … The judgment must be
Reversed.
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, with whom MR. JUSTICE BLACK and MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN join, concurring.
While I join the opinion of the Court, I add what, for me, is an even more important ground of decision.
. …
This is a capital case, and, under the rule of Powell v. Alabama [(1932)], the defendant was entitled to be represented by counsel. …
Depriving a person, formally charged with a crime, of counsel during the period prior to trial may be more damaging than denial of counsel during the trial itself.
. … This is a case of an accused, who is scheduled to be tried by a judge and jury, being tried in a preliminary way by the police. This is a kangaroo court procedure whereby the police produce the vital evidence in the form of a confession which is useful or necessary to obtain a conviction. They in effect deny him effective representation by counsel. This seems to me to be a flagrant violation of the principle announced in Powell v. Alabama, that the right of counsel extends to the preparation for trial, as well as to the trial itself. …
