Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 29, 1991 TAG: 9103290646
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There was, for example, the 1936 case of Brown vs. Mississippi. A deputy sheriff admitted that a defendant had been beaten to extract a confession, "but not too much for a Negro . . . ."
In Ashcraft vs. Tennessee, a 1944 case, a suspect was made to confess after some 36 hours of continuous interrogation by shifts of police.
The 1961 case of Rogers vs. Richmond saw a suspect confess to three police officers after they threatened to arrest his wife.
These cases are part of a vast body of precedents the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Tuesday when it held that some coerced confessions may be entered into evidence at criminal trials.
It's a terrible ruling.
Political conservatives often complain about judicial activists who overturn long-established precedents to indulge their ideological impulses.
That's precisely what the five justices appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush have done in this convoluted decision.
Forty years ago, no less a conservative justice than Felix Frankfurter explained the principles at stake:
"The use of involuntary verbal confessions in criminal trials," he wrote, "is constitutionally obnoxious not only because of their unreliability. They are inadmissible under the Due Process Clause even though the statements in them may be independently established. Coerced confessions offend a community's sense of fair play and decency."
The principle that involuntary confessions are grounds for reversing a conviction dates back not to the Earl Warren era, whose rulings the Rehnquist Court seems so eager to overturn, but to the 19th century. The principle that involuntary confessions are grounds for reversing a conviction dates back not to the Earl Warren era, . . . but to the 19th century.
More recently, involuntary confessions have been treated like the denial of a defendant's right to a lawyer, or proof that a judge is biased. These are constitutional violations so egregious that they cannot be considered "harmless errors" in a criminal conviction. On Tuesday, the court said some tainted confessions may be considered "harmless."
The ruling contradicts constitutional protections against involuntary self-incrimination as well as the fundamental notion that police must obey the law while enforcing it.
It sends this message to overzealous police officers: Don't worry; you can abuse a defendant to extract a confession without fear that bad conduct will damage the case.
Times have changed, you say? Police never abuse their authority as they did in the bad old days?
Tell that to Rodney King, the victim of a videotaped Los Angeles police beating.
The hope must be that, at some future date, the court will confess its mistake and restore the body of law it overturned.
This ruling was a harmful error.
by CNB