Introduction

Voluntariness of Confessions

Introduction

A confession is a suspect's own acknowledgment of guilt, usually with some detail about how the crime was committed.¹ No other item of prosecution evidence speaks so directly to the question a trial exists to answer, and jurors who hear the accused admit the crime in his own words may find it hard to look past that admission. The same quality makes a confession the evidence most tempting to obtain by abusive means. A suspect in custody is alone with the officers who want the statement, and those officers control the room, the clock, and the conditions of the encounter. If pressure produces words, the pressure leaves no mark on the transcript that later reaches the jury. For that reason constitutional law examines the manner in which a confession was obtained as well as its contents.

The law draws its line between two kinds of statement. A voluntary confession is one given freely, with no benefit or punishment promised, threatened, or expected.² A coerced confession is one obtained by threats or force, and the broader label of involuntary confession reaches statements induced by police or other law-enforcement authorities through promises, coercion, or deception.³ Two constitutional provisions give that line its force, and both appear in the Fifth Amendment. The Self-Incrimination Clause forbids compelling a person in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, and the Due Process Clause forbids depriving a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.⁴ The Fourteenth Amendment carries a parallel due process guarantee to the states, where most confession cases arise, and the first body section takes up how each provision came to govern confessions.

The question this chapter answers is whether a particular confession was the product of free choice or was extracted by coercive police conduct. That baseline voluntariness inquiry is separate from the Miranda warnings regime, which concerns the advisements officers must give before custodial questioning. Miranda receives only a bridging treatment near the end, once the voluntariness doctrine is fully on the page. The lesson moves from the sources of the requirement to the test courts apply, then to the limits on how far the inquiry reaches, and finally to what follows when a confession is found involuntary. It begins with the sources, because the reason the voluntariness requirement exists determines how courts apply it.