About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

30 Hastings Const. L.Q. 57 (2002-2003)
Coerced Confessions and the Fourth Amendment

handle is hein.journals/hascq30 and id is 71 raw text is: COERCED CONFESSIONS AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT BY MICHAEL J. ZYDNEY MANNHEIMER* Since 1936, the Supreme Court has consistently located the source of its jurisprudence on coerced confessions by a state criminal defendant in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.2 This is completely understandable, as coerced-confession jurisprudence developed at a time when the Court was loathe to apply mechanistically particular clauses from the Bill of Rights to the States. Instead, the Court's practice was to determine whether the proceedings against the defendant were so lacking in fundamental fairness as to constitute a breach of the vague dictates of due process. Yet, more recently, the Court's jurisprudence on the application of the Bill of Rights to the States has embraced a clause-specific approach. That is, claims that a state has violated due process are addressed by the Court in terms of the specific clauses of the Bill of Rights, nearly all of which are by now applied to the States via the Fourteenth Amendment, and in the identical fashion as they apply against the federal government. Thus, in Graham v. Connor,3 the *Appellate Counsel, Center for Appellate Litigation. J.D. 1994, Columbia Law School. The views expressed in this Article are solely those of the author. 1. Though the terms are fairly interchangeable in the case law and commentary, see, e.g., Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 287 n.3 (1991), this Article uses the term coerced rather than involuntary to describe statements taken from suspects as a result of certain police conduct. This is because the focus of the jurisprudence has shifted from whether the statement was made voluntarily in some abstract sense to whether it was the result of police overreaching or misconduct. See infra Part I.C. This Article uses the term confession to describe any statement taken from the suspect of a criminal inquiry, regardless of whether the statement is inculpatory or exculpatory, or whether it would be considered a confession, an admission, or some other creature at common law. Thus, this Article often uses the word statement interchangeably with confession. 2. No State shall.., deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law .... U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1. 3. 490 U.S. 386 (1986).

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most