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17 Vand. L. Rev. 421 (1963-1964)
The Use of Coerced Confessions in State Courts

handle is hein.journals/vanlr17 and id is 439 raw text is: The Use of Coerced Confessions in State Courts I. A. Spanogle* In this article Professor Spanogle examines the Supreme Court de- cisions in cases involving coerced confessions. He shows that the under- lying basis of these decisions is not, as has been supposed, an attempt to protect accused persons from outrageous police conduct, but instead the principle that an accused has a right to refuse to disclose his guilt to police interrogators. The application of this principle, he says, calls for a subjective test, looking to the state of the accused's mind at the time the confession was made. He concludes by pointing out the state courts' failure to go beyond mere color-matching of factual situations, suggesting that this failure is possibly the result of the previously unclear definition of the basic principles involved. It is now well settled that involuntary confessions must be excluded from evidence in all criminal trials in state courts. It has been difficult, however, to distinguish a voluntary confession from an involuntary one, because the term involuntary is not well defined. This lack of definition, which creates great problems for state trial and appellate courts in attempting to apply the rule to individual cases, has, in turn, stemmed from a lack of understanding of the reasons for excluding involuntary confessions. The United States Supreme Court has handed down thirty-four coerced confession cases, holding con- fessions admissible in some factual situations and inadmissible in others. The difficulties encountered by the state courts in defining involuntary have not been due to inconsistent decisions by the Court in individual cases, but rather to the absence of any clearly enunciated explanation of the purpose the Court seeks to achieve, or of the interests it seeks to protect, by excluding such evidence.' The failure of the state courts to understand the underlying rationale has led many of them to attempt to color-match case fact situations, or to turn the whole matter over to the jury with the most general of instructions.2 It has even led to calls to abandon the involuntary terminology as incapable of explaining the Court's present standard.3 *Assistant Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University. 1. Indeed, it seems fair to say that the whole modem history of the confession rule both in and out of the federal Supreme Court has been characterized by ambiguity as to what purposes the rule is intended to achieve and what interests it is designed to protect. Allen, Due Process and State Criminal Procedures: Another Look, 48 Nw. U.L. R . 16, 18 (1953). 2. See notes 160-62 infra. 3. However, so long as future opinions continue to discuss the confessions problem

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