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Confessions
Coercion
As set forth in the introduction, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." This means, essentially, that in certain situations a confession will not be voluntary, and, therefore, a Fourteenth Amendment violation, if it is sufficiently coerced.
There are many types of coercion that may take place. For example, you must consider the length of an interrogation - an interrogation of unreasonable length may be a strong indication of coercion, which would prevent a confession from being admissible in court. For example, in Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U.S. 143 (1944), a suspect was allegedly interrogated with almost no rest for a thirty-six hour period. The United States Supreme Court held:
We think a situation such as that here shown by uncontradicted evidence is so inherently coercive that its very existence is irreconcilable with the possession of mental freedom by a lone suspect against whom its full coercive force is brought to bear. It is inconceivable that any court of justice in the land, conducted as our courts are, open to the public, would permit prosecutors serving in relays to keep a defendant witness under continuous cross examination for thirty-six hours without rest or sleep in an effort to extract a 'voluntary' confession. Nor can we, consistently with Constitutional due process of law, hold voluntary a confession where prosecutors do the same thing away from the restraining influences of a public trial in an open court room.
A confession may also be coerced based on the setting in which the interrogation took place. . . .
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Page last updated: 2/17/2007
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