Source: https://openjurist.org/384/us/719
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 18:39:19+00:00

Document:
Argued March 1 and 2, 1966.
Petitioner Cassidy was taken into custody in Camden, New Jersey, at 4 a.m. on January 29, 1958, for felony murder. The police took him to detective headquarters and interrogated him in a systematic fashion for several hours. At 9 a.m. he was brought before the chief detective, two other police officers, and a court stenographer. The chief detective introduced the persons present, informed Cassidy of the possible charges against him, gave him the warning set forth in the margin,1 concluded that he understood the warning, and obtained his consent to be questioned. Cassidy was then interrogated until 10:25 a.m. and made a partial confession to felony murder. The stenographer recorded this interrogation and read it back to Cassidy for his acknowledgment. Police officers then took him to another part of the building and apparently questioned him further. At 12:15 p.m. he was brought back to the chief detective's office for another half hour of recorded interrogation. Under circumstances similar to those already described, Cassidy amended his confession to add vital incriminating details. For the next 11 hours he was held in a detention room and may have been subjected to further questioning. At 11:40 p.m. the police returned him to the chief detective's office for a final brief round of recorded interrogation. Taken together, Cassidy's three formal statements added up to a complete confession of felony murder, and they were later introduced against him at his trial for that crime.
The confessions of Johnson and Cassidy were offered in evidence by the State at their joint trial for felony murder. The judge held a hearing out of the presence of the jury on the voluntariness of the confessions. Petitioners made no effort to rebut the testimony adduced by the State relating to this issue. The judge found the confessions voluntary and admitted them into evidence. Petitioners then expressly relinquished their right under state law to have the issue of voluntariness, and the accompanying evidence, submitted to the jury for redetermination.2 They did not introduce any testimony to dispute the correctness of their confessions.
The convictions of Johnson and Cassidy became final six years ago, when the New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed them upon direct appeal4 and the time expired for petitioners to seek certiorari from the decision. There followed a battery of collateral attacks in state and federal courts based on new factual allegations, in which petitioners repeatedly and unsuccessfully assailed the voluntariness of their confessions.5 This proceeding arises out of still another application for post-conviction relief, accompanied by a fresh set of factual allegations, in which petitioners have argued in part that their confessions were inadmissible under the principles of Escobedo. The court below rejected the claim, holding that Escobedo did not affect convictions which had become final prior to the date of that decision,6 and it is this holding which we are principally called upon to review. In view of the standards announced one week ago concerning the warnings which must be given prior to in-custody interrogation, this case also obliges us to determine whether Miranda should be accorded retroactive application.
We here stress that the choice between retroactivity and nonretroactivity in no way turns on the value of the constitutional guarantee involved. The right to be represented by counsel at trial, applied retroactively in Gideon v. Wainwright, supra, has been described by Justice Schaefer of the Illinois Supreme Court as 'by far the most pervasive * * * (o)f all of the rights that an accused person has.'7 Yet Justice Brandeis even more boldly characterized the immunity from unjustifiable intrusions upon privacy, which was denied retroactive enforcement in Linkletter as 'the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.'8 To reiterate what was said in Linkletter, we do not disparage a constitutional guarantee in any manner by declining to apply it retroactively. See 381 U.S., at 629, 85 S.Ct., at 1737.
Finally, we emphasize that the question whether a constitutional rule of criminal procedure does or does not enhance the reliability of the fact-finding process at trial is necessarily a matter of degree. We gave retroactive effect to Jackson v. Denno, supra, because confessions are likely to be highly persuasive with a jury, and if coerced they may well be untrustworthy by their very nature.9 On the other hand, we denied retroactive application to Griffin v. State of California, supra, despite the fact that comment on the failure to testify may sometimes mislead the jury concerning the reasons why the defendant has refused to take the witness stand. We are thus concerned with a question of probabilities and must take account, among other factors, of the extent to which other safeguards are available to protect the integrity of the truth-determining process at trial.
Having in mind the course of the prior cases, we turn now to the problem presented here: whether Escobedo and Miranda should be applied retroactively.10 Our opinion in Miranda makes it clear that the prime purpose of these rulings is to guarantee full effectuation of the privilege against self-incrimination, the mainstay of our adversary system of criminal justice. See 384 U.S., pp. 458—466, 86 S.Ct., pp. 1619—1624. They are designed in part to assure that the person who responds to interrogation while in custody does so with intelligent understanding of his right to remain silent and of the consequences which may flow from relinquishing it. In this respect the rulings secure scrupulous observance of the traditional principle, often quoted but rarely heeded to the full degree, that 'the law will not suffer a prisoner to be made the deluded instrument of his own conviction.'11 Thus while Escobedo and Miranda guard against the possibility of unreliable statements in every instance of incustody interrogation, they encompass situations in which the danger is not necessarily as great as when the accused is subjected to overt and obvious coercion.
At the same time, we do not find any persuasive reason to extend Escobedo and Miranda to cases tried before those decisions were announced, even though the cases may still be on direct appeal. Our introductory discussion in Linkletter, and the cases cited therein, have made it clear that there are no jurisprudential or constitutional obstacles to the rule we are adopting here. See 381 U.S., at 622—629, 85 S.Ct., at 1733—1737. In appropriate prior cases we have already applied new judicial standards in a wholly prospective manner. See England v. Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners, 375 U.S. 411, 84 S.Ct. 461, 11 L.Ed.2d 440 (1964); James v. United States, 366 U.S. 213, 81 S.Ct. 1052, 6 L.Ed.2d 246 (1961). Nor have we been shown any reason why our rule is not a sound accommodation of the principles of Escobedo and Miranda.
'(where) the investigation is no longer a general inquiry into an unsolved crime but has begun to focus on a particular suspect, the suspect has been taken into police custody, the police carry out a process of interrogations that lends itself to eliciting incriminating statements, the suspect has requested and been denied an opportunity to consult with his lawyer, and the police have not effectively warned him of his absolute constitutional right to remain silent * * *.' 378 U.S., at 490—491, 84 S.Ct., at 1765.
As for the standards laid down one week ago in Miranda, if we were persuaded that they had been fully anticipated by the holding in Escobedo, we would measure their prospectivity from the same date. Defendants still to be tried at that time would be entitled to strict observance of constitutional doctrines already clearly foreshadowed. The disagreements among other courts concerning the implications of Escobedo,12 however, have impelled us to lay down additional guidelines for situations not presented by that case. This we have done in Miranda, and these guidelines are therefore available only to persons whose trials had not begun as of June 13, 1966. See Tehan v. United States ex rel. Shott, 382 U.S., at 409, 86 S.Ct., at 461, n. 3, in relation to Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964), and Griffin v. State of California, supra.
The New Jersey Supreme Court invoked a state procedural rule, previously applied in another confession case, as a bar to reconsideration of petitioners' coerced confession claim, even in the light of their new allegations regarding the denial of outside assistance. See N.J.Rev.Rules 3:10A—5 (1965 Supp.); State v. Smith, 43 N.J. 67, 202 A.2d 669 (1964). This is an adequate state ground which precludes us from testing the coerced confession claim on the present review, whatever may be the significance of the state court's reliance on its procedural rule in federal habeas corpus proceedings. See Fay v. Noia, 372 U.S. 391, 83 S.Ct. 822 (1963).
'Under the New Jersey procedure for the admission in evidence of a confession, the trial judge must first determine whether the confession was voluntary. If he finds the confession to be voluntary, and hence admissible, he instructs the jury to also consider the voluntariness of the confession and to disregard it unless the State proves it was voluntarily given.' 43 N.J. 572, 586, n. 9, 206 A.2d 737, 744—745, n. 9.

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