Opinion ID: 2327484
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Voluntariness of Appellant's Confession

Text: After the Jackson hearing, the court ruled that appellant's confession was voluntary. Appellant's confession was not available, having apparently been lost by the district attorney's office, and appellant claims that this deprived him of a fair hearing. Although it of course would be preferable to have appellant's actual confession available, we do not see how this would be relevant to a determination of whether or not it was voluntarily given. Determination of whether a confession is voluntary is dependent on facts wholly independent of anything that appears on the actual document. [1] The confession itself is not even necessary in deciding appellant's claim that he merely signed a blank sheet of paper, upon which his allegedly coerced confession was later typed. Viewing the actual confession would be unlikely to cast any light on the truth or falsity of that contention. Considerable testimony was introduced at the hearing bearing on the voluntariness of the confession. From that testimony, the hearing judge determined that the confession was voluntary, and we believe that his determination was correct. Appellant also argues that the validity of his confession should be determined under the rules established in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602 (1966). Although his confession was elicited in 1950, appellant claims that Miranda applies to retrials, and that the vacating of his sentence and his subsequent resentencing constitute a retrial. Although there is considerable disagreement as to whether Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U.S. 719, 86 S. Ct. 1772 (1966), requires that Miranda be applied to retrials, [2] this Court has not yet decided this issue and need not do so here, for this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a retrial. Rather, appellant has merely been resentenced, this time with counsel present, but his new sentence is based on his 1951 trial, the only trial which appellant has received. We thus conclude that the determination that appellant's confession was validly obtained was made at a fair hearing conducted under the proper legal standard.