Opinion ID: 313376
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Inadequacy of the District Court's Findings.

Text: 12 The asserted vice of the District Court's disposition of the motion to suppress the confession resides in the charged inadequacy of his ruling: The motion is overruled. In other contexts, such language might indeed be read as expressing a trial judge's conclusion that the evidence before him was sufficient to satisfy the prosecution's burden to establish the voluntariness of the confession. However, we believe that today's law exhibits its quite special anxiety that conviction of those accused of crime may not be based upon a confession unless the voluntariness of such confession be first established by procedures commanded by the United States Supreme Court. Whatever may have been accepted as sufficient prior to the Court's decision in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. 368, 84 S.Ct. 1774, 12 L.Ed.2d 908 (1964), nothing less than obedience to the rule of that case will now do. There the Court said: 13 These procedures [determination of admissibility of a confession] must, therefore, be fully adequate to insure a reliable and clear-cut determination of the voluntariness of the confession, including the resolution of disputed facts upon which the voluntariness issue may depend. 378 U.S. at 391, 84 S.Ct. at 1788. 14 We think also that a more specific explication of the rule is furnished by Sims v. Georgia, 385 U.S. 538, 87 S.Ct. 639, 17 L.Ed.2d 593 (1967), wherein the Court said: 15 Although the judge need not make formal findings of fact or write an opinion, his conclusion that the confession is voluntary must appear from the record with unmistakable clarity. Here there has been absolutely no ruling on that issue and it is therefore impossible to know whether the judge thought the confession voluntary . . .. 385 U.S. at 544, 87 S.Ct. at 643 (Emphasis supplied.) 16 We are at once aware that the challenge to the voluntariness of the confession involved in Sims had much more substance to it than the one we deal with here. However, we are not at liberty to substitute our appraisal of the evidence taken on the motion to suppress and say on our own that it portrays with unmistakable clarity the voluntariness of appellant's confession. 17 We should observe further that we are not at liberty to employ the harmless error rule to sustain the District Court. Certainly if we could pass upon the voluntariness of Goss' confession and consider it with the other evidence before the jury, we would have little trouble in saying that, whatever the procedural errors, appellant's guilt was made out beyond a reasonable doubt. Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967). In considering harmless error in this case, we are limited to the trial evidence, exclusive of the confession. This evidence consisted of a customer of the bank, present at the time of the robbery, making a courtroom identification of appellant as one of the robbers. No one else present in the bank during the robbery identified appellant; the robbers were masked, but the customer said that appellant's mask, a stocking cap, had fallen off at the moment she saw him jumping over the counter. This witness, like everyone else present, had obeyed the robbers' command to lie, face down, on the bank floor. An FBI agent did produce at trial one of the pictures taken during the course of the robbery. He did not, however, identify it as a picture of defendant. Its relevancy and materiality arises only from the agent saying that Goss, at the time of the confession, identified the print as a picture of himself. The print was not exhibited to the jury for their evaluation of it as a picture of appellant. 18 We have, perhaps at needless length, set out the foregoing to explain our unwillingness to find that, without the confession, the evidence of appellant's guilt was overwhelming. Today's concern for the rights of those accused of crime dictates that quite special care be exercised in permitting the use of confessions as prosecutorial weapons. Jackson v. Denno, supra, and Sims v. Georgia, supra, enjoin upon us employment of such care in dealing with the case before us. 19 The case is remanded to the District Judge for a fresh review of the evidence adduced at the hearing on voluntariness, and an adequate expression from him as to whether or not the voluntariness of Goss' confession does appear from such evidence, with unmistakable clarity. The District Judge shall, after such consideration and the making of the ordered finding, transmit it to this Court. 20 We will not now grant a new trial, but will await receipt of the findings which we hereby direct the District Judge to make. 21 We believe this procedure is consonant with the command of Jackson v. Denno, supra, 378 U.S. 368, 395, 84 S.Ct. 1774 (1964). See also the procedure directed by the Eighth Circuit in United States v. Keeble, 459 F.2d 757, 762 (1972), rev'd on other grounds, 412 U.S. 205, 93 S.Ct. 1993, 36 L.Ed.2d 844 (decided May 29, 1973.) 22