Court Opinion

ID: 9422260
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:01:54.69349+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:35.500773
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring.
Emil Reck at the age of twelve was classified as a “high grade mental defective” 1 and placed in an institution for *445mental defectives. He dropped out of school when he was sixteen. Though he was retarded he had no criminal record, no record of delinquency. At the time of his arrest, confession, and conviction he was nineteen years old.
He was arrested Wednesday morning, March 25, 1936. The next day, March 26, his father went to the police asking where his son was and asking to see him. The police would give him no information. On March 27 his father came to the police station again but was not allowed to see his son. Later the father tried to see his son at the hospital but was denied admission.
The father was denied the right to see his son over and again. The son was held for at least eight full days incommunicado. He was arraigned before a magistrate on April 2, 1936, only after he had confessed.
The late Professor Alexander Kennedy of the University of Edinburgh has put into illuminating words the manner in which long-continued interrogation under conditions of stress can give the interrogator effective command over the prisoner.2 The techniques — now explained in a vast literature — include (1) disorientation and disillusion; (2) synthetic conflict and tension; (3) crisis and conversion; (4) rationalization and indoctrination; (5) apologetics and exploitation.3
The device of “synthetic conflict and tension” is summarized as follows:4
“Production by conditioning methods of a state of psychological tension with its concomitant physical *446changes in heart, respiration, skin and other organs, the feeling being unattached to any particular set of ideas. This is later caused to transfer itself to synthetic mental conflicts created out of circumstances chosen from the subject’s life-history, but entirely irrelevant to the reasons for his detention. The object is to build up anxiety to the limits of tolerance so as to invoke pathological mental mechanisms of escape comparable to those of Conversion Hysteria.”
Whether the police used this technique on Emil Reck no one knows. We do know from this record that Emil Reck was quite ill during his detention. He was so ill that he was taken to a hospital incommunicado. He was so ill he passed blood. What actually transpired no one will know. The records coming before us that involve the relations between the police and a prisoner during periods of confinement are extremely unreliable. The word of the police is on the side of orderly procedure, nonoppressive conduct, meticulous regard for the sensibilities of the prisoner. There is the word of the accused against the police. But his voice has little persuasion.
We do know that long detention, while the prisoner is shut off from the outside world, is a recurring practice in this country — for those of lowly birth, for those without friends or status.5 We also know that detention incommunicado was the secret of the inquisition and is the secret of successful interrogation in Communist countries. Professor Kennedy summarized the matter:6
“From the history of the Inquisition we learn that certain empirical discoveries were made and recog-*447nised as important by a thoughtful and objective minority of those concerned. The first was that if a prisoner were once induced to give a detailed history of his past and to discuss it with his interrogators in the absence of threat or persuasion or even of evidence of interest, he might after an emotional crisis recant and confess his heresies. The second discovery was that true and lasting conversion could never be produced by the threat of physical torture. Torture not infrequently had the opposite effect and induced a negative mental state in which the prisoner could no longer feel pain but could achieve an attitude of mental detachment from his circumstances and with it an immunity to inquisition. The most surprising feature was the genuine enthusiasm of those who did recant. While these results were necessarily ascribed at the time to the powers of persuasion of the Inquistadores, it is evident in retrospect that something was happening which was often beyond their control. The same facts come to light in the long history of Russian political interrogation. In the Leninist period, the success of the immensely tedious method of didactic interrogation then in use was similarly ascribed to the appeal of Marxist doctrine to reason. The fact is that in conditions of confinement, detailed history-taking without reference to incriminating topics and the forming of a personal relationship with an interrogator who subscribes to a system of political or religious explanation, there may occur an endogenous and not always predictable process of conversion to the ideas and beliefs of the interrogator.”
Television teaches that confessions are the touchstone of law enforcement. Experience however teaches that confessions born of long detention under conditions of stress, confusion, and anxiety are extremely unreliable.
*448People arrested by the police may produce confessions that come gushing forth and carry all the earmarks of reliability. But detention incommunicado for days on end is so fraught with evil that we should hold it to be inconsistent with the requirements of that free society which is reflected in the Bill of Rights. It is the means whereby the commands of the Fifth Amendment (which I deem to be applicable to the States) are circumvented. It is true that the police have to interrogate to arrest; it is not true that they may arrest to interrogate.7 I would hold that any confession obtained by the police while the defendant is under detention is inadmissible, unless there is prompt arraignment and unless the accused is informed of his right to silence and accorded an opportunity to consult counsel. This judgment of conviction should therefore be reversed.

 At an interview taking place a few weeks after his arrest in 1936, Reck knew that the Mississippi was a big river, that New York was a big city, that Washington, D. C., was our capital, and that Hoover preceded Roosevelt. But he was unable to divide 25 by 5; *445he did not know how many weeks were in a year, how many feet in a yard, how many quarts in a gallon, when Columbus discovered America, who the opponents were in the Civil War, or the capitals of Illinois, England, France, or Germany.

 Kennedy, The Scientific Lessons of Interrogation, Proc. Hoy. Instn. 38, No. 170 (1960).

 Id., pp. 96-97.

 Id., p. 96.

 “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Anatole France as quoted in Cournos, A Modern Plutarch (1928), p. 27.

 Id., p. 94.

 In ordinary circumstances, the police, under law, are to conduct investigations of crime by interview, and not by interrogation. Typically, it is the Grand Jury or a Court, not the police, which has the power to compel testimony, subject to the limitations of relevance and privilege. See United States v. Bufalino, 285 F. 2d 408, 415, 416, 420. To allow the police to use their power to arrest as a substitute for the power of subpoena is, I think, to strip the Fifth Amendment of its meaning.