Court Opinion

ID: 9696709
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:55:45.180623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:25.777635
License: Public Domain

Gordon, J.
{concurring). When police officers hold an arrested person incommunicado, there is a head-on conflict of rights and interests. On the one hand, the police officers have an understandable desire to strike while the iron is hot — to interrogate and to investigate; they also want to prevent the suspect from alerting any accomplices. On the other hand, the arrested person, by reason of basic constitutional and statutory rights, should be permitted to consult with counsel and to be brought before a magistrate “without unreasonable delay.”
Even if the motives of the police in detaining a suspect incommunicado are not reprehensible, the effect is. It smacks of an offensive police state to 'permit an individual to be swept into the arms of the police and to be completely sealed, off from any outside communication for a period as long as thirty-six hours.
This constitutes an abuse to the arrested individual whom we must assume, by law, is innocent. There is also terror *151to the members of his family who have no means of finding out where he is or what has happened. The typical wife or parent would be making frantic inquiries to hospitals if a husband or son failed to return home all night. Yet nothing would be learned.
Assuming that Pulaski was in fact held incommunicado by the police for thirty-six hours as he claims, the court has properly disapproved of such practice. I have a doubt that mere disapproval is sufficient, although I recognize that this court has declined to reverse convictions upon the ground of prolonged detentions. Indeed, it was pointed out in a note in 1960 Wisconsin Law Review, 164, 170, that the Wisconsin supreme court has never found a detention to be unreasonable. However, an extended detention is one of the factors to be considered in determining whether a confession was voluntarily made. See Haynes v. Washington (1963), 373 U. S. 503, 83 Sup. Ct. 1336, 10 L. Ed. (2d) 513. Wisconsin has recently enacted a statute which in a very limited manner is designed to assure an arrested person the right to consult his attorney. Sec. 946.75, Stats. 1961.
In my opinion, the holding of a suspect incommunicado for a long period offends a fundamental fairness which is essential to justice; courts should revise their interpretations so as to restrict such detentions to far shorter periods. In Cicenia v. LaGay (1958), 357 U. S. 504, 508, 78 Sup. Ct. 1297, 2 L. Ed. (2d) 1523, the United States supreme court, although it found no violation of due process, referred to the denial by the police of the suspect’s request to confer with his attorney and said:
“We share the strong distaste expressed by the two lower courts over the episode disclosed by this record.”
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice Dieterich joins in this concurring opinion.