Court Opinion

ID: 9477963
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:35:58.136978+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:08.885330
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Following United States v. Hawkins, 823 F.2d 1020 (7th Cir.1987), and Sotelo v. Indiana State Prison, 850 F.2d 1244 (7th Cir.1988), we engage in de novo appellate review of the voluntariness of a confession. I doubt that this is wise, for reasons given in Sotelo, 850 F.2d at 1253-55 (concurring opinion); I do not doubt that it is required by controlling precedent in this circuit, so I join the court’s opinion.
The case contains only one legal issue requiring plenary appellate review: the effect of Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 542-43, 18 S.Ct. 183, 186-87, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897). Bram says that a confession “obtained by any direct or implied promises, however slight”, is involuntary. Like many other appellate courts, we slide around that statement on the ground that it is inconsistent with the totality-of-the-eir-cumstances inquiry of Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973), reiterated in Miller v. Fenton, 474 U.S. 104, 106 S.Ct. 445, 88 L.Ed.2d 405 (1985). It is inconsistent, too, with the fact that an exchange of leniency for information, a common trade in the criminal justice system, is a good thing. We usually call transactions “voluntary” when both sides gain (or have the potential to gain) something from the exchange and neither side threatens force or engages in fraud. Courts permit confessions even under conditions that would be forbidden in forming private contracts: one party is in prison (a source of leverage many a bargainer would like to possess!) and the other is allowed a modicum of trickery. E.g., Sotelo, 850 F.2d at 1250-51. Long’s confession, though, would be voluntary even under the contractual standard. He confessed because he thought, rightly, that he had something to gain; the state’s attorney made the promise that elicited the confession because the prosecution, too, had something to gain. Long expected the confession to be used against him in state court; that was part of the arrangement rather than a reason to think his choice “involuntary”. If Long’s election was voluntary for this purpose, it was voluntary, period.
As an original matter, it is hard to see the objection to inducements to confess, provided both sides are truthful and the state keeps its word — as the state prosecutor did. A confession is not a guilty plea, so the prosecutor needn’t inform the suspect of all of the “consequences” of the confession; a “consequence" for this purpose is a legal penalty rather than an effect on related litigation; even in accepting a formal guilty plea the state judge would not have needed to tell Long that his plea might make it easier for the federal government to convict him. Bram has not excluded a confession in decades; it is a derelict, offering false hope to suspects and vexing judges who must distinguish it on the way to decisions reached on other grounds. It is a source of pointless litigation, an irritant only a higher court may remove.