Court Opinion

ID: 9651437
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:19:31.999833+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:34.047112
License: Public Domain

POMEROY, Justice
(dissenting).
The issue of the voluntariness of appellant’s confession was vigorously contested at a suppression hearing; the hearing judge found the confession to have been voluntary. At trial the defendant, as was his right, again challenged the voluntariness of the confession. Pa.R.Cr. P. 323(j), 19 P.S. Appendix (Supp.1974-75). The jury was instructed at length concerning the voluntariness issue and was specifically told that if they determined that the confession was involuntary they should “disregard [it] completely” and could properly find the defendant not guilty. The appellant has no quarrel with the judge’s charge on this issue, and took no exception to it. Notwithstanding these decisions by the finders of fact at the trial level, the Court today holds as a matter of law, that the confession “was not the product of a free will but rather the result of coercion.” Opinion, ante at 134. My own examination of the record satisfies me that the lower court result is supportable, and I would abide by its decision. I therefore dissent. Commonwealth v. Long, 460 Pa. 461, 333 A.2d 865, 867 (1975); Commonwealth v. Karchella, 449 Pa. 270, 273, 296 A.2d 732, 733 (1972); Commonwealth v. Garvin, 448 Pa. 258, 269, 293 A.2d 33, 39 (1972).
We have always taken a “totality of circumstances” approach to the question of voluntariness. Commonwealth ex rel. Butler v. Rundle, 429 Pa. 141, 239 A.2d *393426 (1968). The length of interrogation is but one factor to be considered in determining whether a confession is truly the product of the free will of its maker. Commonwealth v. Tucker, 461 Pa. 191, 335 A.2d 704 (1975). The error which permeates the present decision is the giving of undue weight to but a single factor in the total group of circumstances, viz., the length of the interrogation period.
The cases cited by the majority as involving “similar features” to the instant case all reflect the totality approach. In Commonwealth v. Purvis, 458 Pa. 359, 326 A.2d 369 (1974), the defendant was a 21 year old who had been classified as mentally retarded and who had been undergoing methadone treatment. In light of these facts, we held his confession involuntary where he was interrogated for some 25 hours. We found the confession in Commonwealth v. Simms, 455 Pa. 599, 317 A.2d 265 (1974) to be involuntary where it was shown that the defendant was a 31 year old with an IQ of 61 who had been questioned for 22 hours while handcuffed to a metal chair. Commonwealth v. Riggins, 451 Pa. 519, 304 A.2d 473 (1973) involved a confession found to be involuntary because obtained from a 17 year old defendant who had been questioned continuously for 17 hours. The case cited by the majority which is perhaps the closest factually to the case at bar is Commonwealth v. Eiland, 450 Pa. 566, 301 A.2d 651 (1973). In that case, the defendant was a 20 year old with a 10th grade education who when interrogated by the police initially denied any involvement in the crime of which he was ultimately convicted and who was isolated for several periods of time during the span of the interrogation. He confessed 11 hours later and was not arraigned until 25 hours after arrest. In Eiland, however, it was not merely the length of interrogation which rendered the confession involuntary but the fact that what precipitated the confession 11 hours after interrogation began was a promise of lenien*394cy by the police if the defendant would confess. We there held that the combination of these factors “constituted a subtle but nonetheless powerful form of impermissible psychological coercion.” Id. at 574, 301 A.2d at 654.
Considering as we must only “the evidence of the prosecution’s witnesses and so much of the evidence for the defense as, fairly read in the context of the record as a whole, remains uncontradicted,” Culombe v. Connecticut, 367 U.S. 568, 604, 81 S.Ct. 1860, 1880, 6 L.Ed.2d 1037, 1059 (1961), Tucker, supra at 195-196, 335 A.2d at 706, that evidence in the case at bar does not warrant a finding that the appellant’s confession was involuntary as a matter of law. While almost 19 and one-half hours passed between the time appellant was first questioned and the time he completed signing his formal written confession, the interrogation was not continuous during that period; Irvin was given frequent and ample opportunity to rest, eat and use the bathroom. He was permitted to see and converse with his parents. Furthermore, appellant first admitted his presence at the scene of the crime approximately 4 and one-half hours after the onset of interrogation. His admission of participation in the stabbing was made within 7 hours of this first inculpatory statement and less than 11 hours following commencement of the questioning. I find nothing in these time spans to justify this Court in accusing the police of a “blatant effort” to undermine appellant’s capacity to resist, or of having “tortuously extracted” each concession from him. On the contrary, the suppression court and the jury at trial had ample evidentiary support for a finding that the entire period was taken up with legitimate efforts on the part of the police directed towards the solving of two stabbing assaults, one involving Irvin and another which occurred almost simultaneously, in order to charge those who were shown to have participated. It is for these *395reasons that I am unwilling to declare, as does the majority, that the final product of appellant’s interrogation was coerced and involuntary as a matter of law. Hence this dissent.
JONES, C. J., joins in this dissent.