Court Opinion

ID: 9419617
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:50:28.37487+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.436443
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rutledge,
dissenting in part.
I concur in reversing the judgment against Malinski, but dissent from affirmance of the judgment against Rudish.
I agree that Malinski’s oral confession of October 23, 1942, was coerced, was used in evidence against him and that this requires reversal of the judgment against him. I therefore join in the Court’s opinion in so far as it relates to him. But I am unable to agree that we should stop with the ruling grounded upon the confession of October 23 alone. I think the subsequent confessions, including the written one of October 27, were vitiated with all the coercion which destroys admissibility of the first one. Accordingly their use in evidence also requires reversal of the judgment against Malinski. Furthermore, since the written confession also affected Rudish and in my opinion the devices employed were ineffective to prevent its influencing the verdict and the judgment against him, I think that judgment likewise should be reversed.
I
However great the proof against him otherwise may be, under our system no man should be punished pursuant to a judgment induced wholly or in part by a coerced confession. In my opinion the entire procedure, from the time Malinski was taken into custody until his written confession was obtained nearly five days later, was a single and continuous process of coercion of the type commonly known as “the third degree.” I do not think the Constitution has room for this in company with all the protections it throws around the individual charged with crimp..
*421The State’s summation boldly admitted the case was of that character. It characterized Malinski’s treatment as “quite proper police procedure.” It was “some more psychology — let him sit around with a blanket on him, humiliate him there for a while; let him sit in the corner, let him think he is going to get a shellacking.” The Court of Appeals characterized “the remarks” as “indefensible.” Not only the remarks, but also the conduct they accurately depict must bear that condemnation, as the record demonstrates.
The “psychology” got results. It produced a confession,1 the first in a series. The Court of Appeals treated them as one, though its opinion expressly recognized there were three or more.2 The first came at the end of ten hours of applied “psychology.” 3 The others followed later in the course of and at the end of four days of illegal detention.
*422By any test the first confession was “involuntary.” It was unworthy of credence in any court. No other conclusion can be drawn on the record. The undisputed facts4 bear out this view and the State’s admission that it was obtained by threat of “shellacking.” The evidence is in conflict on whether physical force was used.5 There is no conflict that it was threatened. Nor is there room for inference that the threat did not bring about the confession. “Malinski was not hard to break.” No conviction tainted with this confession’s influence can stand.
Moreover, the first confession was used to secure the defendants’ conviction. In more ways than one. In the first place, it was used directly in evidence against the accused, as the Court of Appeals expressly recognized when it sustained the trial court’s action in submitting that confession, together with the later ones, to the jury,6 and as we now hold. Further, we would be innocent indeed if we did not believe that “leads” furnished were followed and that the evidence thus procured and presented, as an immediate consequence of the initial coercion, had part in bringing about the verdict. The record bears out that belief. Else why was Malinski illegally detained, incommunicado, at the hotel for three days after he had told “the whole thing”? Whatever may be the rule as to the use of evidence secured by means merely unlawful,7 in *423my judgment the Constitution does not tolerate the use of evidence obtained by unconstitutional methods, including coercive ones, to bring about a conviction for crime which is constitutional.8 The Constitution does not thus nullify its own terms, setting them at war with each other. The “leads” thus secured in violation of both the fundamental law and the law of the State9 led directly to the later confessions, including the written one, and- vitiated them with every vice infecting the first. In my judgment, all that followed the first confession was the product of it and therefore of the initial coercion which induced it. Beyond this, the coercive influences themselves continued throughout the period between the first confession and the last, with the single exception that Malinski was given back his clothing.
This fact is highly material as showing the initial coercion. Without more, it belies the explanation that the prisoner was stripped and kept naked or partly so for ten hours because otherwise he might try to escape.10 That danger, if it existed, continued as much after the first confession as before it. It continued throughout the whole *424.time he was detained at the hotel. Malinski was stripped and held naked or partly so, not to prevent his escape, .but to do just what the prosecution says was intended, to “break”- a man “who was not hard to break” by inducing the fear of a “shellacking.”
But the fact that Malinski was given back his clothing, when and only when he confessed, does not show that the coercion ceased then or before the last confession was secured. It shows only that one of the coercive tactics used had become no longer necessary and therefore no longer was employed. Otherwise, why was Malinski not promptly booked and arraigned, as he was four nights .later when the written confession was secured. Why was he detained illegally at the hotel for three days and four nights11 after he admittedly had told “everything” ? Why, further, was he held incommunicado during all this time, seeing only the police, the assistant prosecuting attorney, and Spielfogel? Why also was he subjected to examination, interrupted now and then it is true, in some instances because he fell asleep, but continuing throughout most of each day, including the time of the trips to the scene of the crime and the police garage, and to the early hours of each morning?12
*425All this, the State asks us to believe, was consistent with Malinski’s making a “clean breast” entirely voluntarily. All this comports with the view that the coercion had worn off and the written confession was the act of a man freed from the fears and the pressures which forced out the first one, or so a jury could find. Such is the claim made in the view that the first confession was not used in evidence against the accused.
I cannot accept this view. On the contrary, I think only one conclusion can be drawn from the facts, namely, that all the conditions which forced out Malinski’s first confession continued in full effect until they extorted also the written one, excepting only that .he was given back his clothing. That fact alone is not enough to show that the coercive conditions were wholly abated and the influences they generated had no part in bringing about the later confessions.
*426Taking away Malinski’s clothes is not the controlling fact in this case. It was only one feature of the initial duress. The details of this need not be repeated here. Taken altogether, the first day’s proceedings weave into a pattern typical of “third degree” method.
This pattern was not torn apart when it “broke” Malinski and he confessed for the first time. With that event he was not arraigned or released. His unlawful detention continued for three days and four nights. The questioning continued at frequent intervals each day and each night.13 Spielfogel14 continued to see him daily. No one else except his imprisoners was allowed to see him at any time. That he did not ask again to see counsel or others is but evidence that he had been “broken.” He and Spielfogel were taken to the scene of the crime and to the police garage to identify the automobile used in the crime. These two incidents, I think, show conclusively that the coercion continued after, and did not abate with, the first confession. They were in themselves confessions, as the Court of Appeals recognized. In my view they were at once the products of the first confession and immediately connecting links between it and the written one. They were the consequence of continuing, though interrupted, examination extending from the time of the first confession to the last, and carried within themselves that confession’s vice, transmitting it to the written one. They were the process, with all else that went on during the period, by which whatever had been obtained at the *427first confession was checked, elaborated, verified and distilled until the final essence was separated and bottled in the written confession, a process typical of “third degree” procedure. That they brought forth strong corroborating evidence does not negative or nullify the existence of the coercive conditions which produced both the inducing original confession and the corroboration thus secured.15 Finally when Malinski confessed the last time, it was in the early hours of the morning, after a night and a day of questioning. Only after this confession was obtained, but significantly very shortly thereafter, was Malinski booked, arraigned and taken to the jail.
All these facts stand undisputed on the record. With the facts of the first day’s proceedings, they establish beyond question the pattern of the “third degree.” They establish its application from the time of the arrest throughout the first day until the first confession. They prove with equal clarity, in my.judgment, that every thread in that pattern but one, no longer needed, continued to hold through every moment from the first confession to the last. No single occurrence, not excluding the return of the clothing, took place which gives basis to conclude that the initial psychological pressures were relaxed or their coercive influence and effects were nullified.
If after the clothing was returned, Malinski no longer feared a “shellacking,” an inference there is broad room to doubt, he knew there were other pressures to take the place of this threat, pressures made possible by its success in forcing from him the first confession. He knew that all of the subsequent examination, as it turned out through four nights and three days, would be founded on this confession and that he would be forced to square *428every statement, both in it and made later, not only with every other statement but also with every fact to the discovery of which any statement might lead. This in fact was what he was being required to do, among other incidents, at the scene of the crime and at the police garage. In short, he knew that he was “on the grill” and would continue so until he made whatever statement might satisfy the officials who had him in charge. Cf. Chambers v. Florida, 309 U. S. 227, 240.
■ To say that in such circumstances the coercive influences had ended before they produced the result at which the entire procedure was aimed and with which it stopped, is, in my opinion, a conclusion we cannot draw and the facts allow no room for permitting a jury to make such an inference.
Were the question wholly fresh, the conclusion would seem doubtful in any case that a later confession could be entirely voluntary and uncoerced, where an earlier one had been compelled. A man once broken in will does not readily, if ever, recover from the breaking. Cf. Mr. Justice Murphy, dissenting in Lyons v. Oklahoma, 322 U. S. 596, 606. No change in circumstances can wholly wipe out its effects upon himself or upon others. Thereafter he acts with knowledge that the damage has been done. Others do likewise. He is suspect by his own mouth and must continue so, whether he repudiates or confirms the confession. If he repudiates, he incurs the additional suspicion of lying, and his credibility as a witness in his own behalf is impaired, if not destroyed. If he confirms, he does so with the knowledge he has already confessed and any other course will bring upon him the suspicions and the burden of proof they entail.
For these reasons a stricter standard is necessary where the confession tendered follows a prior coerced one than in the case of a single confession asserted to have been coerced. It would seem consistent therefore with our con*429stitutional tradition that once a coerced confession has been obtained all later ones should be excluded from evidence, wherever there is evidence that the coerced one has been used to secure the later ones. In no other way can the effects of the coercion be wholly excluded from the trial. In no other way can one who has been subjected to use of force or coercive “psychology” be put upon an equal plane for the determination of his guilt or innocence with others who have escaped such unlawful action or be put back in the position he is entitled by law to occupy until his trial and a verdict of guilty, that of a man presumed to be innocent until the contrary is proved by legal means beyond a reasonable doubt. Cf. Lehman, Ch. J., dissenting in the Court of Appeals, 292 N. Y. at 383.
In any event, where there is a continuous process of coercion such as existed in this case, resulting in a series of confessions of which the first is the creative precursor of the later ones, and they moreover are obtained under identical circumstances except for relaxation in one of the initial pressures, there hardly can be room for saying, as was said in the Lyons case, that the latter confessions are not coerced.16 Accordingly I think Malinski’s conviction was *430vitiated as much by admission of the latter confessions as by admitting the earlier oral one. If so, he should not be required to stand another trial at which those confessions may be used against him. Nor should the state officials be permitted to think they may be used again, though the first one must be excluded.
II
This is a capital case. Rudish has been sentenced to death. The written confession involved him. It was used in evidence against Malinski. The court and counsel attempted what I think is and proved to be the impossible, namely, to keep Rudish’s identity as one of the persons mentioned in the confession from the jury by devices similar to those employed in Anderson v. United States, 318 U. S. 350, 356, with the same result. The devices were so obvious as perhaps to emphasize the identity of those they purported to conceal. True, the charge in the Anderson ease was not meticulous as was the one given here to separate the defendants and apply the confession only against the one as to whom technically it was admitted. Nevertheless, I think the line too fine to draw, in capital cases at any rate, between that case and this one in this respect. There could be no valid basis for admitting this confession against Rudish in a separate trial. Due process does not permit one to be convicted upon his own coerced confession. It should not allow him to be convicted upon *431a confession wrung from another by coercion.17 A conviction supported only by such a confession could be but a variation of trial by ordeal. Cf. Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U. S. 278,285; Chambers v. Florida, supra, at 236, 237. The effect is not different because the two, confessor and the person implicated, are tried together or because the torture is applied to other witnesses but not to the accused. Nor is it different, in this respect, because trial is in a state rather than a federal court. Accordingly I think the practice followed in the Anderson case and in Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U. S. 143, should be followed in this one, and the judgment against Rudish should be reversed.
In Lisenba v. California, 314 U. S. 219, the Court stated: “Like the Supreme Court of California we disapprove the violations of law involved in the treatment of the petitioner, and we think it right to add that where a prisoner, held incommunicado, is subjected to questioning by officers for long periods, and deprived of the advice of counsel, we shall scrutinize the record with care to determine whether, by the use of his confession, he is deprived of liberty or life through tyrannical or oppressive means. *432Officers of the law must realize that if they indulge in such practices they may, in the end, defeat rather than further the ends of justice.” 314 U. S. at 240.
The warning exactly fits this case, as do also the repeated warnings referred to by the dissenting opinion in the Court of Appeals.18 I think they should be made effective. That can be done fully in this case only if thé judgments against both of the petitioners are reversed.
Mr. Justice Murphy joins in this opinion.

 The evidence is undisputed that MalinsM arrived at the hotel at about 8:15 a. m., was immediately stripped, and was not given back his clothing, except his shorts, until after he confessed that evening. The summation added to the statement quoted above in the text': “McNally [a police officer] took one look at him and said, ‘Come here’ — just a little tough talk — ‘what do you know about'it?’ Six o’clock in the evening after he was picked up he told’the whole thing.”

 “Counsel have urged upon us, however, that it was error for the court to submit to the jury the confession made by MalinsM orally on October 23rd, by word and deed on October 25th and 26th and to, an Assistant District Attorney and a stenographer in the early morning hours of October 27th. ...
“When we have spoken of Malinsld’s confession we include, of course, not only the confession made orally to a police officer on the Friday night of the arrest but also the two automobile trips on Sunday and Monday, one to the police garage to permit MalinsM to identify the automobile used in the crime and the other to Coney Island to revisit a restaurant and the scene of the crime, and the confession to the District Attorney which was taken stenographically in the early morning of Tuesday, October 27th.” 292 N. Y. 360, 370, 373-374..

 Cf. note 1.

 They are stated fully in the Court’s opinion.

 Malinski testified to violence by two officers who contradicted him in this respect. The majority in the Court of Appeals characterized the testimony as to violence as being “not very strong.”

 Cf. note 2.

 Compare People v. Adams, 176 N. Y. 351, 68 N. E. 636, aff’d sub nom. Adams v. New York, 192 U. S. 585; People v. Defore, 242 N. Y. 13, 150 N. E. 585, cert. denied, 270 U. S. 657; with Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616; Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383; Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U. S. 385; Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298; dissenting opinions of Justices Holmes and Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 469, 471; McNabb *423v. United States, 318 U. S. 332; Anderson v. United States, 318 U. S. 350. See Fraenkel, Recent Developments in the Law of Search and Seizure (1928) 13 Minn. L. Rev. 1; Atkinson, Admissibility of Evidence Obtained through Unreasonable Searches and Seizure (1925) 25 Col. L. Rev. 11; Chafee, Progress of the Law (1922) 35 Harv. L. Rev. 673, 694.

 Cf. Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616; Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383.

 This formed one of the chief grounds of the strong dissenting opinion, concurred in by three judges, in the Court of Appeals. 292 N. Y. 376. Cf. note 18 infra.

 The officers also “explained” their failure to take Malinski before a magistrate “without unnecessary delay” as the New York law requires (Code Crim. Proc. § 165) by saying that though he was seized on October 23rd he was not “arrested” until October 26th. Cf. the dissenting opinion of Lehman, Ch. J., 292 N. Y. at 381-382. • -,

 The fourth night was devoted to final interrogation at the Bath Beach Police Station.

 The questioning of the first day and evening, Friday, October 23, continued after the oral confession and was still in progress at 3:00 á.' in. on Saturday, October 24. Ten to twelve persons were usually present and many participated in the questioning. Investigators stayed' for a time and left to return later. One detective left the hotel at 10:00 or 11:00 p. m. on October 23 and, on his return at 3:00 a. m., found the questioning still continuing’. The interrogation, on and off, had then proceeded for nineteen hours.
■ Throughout October 24, a police lieutenant testified, many of the detectives “continuously” examined and talked to Malinski. The latter-said, “They kept questioning me all that day and night.” Again on October-25 he was questioned “to clear up certain-points,” though *425an officer denied that this “went on for hours and hours.” On that day Malinski was taken on a tour of the scene of the crime. The assistant district attorney and a stenographer accompanied the party. Malinski testified without contradiction that he “was being questioned riding all the way back to the hotel,” and that the questioning continued there until 2:00 a. m.
On Monday, October 26, ten or twelve detectives were still present with Malinski at the hotel. During the course of that day he was questioned and taken to a police garage to identify the automobile used in the crime. There is much confusion in the officers’ testimony as to the time of this trip and whether it preceded or followed one to the Bath Beach Police Station. The weight of their evidence perhaps is that they went to the police garage first, then to the police station, arriving there about 5:00 p. m. The State’s supplementary brief supports this view and the view that on arrival at the station questioning by the assistant district attorney and others began. There is every reason to believe that the final questioning of Malinski, leading to a written confession at 2:10 a. m., October. 27, had proceeded for some nine hours. At the very least, we know that the questioning by a battery of investigators (eight police officers in addition to the assistant district attorney) was in progress at 7:00 p. m., October 26, and continued to midnight.

 Cf. note 12 supra.

 Spielfogel was as much a tool to secure Malinsld’s confession as any member of the police. He was brought down from Sing Sing on October 14, 1942, by the assistant district attorney and others because of what he had revealed about the crime. He made a statement to the police before Malinski was taken into custody and was present at the hotel shortly after Malinski was brought there. He at first refused to discuss the case with the state officials. No satisfactory explanation is offered of his change in attitude.

 At the police garage, although Malinski had “confessed,” he still sought to protect himself by using his handkerchief to open the car door because, he said at the trial, he “did not want to be framed” by leaving his fingerprints.

 That the written confession did not follow on the heels of the first, in the present circumstances, only aggravated the original coercion. The significant fact in Lyons v. Oklahoma, not present in this case, was that the second confession was made under auspices entirely different from those surrounding the first. The prisoner was in. the custody of different officials, men shown by the record to be persons whom he had no reason to fear. And there was no evidence that they shared in or at any time applied the brutal methods by which it was charged, and denied, the first confession had been obtained. The principal question was whether the lapse of time between the two confessions, only some twelve hours, was sufficient so that the second could be taken as having been made free of the compulsions which induced the first, notwithstanding the change in officials having custody. A majority held that the difference in time *430was sufficient to permit the question to go to the jury. But the decision also took into account the change in custodians. 322 U. S. at 604. The Lyons case therefore is not authority for the view that the jury might have found the second confession voluntary, if there had been no such change. Nor does it rule that the coercing officials, by prolonging the period of coercion, though relaxing it in some of the tactics used, can escape its consequences and nullify its continuing effects.

 The matter goes beyond and deeper than mere violation of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination, to whatever extent this may have been applied to the states by adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. Compare Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78, and Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97, with Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U. S. 278; cf. Hysler v. Florida, 315 U. S. 411, stating at 413: “However, if Florida through her responsible officials knowingly used false testimony which was extorted from a witness ‘by violence and torture/ one convicted may claim the protection of the Due Process Clause against a conviction based upon such testimony.” Although the majority thought the tender of proof insufficient to require a trial on a writ of error coram nobis, three dissenting justices deemed it irrelevant whether the state officials knew the coerced confessions were false, 315 U. S. at 424, and interpreted Brown v. Mississippi, supra, and Chambers v. Florida, supra, as barring “confessions wrung from the accused or his accomplices . . .” Cf. also Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U. S. 103, and Pyle v. Kansas, 317 U. S. 213.

 “We cannot close our eyes to the fact that our frequently and solemnly repeated admonitions to law enforcement officers that they are not above the law and may not in their zeal to obtain convictions hold, without arraignment, persons suspected of crime in order to have opportunity to obtain confessions, are often unheeded.” 292 N. Y. at 386.