Court Opinion

ID: 9729557
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:42:23.779106+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:59.519623
License: Public Domain

GORDON, J.
(concurring). While I concur in the court’s opinion, I add these remarks to suggest that it is not only the confession which should be rejected upon the new trial but also all the blemished by-products which may reasonably have flowed from such illegal confession.
The confession itself is tainted and so must be the fruits thereof. It may sometimes be difficult to determine whether certain evidence actually stemmed from the confession. Specifically, should the trial court permit the prosecution to place into evidence the testimony which Mrs. Hoyt gave on the witness stand at the first trial? Such testimony has only a few variations from her confession and may or may not have been induced by the erroneous receipt of the confession.
*317wHowever, I believe that it would be the responsibility of the trial court to determine whether Mrs. Hoyt took the witness stand for the primary purpose of opposing her written confession. If so, it would seem to me that this is a fruit of the contaminated confession and bears its infection.
If, on the other hand, the trial court concludes that she took the stand for reasons other than to counter or vary the confession, it would not be required to exclude her testimony given at the first trial.
This “tainted fruit” concept would obviously not require any rejection of Mrs. Hoyt’s admissions made to the officers early in the evening. It would not justify a dismissal of the charges against her. In this respect, we would not need to go so far as did the Washington court which recently discharged a prisoner whose conversations with his attorney were taped with a hidden microphone. State v. Cory (Wash. 1963), 382 Pac. (2d) 1019, 1022. There the court said:
“There is no way to isolate the prejudice resulting from an eavesdropping activity, such as this. If the prosecution gained information which aided it in the preparation of its case, that information would be as available in the second trial as in the first. If the defendant’s right to private consultation has been interfered with once, that interference is as applicable to a second trial as to the first. And if the investigating officers and the prosecution know that the most severe consequence which can follow from their violation of one of thé most valuable rights of a defendant, is that they will have to try the case twice, it can hardly be supposed that they will be seriously deterred from indulging in this very simple and convenient method of obtaining evidence and knowledge of the defendant’s trial strategy.”
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice Hallows joins in this concurrence.