Court Opinion

ID: 9647401
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 13:35:19.429157+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:02:35.928807
License: Public Domain

BAIRD, Judge,
concurring on appellant’s petition for discretionary review.
I write separately to address the Court of Appeals’ holding that “trickery or deception *680does not render a confession involuntary, unless the method used was calculated to produce an untruthful confession or was offensive to due process.” Farmah v. State, 789 S.W.2d 665, 671 (Tex.App.—Houston [1st Dist.] 1990).1 The question of whether a confession is truthful has no bearing on the determination of whether the confession was voluntarily obtained under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
In Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U.S. 534, 81 S.Ct. 735, 5 L.Ed.2d 760 (1961), the Supreme Court considered the same issue. Rogers was questioned concerning a murder. When Rogers denied his involvement in the murder, an interrogating officer “pretended, in [Rogers’] hearing, to place a telephone call to police officers, directing them to stand in readiness to bring in [Rogers’] wife for questioning. After the passage of approximately one hour, during which [Rogers] remained silent [the interrogating officer] indicated that he was about to have [Rogers’] wife taken into custody. At this point [Rogers] announced his willingness to confess and did confess....” Id. 365 U.S. at 536-537, 81 S.Ct. at 737. The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed, holding the confession was to be reviewed under an appellate standard of “whether this conduct induced the defendant to make an involuntary and hence untrue statement.”2 State v. Rogers, 143 Conn. 167, 120 A.2d 409, 412 (1956).
On review, the United States Supreme Court stated:
Our decisions under [the Fourteenth Amendment] have made clear that convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth. To be sure, confessions cruelly extorted may be and have been, to an unascertained extent, found to be untrustworthy. But the constitutional principle of excluding confessions that are not voluntary does not rest on this consideration. Indeed, in many of the cases in which the command of the Due Process Clause has compelled us to reverse state convictions involving the use of confessions obtained by impermissible methods, independent corroborating evidence left little doubt of the truth of what the defendant had confessed. Despite such verification, confessions were found to be the product of constitutionally impermissible methods in their inducement. Since a defendant had been subjected to pressures to which, under our accusatorial system, an accused should not be subjected, we were constrained to find that the procedures leading to his conviction had failed to afford him that due process of law which the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees.
Id. 365 U.S. at 541, 81 S.Ct. at 739-740 (citations omitted). The Court held:
From a fair reading of [the opinion of the Connecticut Supreme Court], we cannot but conclude that the question whether Rogers’ confessions were admissible into evidence was answered by reference to a legal standard which took into account the circumstance of probable truth or falsity. [Footnote omitted.] And this is not a permissible standard under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The attention of the trial judge should have been focused, for purposes of the Federal Constitution, on the question whether the behavior of the State’s law enforcement officials was such as to overbear petitioner’s will to resist and bring about confessions not freely self-determined — a question to be answered with *681complete disregard of whether or not petitioner in fact spoke the truth.
Id., 365 U.S. at 543-544, 81 S.Ct. at 741.
Consequently, appellant was entitled to “a fair hearing and a reliable determination on the issue of voluntariness, a determination uninfluenced by the truth or falsity of the confession. Rogers v. Richmond [supra].” Figueroa v. State, 473 S.W.2d 202, 205 (Tex.Cr.App.1971) (quoting Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. 368, 84 S.Ct. 1774, 12 L.Ed.2d 908 (1964)). Therefore, the focus of the Court of Appeals should have been on the totality of the circumstances which is the correct standard of appellate review to determine whether a confession is voluntary.3 Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U.S. 731, 89 S.Ct. 1420, 22 L.Ed.2d 684 (1969). This is an appellate standard we have employed on many occasions. See, Barney v. State, 698 S.W.2d 114, 120 (Tex.Cr.App.1985); Barton v. State, 605 S.W.2d 605, 609 (Tex.Cr.App.1980); and, Berry v. State, 582 S.W.2d 463 (Tex.Cr.App.1979). See also, Connor v. State, 773 S.W.2d 13 (Tex.Cr.App.1989); and, Ex parte Brandley, 781 S.W.2d 886, 893 (Tex.Cr.App.1989).
If an appellate court determines a confession was obtained in violation of the Fifth Amendment, the inquiry then becomes whether admission of the confession was nevertheless harmless under the standard announced in Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24, 87 S.Ct. 824, 828, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967) (The Court must determine whether the wrongfully admitted evidence “was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.”). In Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 111 S.Ct. 1246, 113 L.Ed.2d 302 (1991), a divided Supreme Court addressed this issue. The Court held:
It is evident from a comparison of the constitutional violations which we have held subject to harmless error, and those which we have held not, that involuntary statements or confessions belong in the former category. The admission of an involuntary confession is “trial error,” similar in both degree and kind to the erroneous admission of other types of evidence. The evidentiary impact of an involuntary confession, and its effect upon.the composition of the record, is indistinguishable from that of a confession obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment — of evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment — or of a prosecutor’s improper comment on a defendant’s silence at trial in violation of the Fifth Amendment. When reviewing the erroneous admission of an involuntary confession, the appellate court, as it does with the admission of other forms of improperly admitted evidence, simply reviews the remainder of the evidence against the defendant to determine whether the admission of the confession was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
Id., 499 U.S. at 310, 111 S.Ct. at 1265.
Therefore, to address whether a confession is voluntary, the appellate court must look to the totality of the circumstances, not the truthfulness of the confession. Frazier v. Cupp, supra; and, Rogers, supra. If the confession was not voluntarily obtained, the appellate court must then determine whether its admission was harmless. Fulminante, supra.
With these comments, I otherwise join the majority opinion.

. To reach this holding the Court of Appeals relied on Dotsey v. State, 630 S.W.2d 343 (Tex.App.—Austin 1982, no pet.), and Snow v. State, 721 S.W.2d 943 (Tex.App.—Houston [1st Dist.] 1986, no pet.). However, neither Dotsey nor Snow filed a petition for discretionary review. Consequently, we did not have the opportunity in either case to address the issue.

. All emphasis is supplied unless otherwise indicated.

. Application of the “totality of the circumstances” standard of appellant review will vary, but in every case the appellate court is required to:
... sit to review the sum of the facts, and to determine if, and at what point, the totality of those facts renders a confession so suspect that to admit it into evidence would deny the defendant due process of law, and contravene the prohibition against compelled self-incrimination found in the Fifth Amendment.
That point will shift from case to case, dependent upon the presence or absence of factors suggesting coercion, intimidation, overreaching, or the deprivation of rights secured by the constitution, which combine to defeat the free and independent exercise of the will of an accused.
Jurek v. Estelle, 623 F.2d 929, 941 (5th Cir.1980).