Court Opinion

ID: 9689260
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 18:26:31.828391+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:46.537833
License: Public Domain

On Rehearing
CATES, Judge.
Rodgers’s counsel earnestly claims Escobedo v. State of Illinois, 378 U.S. 478, 84 S.Ct. 1758, 12 L.Ed.2d 977, has the effect of voiding Rodgers’s confession.
We cannot help but observe that the Fourteenth Amendment confession cases arc gradually propelling the police to the brink *663■of observing the nine Judges’ Rules used in England. See Archbold, Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice (35th Ed.), §§ 1118-1121.
Today Mr. Justice Frankfurter’s language remains yet valid:
“ * * * Due process does not demand of the States, in their administration of the criminal law, standards of favor to the accused which our civilization, in its most sensitive expression, has never found it practical to adopt. The principle of the Indian Evidence Act which excludes all confessions made to the police or by persons while they are detained by the police has never been accepted in England or in this country. Nor has the principle of the Scottish cases barring the use in evidence of a defendant’s incriminating responses to police questioning at any time after suspicion has focused on him. Rather, this Court (in cases coming here from the lower federal courts), the courts of England and of Canada, and the courts of all the States have agreed in holding permissible the receipt of confessions secured by the questioning of suspects in custody by crime-detection officials. And, in a long series of cases, this Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit a State from such detention and examination of a suspect as, under all the circumstances, is found not to be coercive.” (Footnotes omitted.) — Culombe v. Connecticut, 367 U.S. 568, at 588, 81 S.Ct 1860, at 1871, 1872. 6 L.Ed.2d 1037.
Rule 3 of the Judges’ Rules reads:
“3. Persons in custody should not be questioned without the usual caution being first administered.”
The usual caution is explicit that the detainee’s statement not only can be used against him but also against anyone else, e. g., friends or relatives: “You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you say may be given in evidence.”
Nothing, however, in the nine Rules relates to the right to advise with a solicitor. Archbold, supra (Cum.Supp. No. 8, Jan. 25, 1965), § 1119, points out that the Rules do not affect the distinct principle, viz:
“(c) That every person at any stage of an investigation should be able to communicate and to consult privately with a solicitor. This is so even if he is in custody provided that in such a case no unreasonable delay or hindrance is caused to the processes of investigation or the administration of justice by his doing so
Nevertheless, the editors state the paramountcy of a judicial enquiry as to the voluntariness of the confession, listing the following as the overriding principles:
“(e) That it is a fundamental condition of the admissibility in evidence against any person, equally of any oral answer given by that person to a question put by a police officer and of any statement made by that person, that it shall have been voluntary, in the sense that it has not been obtained from him by fear of prejudice or hope of advantage, exercised or held out by a person in authority, or by oppression.”
III.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in the instant case Rodgers had insisted on first talking to a lawyer. Then, had he confessed, would the circumstance of his having consulted counsel intensify the damnifying quality of his admission of guilt?
Wc doubt the admissibility of such a supposed incident. Hence — without other evidence of oppression — the mere fact of non-access to counsel is a circumstance of indifference.
The right of a person in custody to remain silent is formidable. Glanville Williams, Demanding Name and Address, 66 L.Q.Rev. 465.
*664We conclude counsel reads too much into verbal interstices of Escobedo. There Mr. Justice Goldberg opens for the majority:
“ * * * the refusal by the police to honor petitioner’s request to consult with his lawyer during the course of an interrogation [in “custody,” at police headquarters] constitutes a denial of ‘the Assistance of Counsel’ * * * obligatory upon the States * * (Italics and bracketed matter added.)
This frame of reference we take to be words of limitation.
Application overruled.
PRICE, P. J., not sitting.