Court Opinion

ID: 9430408
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:40.662654+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:24.404585
License: Public Domain

Chief Justice Burger,
concurring in the judgment.
I concurred only in the judgment in Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U. S. 477, 487-488 (1981), and in doing so I observed:
“The extraordinary protections afforded a person in custody suspected of criminal conduct are not without a valid basis, but as with all ‘good’ things they can be carried too far.”
The urge for “bright-line” rules readily applicable to a host of varying situations would likely relieve this Court some*637what from more than a doubling of the Court’s work in recent decades, but this urge seems to be leading the Court to an absolutist, mechanical treatment of the subject. At times, it seems, the judicial mind is in conflict with what behavioral— and theological — specialists have long recognized as a natural human urge of people to confess wrongdoing. See, e. g., T. Reik, The Compulsion to Confess (1959).
We must, of course, protect persons in custody from coercion, but step by step we have carried this concept well beyond sound, common-sense boundaries. The Court’s treátment of this subject is an example of the infirmity of trying to perform the rulemaking function on a case-by-case basis, ignoring the reality that the criminal cases coming to this Court, far from typical, are the “hard” cases. This invokes the ancient axiom that hard cases can make bad law.
Stare decisis calls for my following the rule of Edwards in this context, but plainly the subject calls for reexamination. Increasingly, to borrow from Justice Cardozo, more and more “criminal[s]... go free because the constable has blundered.” People v. Defore, 242 N. Y. 13, 21, 150 N. E. 585, 587 (1926).