Court Opinion

ID: 9421356
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:57:56.92081+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:29.777899
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Harlan,
whom Mr. Justice Reed and Mr. Justice Burton join,
dissenting.
The setting aside of this conviction, in my opinion, oversteps the boundary between this Court’s function under the Fourteenth Amendment and that of the state *200courts in the administration of state criminal justice. I recognize that particularly in “coerced confession” cases the boundary line is frequently difficult to draw. But this Court has recognized that its corrective power over state courts in criminal cases is narrower than that which it exercises over the lower federal courts. Watts v. Indiana, 338 U. S. 49, 50.
In this instance I do not think it can be said that the procedures followed in obtaining petitioner’s confessions violated constitutional due process. The elements usually associated with cases in which this Court has been constrained to act are, in my opinion, not present here in constitutional proportions, separately or in combination. Concededly, there was no brutality or physical coercion. And psychological coercion is by no means manifest. While the total period of interrogation was substantial, the questioning was intermittent; it never exceeded two or three hours at a time, and all of it took place during normal hours; “relay” tactics, such as were condemned in Turner v. Pennsylvania, 338 U. S. 62, and other cases,1 were not employed. True, petitioner’s mental equilibrium appears to have been less than normal, but these facts were before the trial judge and the jury. The absence of arraignment, much as that practice is to be deprecated, loses in significance in light of the State’s representation at the oral argument that this was not an unusual thing in Alabama. As this Court recognizes, it did not of itself make the confessions inadmissible. Petitioner’s removal to Kilby Prison, after authorization by a state circuit judge, stands on quite a different footing from the episode in Ward v. Texas, 316 U. S. 547. And I am not satisfied that there was any deliberate purpose to keep the petitioner incommunicado, such as existed in *201Watts v. Indiana, supra; Turner v. Pennsylvania, supra; and Harris v. South Carolina, supra. Before the first confession, petitioner, at his own request, was permitted to see the sheriff of his home county, and his employer. His father, although not permitted to see petitioner on the day of the first confession,2 was allowed to see him before the second confession. The lawyer who sought to see petitioner was refused permission because, having no authority from petitioner or his family to Represent him, the prison authorities evidently thought he was trying to solicit business.
The Supreme Court of Alabama, after reviewing the record, has sustained the conviction. 263 Ala. 89, 81 So. 2d 303. I find nothing here beyond a state of facts upon which reasonable men might differ in their conclusions as to whether the confessions had been coerced. In the absence of anything in the conduct of the state authorities which “shocks the conscience” or does “more than offend some fastidious squeamishness or private sentimentalism about combatting crime too energetically,” Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165, 172, I think that due regard for the division between state and federal functions in the administration of criminal justice requires that we let Alabama's judgment stand.

 See, for example, Watts v. Indiana, supra; Haley v. Ohio, 332 U. S. 596; Harris v. South Carolina, 338 U. S. 68.

 The record is silent as to why the father did not gain admittance on this first visit.