Court Opinion

ID: 9420075
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:52.894713+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:22.294361
License: Public Domain

*597Mr. Justice Douglas
announced the judgment of the Court and an opinion in which Mr. Justice Black, Mr. Justice Murphy, and Mr. Justice Rutledge join.
Petitioner was convicted in an Ohio court of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Court of Appeals of Ohio sustained the judgment of conviction over the objection that the admission of petitioner’s confession at the trial violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. 79 Ohio App. 237. The Ohio Supreme Court, being of the view that no debatable constitutional question was presented, dismissed the appeal. 147 Ohio St. 340. The case is here on a petition for a writ of certiorari which we granted because we had doubts whether the ruling of the court below could be squared with Chambers v. Florida, 309 U. S. 227, Malinski v. New York, 324 U. S. 401, and like cases in this Court.
A confectionery store was robbed near midnight on October 14,1945, and William Karam, its owner, was shot. It was the prosecutor’s theory, supported by some evidence which it is unnecessary for us to relate, that petitioner, a Negro boy aged 15, and two others, Willie Lowder, aged 16, and A1 Parks, aged 17, committed the crime, petitioner acting as a lookout. Five days later- — ■ around midnight October 19, 1945 — petitioner was arrested at his home and taken to police headquarters.
There is some contrariety in the testimony as to what then transpired. There is evidence that he was beaten. He took the stand and so testified. His mother testified that the clothes he wore when arrested, which were exchanged two days later for clean ones she brought to the jail, were torn and blood-stained. She also testified that when she first saw him five days after his arrest he was bruised and skinned. The police testified to the contrary on this entire line of testimony. So we put to one side the *598controverted evidence. Taking only the undisputed testimony (Malinski v. New York, supra, p. 404 and cases cited), we have the following sequence of events. Beginning shortly after midnight this 15-year-old lad was questioned by the police for about five hours. Five or six of the police questioned him in relays of one or two each. During this time no friend or counsel of the boy was present. Around 5 a. m. — after being shown alleged confessions of Lowder and Parks — the boy confessed. A confession was typed in question and answer form by the police. At no time was this boy advised of his right to counsel; but the written confession started off with the following statement:
“we want to inform you of your constitutional rights, the law gives you the right to make this statement or not as you see fit. It is made with the understanding that it may be used at a trial in court either for or against you or anyone else involved in this crime with you, of your own free will and accord, you are under no force or duress or compulsion and no promises are being made to you at this time whatsoever.
“Do you still desire to make this statement and tell the truth after having had the above clause read to you?
“A. Yes.”
He was put in jail about 6 or 6:30 a. m. on Saturday, the 20th, shortly after the confession was signed. Between then and Tuesday, the 23d, he was held incommunicado. A lawyer retained by his mother tried to see him twice but was refused admission by the police. His mother was not allowed to see him until Thursday, the 25th. But a newspaper photographer was allowed to see him and take his picture in the early morning hours of the 20th, right after he had confessed. He was not taken before a magistrate and formally charged with a crime *599until the 23d — three days after the confession was signed.
The trial court, after a preliminary hearing on the voluntary character of the confession, allowed it to be admitted in evidence over petitioner’s objection that it violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The court instructed the jury to disregard the confession if it found that he did not make the confession voluntarily and of his free will.
But the ruling of the trial court and the finding of the jury on the voluntary character of the confession do not foreclose the independent examination which it is our duty to make here. Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U. S. 143, 147-148. If the undisputed evidence suggests that force or coercion was used to exact the confession, we will not permit the judgment of conviction to stand, even though without the confession there might have been sufficient evidence for submission to the jury. Malinski v. New York, supra, p. 404, and cases cited.
We do not think the methods used in obtaining this confession can be squared with that due process of law which the Fourteenth Amendment commands.
What transpired would make us pause for careful inquiry if a mature man were involved. And when, as here, a mere child — an easy victim of the law — is before us, special care in scrutinizing the record must be used. Age 15 is a tender and difficult age for a boy of any race. He cannot be judged by the more exacting standards of maturity. That which would leave a man cold and unimpressed can overawe and overwhelm a lad in his early teens. This is the period of great instability which the crisis of adolescence produces. A 15-year-old lad, questioned through the dead of night by relays of police, is a ready victim of the inquisition. Mature men possibly might stand the ordeal from midnight to 5 a. m. But we cannot believe that a lad of tender years is *600a match for the police in such a contest. He needs counsel and support if he is not to become the victim first of fear, then of panic. He needs someone on whom to lean lest the overpowering presence of the law, as he knows it, crush him. No friend stood at the side of this 15-year-old boy as the police, working in relays, questioned him hour after hour, from midnight until dawn. No lawyer stood guard to make sure that the police went so far and no farther, to see to it that they stopped short of the point where he became the victim of coercion. No counsel or friend was called during the critical hours of questioning. A photographer was admitted once this lad broke and confessed. But not even a gesture towards getting a lawyer for him was ever made.
This disregard of the standards of decency is underlined by the fact that he was kept incommunicado for over three days during which the lawyer retained to represent him twice tried to see him and twice was refused admission. A photographer was admitted at once; but his closest friend — his mother — was not allowed to see him for over five days after his arrest. It is said that tl/ese events are not germane to the present problem because they happened after the confession was made. But they show such a callous attitude of the police towards the safeguards which respect for ordinary standards of human relationships compels that we take with a grain of salt their present apologia that the five-hour grilling of this boy was conducted in a fair and dispassionate manner. When the police are so unmindful of these basic standards of conduct in their public dealings, their secret treatment of a 15-year-old boy behind closed doors in the dead of night becomes darkly suspicious.
The age of petitioner, the hours when he was grilled, the duration of his quizzing, the fact that he had no friend or counsel to advise him, the callous attitude of *601the police towards his rights combine to convince us that this was a confession wrung from a child by means which the law should not sanction. Neither man nor child can be allowed to stand condemned by methods which flout constitutional requirements of due process of law.
But we are told that this boy was advised of his constitutional rights before he signed the confession and that, knowing them, he nevertheless confessed. That assumes, however, that a boy of fifteen, without aid of counsel, would have a full appreciation of that advice and that on the facts of this record he had a freedom of choice. We cannot indulge those assumptions. Moreover, we cannot give any weight to recitals which merely formalize constitutional requirements. Formulas of respect for constitutional safeguards cannot prevail over the facts of life which contradict them. They may not become a cloak for inquisitorial practices and make an empty form of the due process of law for which free men fought and died to obtain.
The course we followed in Chambers v. Florida, supra, White v. Texas, 310 U. S. 530, Ashcraft v. Tennessee, supra, and Malinski v. New York, supra, must be followed here. The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the police from using the private, secret custody of either man or child as a device for wringing confessions from them.

Reversed.

Mr. Justice Frankfurter, joining in reversal of judgment.
In a recent series of cases, beginning with Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U. S. 278, the Court has set aside convictions coming here from State courts because they were based on confessions admitted under circumstances that offended the requirements of the “due process” exacted *602from the States by the Fourteenth Amendment. If the rationale of those cases ruled this, we would dispose of it per curiam with the mere citation of the cases. They do not rule it. Since at best this Court’s reversal of a State court’s conviction for want of due process always involves a delicate exercise of power and since there is a sharp division as to the propriety of its exercise in this case, I deem it appropriate to state as explicitly as possible why, although I have doubts and difficulties, I cannot support affirmance of the conviction.
The doubts and difficulties derive from the very nature of the problem before us. They arise frequently when this Court is obliged to give definiteness to “the vague contours” of Due Process or, to change the figure, to spin judgment upon State action out of that gossamer concept. Subtle and even elusive as its criteria are, we cannot escape that duty of judicial review. The nature of the duty, however, makes it especially important to be humble in exercising it. Humility in this context means an alert self-scrutiny so as to avoid infusing into the vagueness of a Constitutional command one’s merely private notions. Like other mortals, judges, though unaware, may be in the grip of prepossessions. The only way to relax such a grip, the only way to avoid finding in the Constitution the personal bias one has placed in it, is to explore the influences that have shaped one’s unanalyzed views in order to lay bare prepossessions.
A lifetime’s preoccupation with criminal justice, as prosecutor, defender of civil liberties, and scientific student, naturally leaves one with views. Thus, I disbelieve in capital punishment. But as a judge I could not impose the views of the very few States who through bitter experience have abolished capital punishment upon all the other States, by finding that “due process” proscribes it. Again, I do not believe that even capital offenses by boys of fifteen should be dealt with according *603to the conventional criminal procedure. It would, however, be bald judicial usurpation to hold that States violate the Constitution in subjecting minors like Haley to such a procedure. If a State, consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment, may try a boy of fifteen charged with murder by the ordinary criminal procedure, I cannot say that such a youth is never capable of that free choice of action which, in the eyes of the law, makes a confession “voluntary.” Again, it would hardly be a justifiable exercise of judicial power to dispose of this case by finding in the Due Process Clause Constitutional outlawry of the admissibility of all private statements made by an accused to a police officer, however much legislation to that effect might seem to me wise. See The Indian Evidence Act of 1872, § 25; cf. § 26.
But whether a confession of a lad of fifteen is “voluntary” and as such admissible, or “coerced” and thus wanting in due process, is not a matter of mathematical determination. Essentially it invites psychological judgment — a psychological judgment that reflects deep, even if inarticulate, feelings of our society. Judges must divine that feeling as best they can from all the relevant evidence and light which they can bring to bear for a confident judgment of such an issue, and with every endeavor to detach themselves from their merely private views. (It is noteworthy that while American experience has been drawn upon in the framing of constitutions for other democratic countries, the Due Process Clause has not been copied. See, also, the illuminating debate on the proposal to amend the Irish Home Rule Bill by incorporating our Due Process Clause. 42 H. C. Deb. 2082-2091, 2215-2267 (5th ser., Oct. 22, 23, 1912).)
While the issue thus formulated appears vague and impalpable, it cannot be too often repeated that the limitations which the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment placed upon the methods by which the States *604may prosecute for crime cannot be more narrowly conceived. This Court must give the freest possible scope to States in the choice of their methods of criminal procedure. But these procedures cannot include methods that may fairly be deemed to be in conflict with deeply rooted feelings of the community. See concurring opinions in Malinski v. New York, 324 U. S. 401, 412, and Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U. S. 459, 466. Of course this is a most difficult test to apply, but apply it we must, warily, and from case to case.
This brings me to the precise issue on the record before us. Suspecting a fifteen-year-old boy of complicity in murder resulting from attempted robbery, at about midnight the police took him from his home to police headquarters. There he was questioned for about five hours by at least five police officers who interrogated in relays of two or more. About five o’clock in the morning this procedure culminated in what the police regarded as a confession, whereupon it was formally reduced to writing. During the course of the interrogation the boy was not advised that he was not obliged to talk, that it was his right if he chose to say not a word, nor that he was entitled to have the benefit of counsel or the help of his family. Bearing upon the safeguards of these rights, the Chief of Police admitted that while he knew that the boy “had a right to remain mute and not answer any questions” he did not know that it was the duty of the police to apprise him of that fact. Unquestionably, during this whole period he was held incommunicado. Only after the nightlong questioning had resulted in disclosures satisfactory to the police and as such to be documented, was there read to the boy a clause giving the conventional formula about his constitutional right to make or withhold a statement and stating that if he makes it, he makes it of his “own free will.” Do these uncontested facts justify a State court in *605finding that the boy’s confession was “voluntary,” or do the circumstances by their very nature preclude a finding that a deliberate and responsible choice was exercised by the boy in the confession that came at the end of five hours questioning?
The answer, as has already been intimated, depends on an evaluation of psychological factors, or, more accurately stated, upon the pervasive feeling of society regarding such psychological factors. Unfortunately, we cannot draw upon any formulated expression of the existence of such feeling. Nor are there available experts on such matters to guide the judicial judgment. Our Constitutional system makes it the Court’s duty to interpret those feelings of society to which the Due Process Clause gives legal protection. Because of their inherent vagueness the tests by which we are to be guided are most unsatisfactory, but such as they are we must apply them.
The Ohio courts have in effect denied that the very nature of the circumstances of the boy’s confession precludes a finding that it was voluntary. Their denial carries great weight, of course. It requires much to be overborne. But it does not end the matter. Against it we have the judgment that comes from judicial experience with the conduct of criminal trials as they pass in review before this Court. An impressive series of cases in this and other courts admonishes of the temptations to abuse of police endeavors to secure confessions from suspects, through protracted questioning, carried on in secrecy, with the inevitable disquietude and fears police interrogations naturally engender in individuals questioned while held incommunicado, without the aid of counsel and unprotected by the safeguards of a judicial inquiry. Disinterested zeal for the public good does not assure either wisdom or right in the methods it pursues. A report of President Hoover’s National Commission on Law Ob*606servance and Enforcement gave proof of the fact, unfortunately, that these potentialities of abuse were not the imaginings of mawkish sentimentality, nor their tolerance desirable or necessary for a stern policy against crime. Legislation throughout the country reflects a similar belief that detention for purposes of eliciting confessions through secret, persistent, long-continued interrogation violates sentiments deeply embedded in the feelings of our people. See McNabb v. United States, 318 U. S. 332, 342-43.
It is suggested that Haley’s guilt could easily have been established without the confession elicited by the sweating process of the night’s secret interrogation. But this only affords one more proof that in guarding against misuse of the law enforcement process the effective detection of crime and the prosecution of criminals are furthered and not hampered. Such constitutional restraints of decency derive from reliance upon the resources of intelligence in dealing with crime and discourage the too easy temptations of unimaginative crude force, even when such force is not brutally employed.
It would disregard standards that we cherish as part of our faith in the strength and well-being of a rational, civilized society to hold that a confession is “voluntary” simply because the confession is the product of a sentient choice. “Conduct under duress involves a choice,” Union Pacific R. Co. v. Public Service Commission, 248 U. S. 67, 70, and conduct devoid of physical pressure but not leaving a free exercise of choice is the product of duress as much so as choice reflecting physical constraint.
Unhappily we have neither physical nor intellectual weights and measures by which judicial judgment can determine when pressures in securing a confession reach the coercive intensity that calls for the exclusion of a statement so secured. Of course, the police meant to *607exercise pressures upon Haley to make him talk. That was the very purpose of their procedure. In concluding that a statement is not voluntary which results from pressures such as were exerted in this case to make a lad of fifteen talk when the Constitution gave him the right to keep silent and when the situation was so contrived that appreciation of his rights and thereby the means of asserting them were effectively withheld from him by the police, I do not believe I express a merely personal bias against such a procedure. Such a finding, I believe, reflects those fundamental notions of fairness and justice in the determination of guilt or innocence which lie embedded in the feelings of the American people and are enshrined in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. To remove the inducement to resort to such methods this Court has repeatedly denied use of the fruits of illicit methods.
Accordingly, I think Haley’s confession should have been excluded and the conviction based upon it should not stand.