Court Opinion

ID: 9447177
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:27:58.050573+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:55.830618
License: Public Domain

DUFFY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
Because the record before us discloses that Emil Reek’s confessions were the product of psychological, if not physical, coercion, he was deprived of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The majority opinion makes light of the claim that Reck had a retarded mentality, and reaches the amazing conclusion “Undoubtedly he was no mental genius and was more apt to be classified as ‘inglorious’ * * *.” The opinion quotes Dr. Harry R. Hoffman, yet this doctor testified Reck, who was nineteen years old at the time of his arrest, had the intelligence of a child between ten ■and eleven years old.
Reck never had been arrested previously and was not a juvenile delinquent. He never had been a behavior problem at home or at school, but from early ■childhood, because of his mental retardation, he was studied recurrently by social agencies, psychologists and psychiatrists. At the age of twelve and a half it was estimated his mental age was eight, and his IQ was sixty-four. When he was tested again at the' time he was nearly fifteen years of age, his mental age was found to be eight years and four months, .and his IQ fifty-seven. Furthermore, the District Court found as a fact that Reck was a mentally retarded boy. In my view, it is not a correct statement of the record to classify his condition as “inglorious.”
I must also dissent from the statement in the majority opinion: “We are convinced, however, that the evidence proves that none of the treatment which he received while he was being detained prior to Saturday afternoon produced the confessions by Reck.” At the time Reck signed the first confession, he had been in police custody about eighty hours. When he signed his second confession, he had been in police custody one hundred two hours and without solid food for at least forty-eight hours. The Supreme Court of Illinois described the situation by stating that Reck “was in custody of the police for a week, during which time he was frequently ill, fainted several times, vomited blood on the floor of the police station and was twice taken to the hospital on a stretcher. During that week no formal charge was placed against petitioner and he was confined practically incommunicado." Reck v. People, 7 Ill.2d 261, 264, 130 N.E.2d 200, 202. This is the. boy referred to in the majority opinion as “the strong man of the group.”
The record discloses Reck was violently ill in the North Avenue Police Station four times the night before he confessed. He fainted repeatedly. He vomited blood and was unable to walk. While hospitalized, Reck recounted the details of police coercion to two physicians, but the doctors returned him to the tender ministrations of the police. Reck was not brought before a magistrate until the ninth day after his arrest without a warrant.
It is true the police examined Reck for three days about dozens of unrelated crimes ranging from bicycle theft to robbery, but this so-called “investigation” made a hospital case out of Reck. He had an entire physical collapse Friday night. Although his father twice attempted to visit him during the first several days of his confinement, he could *255not do so, for Reck was being held incommunicado.
Applicable here are the decisions in Fikes v. State of Alabama, 352 U.S. 191, 77 S.Ct. 281, 1 L.Ed.2d 246; Watts v. State of Indiana, 338 U.S. 49, 69 S.Ct. 1347, 1357, 93 L.Ed. 1801; Turner v. Com. of Pennsylvania, 338 U.S. 62, 69 S.Ct. 1352, 93 L.Ed. 1810; Haley v. State of Ohio, 332 U.S. 596, 68 S.Ct. 302, 92 L.Ed. 224, and Spano v. People of State of New York, 360 U.S. 315, 79 S.Ct. 1202, 3 L.Ed.2d 1265. The facts, reasoning and results in those five Supreme Court cases should dictate the result here. I believe that Emil Reck is entitled to a new trial because his confessions coerced by psychological pressures overwhelmed his limited powers of resistance.