Darwin v. Connecticut/Concurrence Harlan

by John Marshall Harlan II

United States Supreme Court

391 U.S. 346

Darwin  v.  Connecticut

 Argued: May 20, 1968. ---

Mr. Justice HARLAN, concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I am unable to agree with the basis on which the Court reverses petitioner's conviction. The courts of the State of Connecticut conducted a careful and conscientious review of the 'totality of the circumstances' surrounding petitioner's three confessions. If the question in this case were simply whether the third confession was 'coercively extracted, I would vote to affirm. I cannot join the Court in what seems to me no more than a substitution of its view on a close factual question for that of the state courts.

In this case, however, a special element is present. The trial court ruled that the prosecution had not met its burden of proving that petitioner's first two confessions were voluntarily made. It then admitted his third confession. The Connecticut Supreme Court, affirming, evaluated petitioner's third confession by the rules that had been applied to the other two; finding that the atmosphere had changed enough to tip the balance in favor of voluntariness, it found this confession admissible. I do not think this reflected a proper approach to the problem of multiple confessions.

A principal reason why a suspect might make a second or third confession is simply that, having already confessed once or twice, he might think he has little to lose by repetition. If a first confession is not shown to be voluntary, I do not think a later confession that is merely a direct product of the earlier one should be held to be voluntary. It would be neither conducive to good police work, nor fair to a suspect, to allow the erroneous impression that he has nothing to lose to play the major role in a defendant's decision to speak a second or third time.

In consequence, when the prosecution seeks to use a confession uttered after an earlier one not found to be voluntary, it has, in my view, the burden of proving not only that the later confession was not itself the product of improper threats or promises or coercive conditions, but also that it was not directly produced by the existence of the earlier confession. See United States v. Bayer, 331 U.S. 532, 540-541, 67 S.Ct. 1394, 1398-1399, 91 L.Ed. 1654. Here, the facts as stated by the state courts fail to satisfy this additional burden. Petitioner's third confession followed the completion of his inadmissible second confession by only a few hours. In the interval he appears to have talked to no one except his jailors and the coroner. There is no indication that he had any reason to think that a third confession would increase his peril. Since I would hold only that the state courts applied the wrong standard in this case, I would remand for further proceedings, in order to give the prosecution the opportunity to show that the third confession was not merely the product of the erroneous impression that the cat was already out of the bag.

Notes