Harrison v. United States (392 U.S. 219)/Dissent White

by Byron White

United States Supreme Court

392 U.S. 219

Harrison  v.  United States (392 U.S. 219)

 Argued: April 4, 1968. --- Decided: June 10, 1968

Mr. Justice WHITE, dissenting.

This case and others like it would be more comprehensible if they purported to make procedures for trying criminals more reliable for finding facts and minimizing mistakes. Cases like United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218, 87 S.Ct. 1926, 18 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1967); Gilbert v. State of California, 388 U.S. 263, 87 S.Ct. 1951, 18 L.Ed.2d 1178 (1967); and Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 20 L.Ed.2d 476 (1968), for example, at least could claim this redeeming virtue. But here, as in Miranda v. State of Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), decision has emanated from the Court's fuzzy ideology about confessions, an ideology which is difficult to relate to any provision of the Constitution and which excludes from the trial evidence of the highest relevance and probity.

Three times petitioner has been convicted of murdering his robbery victim with a shotgun. The first trial was in 1960. At the second trial, in 1963, written and oral statements by petitioner and his codefendants were introduced. Petitioner then took the stand and gave his version of the events leading to the killing. He admitted being at the scene of the crime. Conviction followed. The Court of Appeals again reversed, this time on the ground that petitioner's statements were wrongfully admitted, not because they were involuntary or in any way coerced, but because they violated Mallory v. United States, 354 U.S. 449, 77 S.Ct. 1356, 1 L.Ed.2d 1479 (1957), and recent decisions of the Court of Appeals in Killough v. United States, 119 U.S.App.D.C. 10, 336 F.2d 929 (1964), and Harling v. United States, 111 U.S.App.D.C. 174, 295 F.2d 161 (1961). By the time of the third trial, in 1966, prosecution witnesses were dead or unavailable. Considerable reliance was placed on the testimony which had been given at the second trial, including petitioner's admissions when he took the stand in his own defense. Harrison was convicted for a third time. It is this conviction which the Court now reverses, contrary to the judgment of the Court of Appeals. That court found no reason to exclude petitioner's voluntary statements, made under oath in open court and with the advice of counsel.

There is no suggestion that petitioner's testimony at his second trial was untruthful or unreliable. Nor does the Court hold that Harrison was compelled to take the stand and incriminate himself contrary to his privilege under the Fifth Amendment. The reason is obvious. If a defendant were held to be illegally 'compelled' when he takes the stand to counter strong evidence offered by the prosecution and admitted into evidence, he would be as much 'compelled' whether it was error to admit the evidence or not. To avoid this absurd construction of the Self-Incrimination Clause, the Court casts about for a different label. Harrison's testimony at the second trial, the Court now says was not 'compelled' but only 'impelled' by the confessions. Alternatively it suggests that except for the confessions Harrison would not have taken the stand and admitted being at the scene of the crime. On either basis, his testimony at the second trial is deemed a fruit of illegally obtained confessions from which the Government should be permitted no benefit whatever. I disagree.

The doctrine that the 'fruits' of illegally obtained evidence cannot be used to convict the defendant is complex and elusive. There are many unsettled questions under it. The Court, however, seems to overlook all of these problems in adopting an overly simple and mechanical notion of 'fruits' to which I cannot subscribe. In the view of the Court, if some evidentiary matter is causally linked to some illegal activity of the Government-linked in that broad 'but for' sense of causality which rarely excludes relevant matters which come later in time-it is a 'fruit' and excludable as such. This strictly causal notion of fruits is, of course, consistent with the dictum in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385, 392, 40 S.Ct. 182, 183, 64 L.Ed. 319 (1920), that '(i)f knowledge of (the facts) is gained from an independent source they may be proved like any others, but the knowledge gained by the Government's own wrong cannot be used by it * * *.' In Silverthorne, however, the 'fruits' were copies and photographs of original documents illegally seized; it would be difficult to imagine a case where the fruits hung closer to the trunk of the poison tree. The Court seems to overlook the critical limitation placed upon the fruits doctrine in Nardone v. United States, 308 U.S. 338, 341, 60 S.Ct. 266, 268, 84 L.Ed. 307 (1939), where Mr. Justice Frankfurter stated that:

'Sophisticated argument may prove a causal connection between information obtained through illicit wire-tapping and the Government's proof. As a matter of good sense, however, such connection may have become so attenuated as to dissipate the taint.'

Cf. Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 487-488, 83 S.Ct. 407, 417, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963); United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218, 239-242, 87 S.Ct. 1926, 1938-1940, 18 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1967). The concept implicit in the quoted statement, as I understand it, is that mere causal connection is insufficient to make something an inadmissible fruit. Rather it must be shown that suppression of the fruit would serve the same purpose as suppression of the illegal evidence itself. When one deals with the fruits of an illegal search or seizure, as in Silverthorne, or with the fruits of an illegal confession, as the Court decides that we do in this case, ^[1] the reason for suppression of the original illegal evidence itself is prophylactic-to deter the police from engaging in such conduct in the future by denying them its past benefits. See Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U.S. 618, 634 639, 85 S.Ct. 1731, 1740-1743, 14 L.Ed.2d 601 (1965). Since deterrence is the only justification for excluding the original evidence, there is no justification for excluding the fruits of such evidence unless suppression of them will also serve the prophylactic end. I deem this the crucial issue, and proper resolution of it requires a different result from that to which the Court has bulled its way.

As the Court makes plain, it is 'difficult to unravel the many considerations that might have led the petitioner to take the witness stand * * *.' Ante, at 224. Given the difficulty of determining after the fact why the petitioner took the stand, it would seem patent that at the confession stage the police would be wholly without a basis for predicting whether the defendant would be more likely to waive his privilege against self-incrimination and take the stand if they were to obtain a confession than if they were not. Accordingly, it cannot realistically be supposed that the police are spurred on to greater illegality by any rational supposition that success in that illicit endeavor will make it more likely that the defendant will make incriminatory admissions on the witness stand. If this is the case, and I see no grounds for doubting that it is, then suppression of the petitioner's testimony, even if it was in fact induced by the wrongful admission into evidence of an illegal confession, does not remove a source of further temptation to the police to violate the Constitution. ^[2]

Even if it were true that the rule adopted by the Court served some minimal deterrent function, I would not be able to join the Court. Marginal considerations such as these, especially when one is dealing with confessions excludable because of violation of the technical requirements of cases like Mallory v. United States, 354 U.S. 449, 77 S.Ct. 1356 (1957); Massiah v. United States, 377 U.S. 201, 84 S.Ct. 1199, 12 L.Ed.2d 246 (1964); Escobedo v. State of Illinois, 378 U.S. 478, 84 S.Ct. 1758, 12 L.Ed.2d 977 (1964); and Miranda v. State of Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602 (1966), are insufficient to override the interest in presenting all evidence which is relevant and probative. When one adds the fact that in this case, as in most others where the issue will now arise, the defendant took the stand only upon advice of counsel, the argument for deterrence seems virtually to vanish altogether. Police now know that interrogation without warnings will void a confession, and the Federal Government at least is apprised that unduly long detention prior to arraignment will invalidate a confession obtained during the detention period. When this knowledge is coupled with their realization that a defendant's subsequent act of taking the stand to diminish the impact of an improperly admitted confession is guided by the advice of counsel, we have a situation in which the inducements to the police to refrain from illegality are already so clear and so strong that excluding testimony as the Court does in this case cannot conceivably be thought to decrease illegal conduct by the police. The police will know that if they fail to give warnings or if they detain the prisoner too long, any confession thus obtained will be unusable and that timely and effective objection to it will be taken as soon as the defendant acquires a lawyer. In such circumstances they could not reasonably believe that the confession will ever actually induce the defendant to take the witness stand. In short, the fact that the defendant has counsel who gives him specific advice deprives the Court's 'fruits' argument of the last vestige of deterrence. Of course, in a situation where the illegality of the methods used to obtain the initial evidence is open to doubt, as was true in this case, the fact that the defendant has counsel has little if any effect on the deterrence value of excluding the fruits. Even in such a case, however, I find the deterrence value of such exclusion too minimal. In any event it is clear that the deterrence value in such cases provides insufficient justification for the general rule which the Court adopts today.

I am deeply concerned about the implications of the Court's unexplained and unfounded decision. If Harrison's trial testimony was tainted evidence because induced by an illegal confession, then it follows, as the Court indicates by quoting from People v. Spencer, 66 Cal.2d 158, 164, 57 Cal.Rptr. 163, 168, 424 P.2d 715, 719 (1967), that Harrison's testimony would be automatically excluded even if the confessions had not been admitted. Similarly, an inadmissible confession preceding a plea of guilty would taint the plea. And, as a final consequence, today's decision would seem to bar the use of confessions defective under Miranda or Mallory from being used for impeachment when a defendant takes the stand and deliberately lies. All these results would seem to flow necessarily from the Court's adoption of a test for inadmissible fruits which relies only upon the existence of a causal link between the original evidence seized illegally and any subsequent product of it. Since precluding the prosecution from any of these uses will not serve the prophylactic end which alone justifies the exclusion of the original illegal evidence, and because all of these uses of evidence admittedly of relevance and high probative value are important to the overriding goal of criminal law-the just conviction of the guilty-I must dissent.

The Court compounds its substantive error today by the procedural ploy of switching the burden of proof to the prosecution. It rules that once it is shown that the defendant testified after inadmissible confessions were used, 'the Government must show that its illegal action did not induce his testimony.' This despite the fact that the only person with actual knowledge of the subtle and varied 'springs of conduct' which caused the defendant to take the stand is the defendant himself. This despite the fact that only five years ago this Court clearly affirmed the traditional rule that the defendant bears the burden of showing that the evidence complained of was an inadmissible fruit of illegality. Fahy v. State of Connecticut, 375 U.S. 85, 91, 84 S.Ct. 229, 232, 11 L.Ed.2d 171 (1963). See Nardone v. United States, 308 U.S. 338, 341, 60 S.Ct. 266, 267, 84 L.Ed. 307 (1939). The switch in the burden can be justified only by the Court's misguided desire to exclude important evidence for which it has somehow acquired a constitutional distaste. Because I reject the end which the Court seeks to serve, I cannot endorse this naked manipulation of means to achieve that end.

Given the Court's current ideology about confessions, there is perhaps some logic on the side of the Court. But common sense and policy are squarely opposed. The important human values will not be served by the obstacles which the Court now places in the path of policeman, prosecutor, and trial judge alike. Criminal trials will simply become less effective in protecting society against those who have made it impossible to live today in safety.

Notes

1. The essential predicate for excluding petitioner's testimony is the illegality of his confessions. That issue, seemingly a condition precedent to reversal, the Court avoids. It simply assumes, without deciding, both that the confessions were properly rejected by the Court of Appeals and that the prior decisions of the Court of Appeals in Killough and Harling were correctly decided. I would not reverse without reaching those questions.
2. 'The purpose of depriving the government of any gain is to remove any incentive which exists toward the unlawful practice. The focus is forward-to prevent future violations, not punish for past ones. Consequently, where the chain between the challenged evidence and the primary illegality is long or the linkage can be shown only by 'sophisticated argument,' exclusion would seem inappropriate. In such a case it is highly unlikely that the police officers foresaw the challenged evidence as a probable product of their illegality; thus it could not have been a motivating force behind it. It follows that the threat of exclusion could not possibly operate as a deterrent in that situation. Absent this, exclusion carries with it no benefit to society and should not prejudice society's case against a criminal.' Comment, Fruit of the Poisonous Tree-A Plea for Relevant Criteria, 115 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1136, 1148-1149 (1967). In the past the Court has shown greater appreciation of the significance of the deterrence element as well as of the causal element, for both must be present to present a substantial question for this Court. See Smith v. United States, 117 U.S.App.D.C. 1, 324 F.2d 879 (1963), cert. denied, 377 U.S. 954, 84 S.Ct. 1632, 12 L.Ed.2d 498 (1964); Harlow v. United States, 301 F.2d 361 (C.A.5th Cir.), cert. denied, 371 U.S. 814, 83 S.Ct. 25, 9 L.Ed.2d 56 (1962).