Legal News

Scotus to Cops: You Have 6 Hours to Get that Confession

By Ashby Jones

Just a good piece of information to keep in the back of your mind in the event you one day find yourself in cuffs: If more than six hours pass between the time you’re arrested and the time you’re brought before a judge — and in that time you bark out a confession — you may be in luck.

That’s the result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling made on Monday. In a 5-4 ruling, the Court ruled that federal agents cannot use unreasonable delay tactics to secure confessions.

Reversing the Third Circuit, Justices Souter, Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg and Stevens ruled that even a “voluntary” confession obtained by federal authorities may be deemed inadmissible if more than six hours elapse between an arrest and a suspect’s first court appearance. Click here for a story from the Legal Intelligencer, here for coverage from the LA Times; here for Scotusblog’s writeup.

Writing for the majority, Justice Souter found that lengthy delays before a suspect sees a judge can give the government too much leverage over someone who has been arrested.

“Federal agents would be free to question suspects for extended periods before bringing them out in the open, and we have always known what custodial secrecy leads to,” Souter wrote.

The defendant in the case, Johnnie Corley, was arrested on suspicion of robbing a credit union in Norristown, Pa. The FBI agents who arrested him did not take him to court for his initial appearance for nearly 30 hours, during which time they elicited a confession.

In his appeals, Corley argued that the agents violated a federal statute that prohibits police from persisting in questioning a suspect with the goal of securing a confession if doing so would result in an unreasonable delay in taking the suspect for his initial court appearance.

The Supreme Court agreed. “If the confession occurred before presentment and beyond six hours … the court must decide whether delaying that long was unreasonable or unnecessary under the McNabb-Mallory cases, and if it was, the confession is to be suppressed,” Souter wrote.

In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. found that there was “nothing ambiguous” about the first section of the law which states that voluntary confessions are admissible. Joining Alito in dissent were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).