I have a related question: what if the priest reports not just hearsay confession, but actual facts?
Suppose the penitent told the priest where he hid the murder weapon.
The police search the location and find the weapon with fingerprints. Is that admissable evidence in court?
The police can give evidence of the search, the discovery of the weapon, the examination of the weapon, the discover of the fingerprints, the identification of the fingerprints. None of that would be hearsay or inadmissible.
The weight of this evidence wouldn’t be greatly added to by the revelation that the police got the tip-off from a priest who told them he had himself got the information fro a penitent in the confessional, so it’s very unlikely that the state would seek to call the priest to give evidence about what was said to him. The question of the admissibility of the priest’s evidence as to what was said to him would therefore not arise.
Do you have a cite for the bolded part?
Are you sure that it would be admissible?
Given that this evidence was obtained only from the priest’s information, and that it was privileged information, (with the privilege belonging to the confessent, not the priest), I’d think the defense lawyer would challenge the admissibility. And from my (non-lawyer) understanding of the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’ theory, he would win – evidence obtained illegally is not admissible.
Not much of one. I recall it being told to me years ago by a lawyer whose firm sometimes did workers comp cases. Possibly googling would find info about the rules on this (though they probably vary a lot in each state).
Just because something is inadmissible doesn’t mean it was obtained illegally. The vast majority of information that is inadmissible was not obtained illegally.
Excited utterance!:eek:
While making room for a state with contrary laws, I can’t think of any generally-applicable provision that would exclude this evidence.
The Spanish Criminal Code includes “spontaneous confession” and “delivered himself” among the items which should produce a more lenient sentence. A criminal who went to a priest knowing that the priest can’t call the cops on him, and who was then convinced by the priest to deliver himself to the police, would still be counted as “delivered himself and confessed spontaneously”, and the priest could be called upon to testify in their favor: reporting relevant parts of the conversation to the police and court with the criminal’s permission does not break the secrecy of the confessional (anything else which was part of the same conversation is still covered by it).
At lower levels, I’ve seen it work for small and not so small school stuff, or in work situations. Knowing there’s certain people that you can ask for advice without getting yourself in trouble for it can be an enormous relief.
No, this isn’t quite the meaning of “poisoned tree.” The exclusion principle is crafted to deter police misconduct by removing the incentive to violate Constitutional guarantees. As an example, if the police in good faith rely upon a warrant that is ultimately shown to be flawed, the evidence derived therefrom is still admissible, no matter how “poisoned,” the original tree was.
If it’s OK to use privileged information to obtain a search warrant, why does the US Attorney’s manual recommend that police searching through privileged information bring in uninvolved investigators to determine which documents are OK to seize? Is the problem in this case that other documents aren’t covered by the warrant, not just that they’re privileged?
The attorney-client privilege is not co-extensive with the priest penitent privilege.
Disclosure of information within the ambit of attorney client privilege can affect the accused’s right to a fair trial by revealing defense strategy, theories of the case, results of witness interviews, impeachment evidence against Commonwealth witnesses, and the like. The evidence uncovered by a search such as the one described above is potentially both direct conversations between attorney and client and attorney work product – that is, material generated by the attorney in furtherance of the defense of the client.
In short – letting the prosecutor see that material impairs the defense strategy, regardless of whether the evidence is admissible at trial.
That makes sense, I thought they worked basically the same.
you know, you can correct someone without having to proceed to grind them into the dirt for being wrong.
Yeah, I got a bit unhinged there. I apologize.
I believe it differs from state to state in Australia. I think it would be fair to say that in light of the very serious abuses performed by the Catholic church in Australia which have been heavily in our media (Cardinal Pell etc) that the Australian public would mostly be in favour of priests being obliged to break the confessional when there is ongoing harm to an individual. Eg if a Priest who is sexually abusing children confesses to another priest and then continues to abuse. We’re also a remarkably irreligious country anyway and rather famously had an openly atheist Prime Minister is the 1980’s who is remembered rather fondly (Bob Hawke)
I believe that counsellors / psychiatrists are legally required to break privilege in Australia in cases of ongoing harm and I see no rational reason why religious clergy should not have a similar obligation. Sorry but real world ongoing harm takes priority over your made up rules from the invisible sky father.
It’s been suggested to me that the privilege simply acknowledges the practical reality of the situation – that abrogating the privilege would not produce testimony, because in most cases, the priest will choose to sit in jail for contempt rather than breach his religious duty.
Nothing in your post addresses the law in Australia; you have merely shared your opinion of what the law should be and your opinion of what public sentiment might be. I assume that in Australia, neither your opinion nor a measurement of public sentiment would be the basis for an evidentiary ruling by a court.
Or am I mistaken? As I say: I don’t know the law in Australia.
That’s a pretty simplistic note for a complicated issue of Church history. There was also the Nestorian Church, the Eastern Church, the Coptic Church, and so forth.
I once got pretty drunk with my friend Michael and his uncle, an alcoholic Catholic priest.
Michael’s uncle began telling “tales from the confessional” which I found hilarious, but Michael became increasingly upset. The priest said it was ok because he wasn’t naming names, but Michael insisted it was a horrible sin.
Eventually Michael couldn’t take any more and asked me to leave.
ETA: the priest got a real kick out of me calling him “Uncle Father”, but then again he was pretty trashed.