I have been watching Perry Mason lately. At the end of every Perry Mason, someone stands up and simply confesses in open court.
Has this exceptional event ever actually happened?
I’m sure it has happened, but rarely. There’s something known as Perry Mason Syndrome which has caused a few defendants some grief.
Perry Mason ran from 1957-1966. The Miranda vs. Arizona decision that requires an accused person be informed of their rights before making a statement was in 1966. In real life at the time Perry Mason aired, those confessions could probably be used against a defendant, so they probably all ended up plea bargaining. After 1966, those confessions would nearly all get ruled inadmissable (I have a cousin who is an ADA in Chicago, and I once asked him about this specifically).
Really? Even when the confession is made uncoerced, in court, under oath?
Well, there are no DAs or ADAs in Chicago. The Illinois county prosecutors are called the State’s Attorney, and his minions are ASAs, Assistant State’s Attorney.
The cousin is wrong. The Miranda decision applies only to statements made during a custodial interrogation. Neither it, nor any other principle of law, would make a confession inadmissible if the statement came about as an outburst in open court, either by a witness or an observer.
So to be very clear: today, in 2014, if you stand up in court during someone else’s trial and confess to being the real killer, your statement is admissible against you without implicating the Miranda decision.
Well, not every episode ends with someone confessing under oath-- sometimes people confess from the gallery.
Also, people do recant confessions.
What would happen in real life, is that after the confession, the judge would have the jury immediately removed from the courtroom, and the prosecutor would move for a mistrial, which might be granted. Meanwhile, the person who confessed would be arrested for disrupting the proceedings. The prosecutor and the detectives on the case would go back and try to sort things out, while the person who confessed would get a lawyer.
In real life, the prosecutor might not believe the person who confessed, and try to get a mistrial, and schedule the original defendant for a new trial. If he did believe the confessor, he might try to sort out whether he and the original defendant acted together. They might end up both on trial. If the original defendant got dismissed, when the new defendant was being scheduled for trial, his lawyer would move to have the confession suppressed, and it probably would be granted. However, given that his client tends toward outbursts in court, and the confession was probably in the news, the lawyer will most likely suggest a plea bargain. There’s a built-in defense-- the prosecutor had a good case against someone else-- so the chances are that the prosecution will offer a good plea deal.
According to my cousin, this doesn’t happen, although what does happen, albeit rarely, is that someone with knowledge of another person’s guilt will follow the trial, and if it looks like there’s going to be a conviction, will be moved to come forward. The witness is OK with keeping the secret as long as no innocent person goes to prison, but he doesn’t want to see an innocent person convicted. I don’t think this has actually happened to Alex, it’s just something he’s heard about.
The thing about someone spontaneously confessing in court is that it requires the wrong person to be on trial in the first place, and the right person to be in the courtroom, as a witness or spectator. According to Alex, they don’t try innocent people. At most, they try lesser conspirators and accessories, because they are hoping to get to the core criminal, and it isn’t happening. But, even if they do have the wrong person, it further requires the real criminal to be at hand to confess. The real criminal is probably on his way to Mexico.
I don’t know what Alex’s actual title is. I just know what such people are called where I have lived, and most people have a general idea what an ADA is. In Indiana, they are called county prosecutors, and I didn’t think people would necessarily know what that was.
Maybe Alex was giving me worst-case scenario. I don’t know. I know he finds the idea of someone confessing during a court proceeding-- other than the actual defendant changing his mind during trial and requesting a plea bargain-- to be funny.
Oh, I find it funny also. It’s unlikely in the extreme. Perry must have had some sort of confession pheromones in his system to get it to happen so often.
But if it did, it’s not inadmissible.
To be fair to Alex, I may not be giving a good report of what he said-- this conversation was years ago. He didn’t say it was automatically inadmissable-- more like, any decent defense lawyer would get it tossed. Also, I think that as a prosecutor, he’d be more concerned with what a spontaneous confession would do to the case he was trying to prosecute, not “Wow, thanks Mason, for solving the case!” He did NOT say, but he implied (or I inferred), that while the whole thing was extraordinarily unlikely, the most likely scenario was that the confessor was simply trying to throw a wrench into the trial in order to get the defendant off, didn’t really do it, and wouldn’t be convicted, because there’d be no evidence whatsoever aside from the confession, and the confessor would have a good alibi.
Am I the only one who ever wondered how Hamilton Burger kept getting re-elected?
The problem with juries is that they consist of 12 people who were too stupid to get out of jury duty.
Yep, there was a lady here in Dallas that made the local news a few months ago because she had a Perry Mason moment in court. What made it even more bizarre, is her defense was winning. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut and she would have got off scott free.
I can’t remember what it is she did, but I think it was murder.
I used to wonder that, but I figured he beat most of the other defense attorneys. Furthermore almost all of the televised Perry “trials” were preliminary hearings (this was so they could play fast and loose with procedures I think) and not actual trials, so his losses to Perry wouldn’t even count in his conviction percentages. Plus he presumably won all those cases when he tried those who confessed during Perry’s trials.
Spectators in the gallery are not under oath.
:dubious:
I call bullshit!
That’s not fair. I sat on a jury, and most of the people were fairly well-educated-- about half had college degrees-- and didn’t try to get out, because we accepted that we were doing a civic duty. One of the guys who “got out” of it did it by being a total jackass during voir dire. Everyone was really glad he was discharged.
My father had a Ph.D, and was twice seated on juries. He was dismissed from another during voir dire, because it was when one of the first woman ADAs was prosecuting the case, and the defense attorney asked all the men if it would bias them against the defendant that the prosecutor was such an attractive woman. My father said “No,” but it might bias him against the defendant that his attorney would ask such an offensive question. My father didn’t go in looking for an out. It’s snarky, and funny, but it was also an honest answer to the question.
Your jury comment is like saying that voters are people to dumb to find the snooze button.
Good point.
“Prosecutor” is a well-understood generic term for a lawyer representing the system in a criminal matter.
Yeah, but he’s not the elected prosecutor. He’s a hired underling.
“Prosecutor” can mean any of them. It’s a generic term.
It doesn’t affect the substantive point of your post but don’t forget the original Perry Mason movies with Warren William in the 1930s, and of course the Erle Stanley Gardner novels on which they were based.