Back when I was still in grade school was when I first heard this story. Back in the 1950’s, maybe into the early 69’s, the FBI would get perps to confess by working them over with a rubber hose.
I don’t have a cite just yet. But I don’t need one. It’s cliche.
My question is, why didn’t this violate the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination? Now it certainly would. You are not supposed to force anyone to confess against their will. I don’t know what our forefathers would say. But it is pretty obvious now.
And you will note that the FBI is the federal government. So there was no fourteenth amendment substantive due process controversy here.
The FBI didnt come into existence until 1933. Rubber hose interrogations (except perhaps in the deep South) were mostly gone by then.
Indeed, such things are totally Illegal and forced confessions are not valid.
Police interrogations weren’t always so complex. Until the early 1900s in the United States, physical abuse was an acceptable (if not legal) method of getting a confession. Confessions obtained by “third degree” techniques – deprivation of food and water, bright lights, physical discomfort and long isolation, beating with rubber hoses and other instruments that don’t leave marks – were usually admissible in court as long as the suspect signed a waiver stating the confession was voluntary. Between the 1930s and 1960s, though, a crackdown on police tactics gradually changed the practice of interrogation.
While the Supreme Court had ruled as early as 1897 against involuntary confessions, it was in 1937 that things really started to change. In the case Brown v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court threw out a “voluntary” confession that was obtained after police officers repeatedly strung a suspect up in a tree and whipped him. The Court’s decision was clear: Confessions obtained by force cannot be used as evidence at trial. By the 1950s, confessions were considered involuntary not only if police beat the suspect, but also if they held a suspect for an unnecessarily extended period of time, deprived him of sleep, food, water or bathroom facilities, promised some benefit if the suspect confessed or threatened some harm if he didn’t.
And indeed, the FBI were never known for that sort of brutality, altho they did use the bright lights, etc for a while.
It would have then, too. The problem of course was proving it. They weren’t recording their interviews, they’d just produce a handwritten confession in court and then put 4 clean-cut all-American FBI agents on the stand to assert that of course this wasn’t a coerced confession, against one alleged felon. Who’s the jury going to believe?
This is still a problem today, although it’s hard to know how large a problem it is. Cops lie on the stand and juries believe them. We mostly only know about it because there is occasional video evidence that directly contradicts their testimony that’s produced after the fact.
Courts started tossing out forced confessions pretty regularly in the 1930s and 40s, and as indicated above, any involuntary interrogation that lasts longer than a couple of hours becomes increasingly suspect.
I don’t recall reading about FBI having issues with forced confessions – warantless surveillance? Sure, but it seems that the local PDs were more likely to engage in third degree tactics.
The progenitor of the FBI came into existence in 1908. The name change that created the FBI didn’t happen until 1935. J. Edgar Hoover had been head of the Bureau of Investigation since 1924.
If your question is about the timing, it was 1936 in Brown v Mississippi when the Supreme Court held that confessions coerced by physical force violate (not the 5th Amendment) the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. There’s a whole bunch of caselaw and cases that deal with self-incrimination, but I hope this helps with the generalities.
It was only comparatively recently that courts in Victoria.Australia stopped accepting verbal confessions reported by police officers as evidence. As in “he confessed to doing it”.
As I understand it, confessions are generally an exception to hearsay rules.
A confession by a perpetrator isn’t hearsay, so doesn’t require an exception to the hearsay rule. Evidence from a third party that the perpetrator confessed would be hearsay. There is an exception to the hearsay rule to cover evidence of that kind, if the confession was made voluntarily and knowingly and not in response to any inducement which might tend to undermine the reliability of the confession.
Yes, as I understand it, evidence from a police officer that a person had (verbally) confessed would be hearsay, if not covered by the exception. And would be accepted, if not excluded by court rules.
