“ But where on the uncontested external happenings, coercive forces set in motion by state law enforcement officials are unmistakably in action; where these forces, under all the prevailing states of stress, are powerful enough to draw forth a confession; where, in fact, the confession does come forth and is claimed by the defendant to have been extorted from him; and where he has acted as a man would act who is subjected to such an extracting process-where this is all that appears in the record-a State's judgment that the confession was voluntary cannot stand. ”

“ While encouraging police officers to put questions to all possibly informed persons, whether or not suspected, during the early phase of their investigation which aims at discovering who committed the offense, the Rules admonish that so soon as the officers make up their minds to charge a particular person with a crime, they should caution him, first, that he need say nothing and, second, that what he says may be used in evidence, before questioning him or questioning him further. ”

“ Beyond the obvious, immediate considerations concerning incarceration without judicial hearing, the threat of the third degree, deprivation of counsel at a possibly critical period in the criminal proceeding, etc., there lie other less evident but equally significant menaces. There is the threat that a police system which has grown to rely too heavily on interrogation will not pursue, or learn, other crime detection methods, and the consequent danger that the police will feel themselves under pressure to secure confessions. ”

“ Whatever fortifies the suspect ors econds him in his capacity to keep his mouth closed is a potential obstacle to the solution of crime.
At the other pole is a cluster of convictions each expressive, in a different manifestation, of the basic notion that the terrible engine of the criminal law is not to be used to overreach individuals who stand helpless against it. [21] Among these are the notions that men are not to be imprisoned at the unfettered will of their prosecutors, nor subjected to physical brutality by officials charged with the investigation of crime. ”

“ Despite modern advances in the technology of crime detection, offenses frequently occur about which things cannot be made to speak. And where there cannot be found innocent human witnesses to such offenses, nothing remains if police investigation is not to be balked before it has fairly begun-but to seek out possibly guilty witnesses and ask them questions, witnesses, that is, who are suspected of knowing something about the offense precisely because they are suspected of implication in it. ”

“ However, a confession made by a person in custody is not always the result of an overborne will. The police may be midwife to a declaration naturally born of remorse, or relief, or desperation, or calculation. If that is so, if the 'suction process' [13] has not been at the prisoner and drained his capacity for freedom of choice, does not the awful responsibility of the police for maintaining the peaceful order of society justify the means which they have employed? ”

“ But persons who are suspected of crime will not always be unreluctant to answer questions put by the police. Since under the procedures of Anglo-American criminal justice they cannot be constrained by legal process to give answers which incriminate them, the police have resorted to other means to unbend their reluctance, lest criminal investigation founder. ”

“ Although Culombe, too, has had considerable criminal experience, its value to him, as a school for toughening his resistance, must be duly discounted in light of his subnormal mental capacities. The testimony of a psychiatric expert for the prosecution is that 'as a mental defective he is suggestible. I don't think that he is a fearful man. I think that he can be intimidated, and to use his own expression 'I don't have the Moxie that someone else has.' . . . He is suggestible and he can be intimidated. ”

“ Often the place of questioning will have to be a police interrogation room, both because it is important to assure the proper atmosphere of privacy and non-distraction if questioning is to be made productive, [19] and because, where a suspect is questioned but not taken into custody, he-and in some cases his associates-may take prompt warning and flee the premises. Legal counsel for the suspect will generally prove a thorough obstruction to the investigation. ”

“ The prisoner knows this-knows that no friendly or disinterested witness is present-and the knowledge may itself induce fear. [9] But, in any case, the risk is great that the police will accomplish behind their closed door precisely what the demands of our legal order forbid: make a suspect the unwilling collaborator in establishing his guilt. This they may accomplish not only with ropes and a rubber hose, not only by relay questioning persistently, insistently subjugating a tired mind, but by subtler devices. ”

“ By the law of this country, no person ought to he (sic) made to criminate himself, and no police officer has any right, until there is clear proof of a crime having been committed, to put searching questions to a person for the purpose of eliciting from him whether an offence has been perpetrated or not. If there is evidence of an offence, a police officer is justified, after a proper caution, in putting to a suspected person interrogatories with a view to ascertaining whether nor not there are fair and reasonable grounds for apprehending him. ”

“ Recognizing the need to protect criminal suspects from all of the dangers which are to be feared when the process of police interrogation is entirely unleashed, legislatures have enacted several kinds of laws designed to curb the worst excesses of the investigative activity of the police. ”

“ First, there is the business of finding the crude historical facts, the external, 'phenomenological' occurrences and events surrounding the confession. Second, because the concept of 'voluntariness' is one which concerns a mental state, there is the imaginative recreation, largely inferential, of internal, 'psychological' fact. Third, there is the application to this psychological fact of standards for judgment informed by the larger legal conceptions ordinarily characterized as rules of law but which, also, comprehend both induction from, and anticipation of, factual circumstances. ”

“ The dilemma posed by police interrogation of suspects in custody and the judicial use of interrogated confessions to convict their makers cannot be resolved simply by wholly subordinating one set of opposing considerations to the other. The argument that without such interrogation it is often impossible to close the hiatus between suspicion and proof, especially in cases involving professional criminals, is often pressed in quarters responsible and not unfeeling. ”

“ But if it is once admitted that questioning of suspects is permissible, whatever reasonable means are needed to make the questioning effective must also be conceded to the police. Often prolongation of the interrogation period will be essential, so that a suspect's story can be checked and, if it proves untrue, he can be confronted with the lie ”

“ Each of these murders was unwitnessed, and the only positive knowledge on which a solution could be based was possessed by the killer. In each there was reasonable ground to suspect an individual but not enough legal evidence to charge him with guilt. ”

“ Persons in custody are not to be questioned, except that when a prisoner, having been cautioned, volunteers a statement, such questions may be asked as are fairly needed to remove ambiguities, so long as the questioner does not seek to elicit information beyond the scope of what the prisoner has offered. If two or more persons are charged with an offense and the police have taken the statement of one of them, copies may be furnished to the others but nothing should be said or done to invite a reply. ”

“ In any event, whatever its outcome, such questioning is often indispensable to crime detection. Its compelling necessity has been judicially recognized as its sufficient justification, even in a society which, like ours, stands strongly and constitutionally committed to the principle that persons accused of crime cannot be made to convict themselves out of their own mouths. ”

“ For although the question whether a particular criminal defendant's will has been overborne and broken is one, it deserves repetition, that must be decided on the peculiar, individual set of facts of his case, it is only by a close, relevant comparison of situations that standards which are solid and effectively enforceable-not doctrinaire or abstract-can be evolved. ”

“ In the police station a prisoner is surrounded by known hostile forces. He is disoriented from the world he knows and in which he finds support. [10] He is subject to coercing impingements, undermining even if not obvious pressures of every variety. In such an atmosphere, questioning that is long continued-even if it is only repeated at intervals, never protracted to the point of physical exhaustion-inevitably suggests that the questioner has a right to, and expects, an answer. ”

“ Moreover, Culombe, despite his mental age of nine or nine and a half, cannot be viewed as a child. Expert testimony in the record, which the Connecticut courts may have credited, precludes the application to Culombe of standards appropriate to the adolescent Haley.
Nor, without guessing, as untutored laymen and not professionally informed as judges, about the susceptibility of a mental defective to overreaching, can we apply to Culombe the standards controlling the case of the active psychotic, Blackburn. ”

“ Inasmuch as the same conception is shared by counsel for the Crown, the contemporary English reports do not disclose cases involving the sort of claims of coercion so frequently litigated in our courts. It may well be that their circurstances seldom arise; [46] when they do, the Crown does not offer the confession; if it were offered-in a case, for example, where several hours of questioning could be shown-the trial judge would almost certainly exclude it. ”

“ The next morning, although the mittimus of the New Britain Police Court had committed Culombe to the Hartford Jail until released by due course of law, the police 'borrowed' him, and later the questioning resumed. There can be no doubt of its purpose at this time. For Paige then 'knew'-if he was ever to know-that Culombe was guilty. [96] Paige opened by telling Culombe to stop lying and to say instead that he did not want to answer. But when Culombe said that he did not want to answer, Detective Murphy took over and repeated the same questions that Paige had asked. ”

“ Once the interrogation has begun, the police or other officials are naturally reluctant to leave off until the desired information has been obtained, regardless of the prisoner's fatigue or need of sleep; and the baffled questioner, getting obstinate silence or evasive and impudent replies, is easily tempted to eke out his unsuccessful questions by threats or violence.'↑ There can be no doubt that the secrecy in which police-station interrogation is usually carried out is a condition which encourages questioning to run over into violence. ”

“ Culombe v. Connecticut
Argued: Jan. 19, 1961. --- Decided: June 19, 1961
Once again the Court is confronted with the painful duty of sitting in judgment on a State's conviction for murder, after a jury's verdict was found flawless by the State's highest court, in order to determine whether the defendant's confessions, decisive for the conviction, were admitted into evidence in accordance with the standards for admissibility demanded by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. ”

“ It is true that the English courts have long tended severely to discourage law enforcement officers from asking questions of persons under arrest or who are so far suspected that their arrest is imminent. The judges have many times deprecated the practice even while receiving in evidence the confessions it has produced. ”

“ Culombe was taken back to Headquarters. Paige talked with him for a short while, then discontinued his investigation for the night. Rome talked with Culombe for about two hours, apparently over a three- or three-and-a-half-hour period. The talk concerned the Kurp's killings and other matters. At this time Culombe and Taborsky were kept in separate rooms. Rome would question one, then the other, staying with each man until he got some bit of information that he could have checked. During respites of questioning by Rome, Culombe remained in the interrogation room. ”

“ Where they have made explicit findings of fact, those findings conclude us and form the basis of our review-with the one caveat, necessarily, that we are not to be bound by findings wholly lacking support in evidence. ”

“ That judges who agree on relatively legal considerations may disagree in their application to the same set of circumstances does not weaken the validity of those considerations nor minimize their importance. ”

“ In February 1957, the Connecticut State Police at Hartford were investigating a number of criminal incidents. In connection with certain of these (other than the Kurp's Gasoline Station killings in New Britain) it was decided on Saturday, February 23 to have two men, Arthur Culombe and Joseph Taborsky, picked up and viewed by witnesses. Lieutenant Rome, who was in charge of the investigation, delegated teams of officers to go to different addresses where the men might be located. ”