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117 Mass. 431

Commonwealth v. Mitchell

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1875-03-25

<p>A man, when arrested at his house, for an assault upon a young girl, on the day after the offence, was asked by the officer whether the girl had been there, and answered, ‘ No.” The officer then said, “ The more lies told in such cases, the deeper one gets into the mud.” The prisoner then admitted that the girl had been there and that he had given her three cents. Held, that the admission was competent evr dence against the prisoner.</p>

Relies on Commonwealth v. Cuffee

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1875-03-25

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently May 1936

3 state decisions

101875188018901900191019201930decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Ames, J.

¶1Nothing which was said by the officer making the arrest can be construed as a promise of any advantage to the defendant to be gained by confession. If the defendant’s reply, therefore, is to be held inadmissible in evidence against him, it can only be upon the ground that it was induced by fear. But the kind of fear which can have that effect must be something more than that which is produced by the mere fact that the defendant was accused of a crime and was arrested for that reason. If that were all, nothing which an arrested party could say, short of a plea of guilty, would be evidence against him. The most that can be said as to the language used by the officer on this occasion is, that it was an expression of his disbelief of the defendant’s story, and his conviction that falsehood could only operate to his prejudice. The subject matter of the conversation was a separate fact, easily proved if true, without the aid *433of any confession from the defendant. Upon his denial that the child had been at the place in question, the officer says in substance that it would be proved that she had been there. In this we see nothing in the nature of a threat that could be supposed to have influenced the defendant’s mind, and the evidence was therefore properly admitted. Commonwealth v. Morey, 1 Gray, 461. Commonwealth v. Howe, 2 Allen, 153. Commonwealth v. Cuffee, 108 Mass. 285. Regina v. Sleeman, Dearsly, 249. Regina v. Parker, 8 Cox C. C. 465. Rex v. Court, 7 C. & P. 486.

¶2 Hxeeptions overruled.

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