coerced confession
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 356 U.S. 560 - Payne v. Arkansas · 1958Most cited · 1,535 citing opinions
The use in a state criminal trial of a defendant's confession obtained by coercion—whether physical or mental—is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment.
How the Supreme Court has restated “coerced confession”
Each Supreme Court definition of “coerced confession,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “coerced confession”
Court decisions citing the 5 opinions that defined “coerced confession” — 4,720 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 5 definitions, chronological · 1944–1963
- ORIGINAL
A coerced confession is offensive to basic standards of justice, not because the victim has a legal grievance against the police, but because declarations procured by torture are not premises from which a civilized forum will infer guilt.
The due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment invalidates a state court conviction grounded in whole or in part upon a confession which is the product of other than reasoned and voluntary choice.
a conviction following trial or on a plea of guilty based on a confession extorted by violence or by mental coercion is invalid under the Federal Due Process Clause.
the question in each case is whether the defendant's will was overborne at the time he confessed. If so, the confession cannot be deemed 'the product of a rational intellect and a free will.