involuntary confession
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 365 U.S. 534 - Rogers v. Richmond · 1961Most cited · 2,510 citing opinions
convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand
How the Supreme Court has restated “involuntary confession”
Each Supreme Court definition of “involuntary 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 “involuntary confession”
Court decisions citing the 4 opinions that defined “involuntary confession” — 6,305 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 4 definitions, chronological · 1960–1971
- ORIGINAL
a complex of values underlies the stricture against use by the state of confessions which, by way of convenient shorthand, this Court terms involuntary
the question whether a confession was extracted by coercion does not depend simply upon whether the police resorted to the crude tactic of deliberate physical abuse. The question in each case is whether a 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.' In resolving the issue all the circumstances attendant upon the confession must be taken into account.
a statement in which 'the will of the defendant had been overborne so that the statement was not his free and voluntary act,' resolved 'in light of the totality of the circumstances