From Vox: Being sleep-deprived makes people much more likely to give false confessions

For our look on GOVT 2305 at civil liberties and the due process of the law. I'm unaware of appellate decisions - or anything from the Supreme Court - related to sleep deprivation.

- Click here for the article.

Why in the world would someone confess to a crime he didn't commit?
It's a baffling question that has long confounded the criminal justice system. Confessions are powerfully convincing evidence for juries — but false confessions are also relatively common. According to the Innocence Project, one in four people who have been exonerated for crimes they didn't commit confessed to that crime.

Psychologists have documented several reasons this might occur. The big one is that interrogating police officers can impose their suggestions on suspects: "We have evidence proving you were there!" "Your fingerprints were found!"
But there may be another reason people will confess even when they're innocent: They're exhausted.

Law enforcement "really needs to be super careful when a person is being interrogated after they have been up a long time," says Elizabeth Loftus, a co-author on a new study on sleep deprivation and false confessions in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to Loftus's study, the majority of false confessions occur when interrogations last more than 12 hours. That fact made her and her colleagues wonder: How much of a role does sleepiness play? Sleep deprivation, after all, is awful for the body and mind, decreasing our abilities of reason and judgment.

For items related to the Supreme Court and false confessions:

- Implications of a Supreme Court Ruling for False Confessions. 
- False and Coerced Confessions.
- Overturned Conviction Upheld in False Confession Case.

From the ACLU: A summary of the major civil liberites decisions from the 2012 Supreme Court term

Click here for the entire document.

Here are some of the major cases decided - each provides insight on the contemporary nature of civil liberty disputes in the 21st century:

Free Speech

- Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc.

. . . the Court struck down a requirement that organizations participating in a federally - funded program to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS must have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts drew a distinction between conditions that affect how federal funds are spent and conditions that reach beyond the funded program. Here, he found, the challenged condition crossed that line because it dictated what organizations could say in parts of their program that are entirely supported by private funds. Moreover, he explained, the government’s willingness to allow grant recipients to create affiliated entities that are not bound by the same condition is unsatisfactory in this context. If the affiliate’s speech can be attributed to the grant recipient, it is merely an invitation to hypocrisy by allowing the same organization to express differing views on the legalization of prostitution. If the affiliate’s speech cannot be attributed to the grant recipient, it does nothing to preserve the First Amendment rights of the grant recipient.

Probable Cause

- Florida v. Jardines.

. . . the Court held that the use of a drug - sniffing dog on the front porch of a home constitutes a search that violates the Fourth Amendment in the absence of consent or a warrant. The majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia, rested on traditional property notions. It also rejected the dissent’s reliance on the doctrine of implied consent. According to Justice Scalia, the doctrine of implied consent allows visitors to approach the front door without committing trespass but does not extend to an investigative
search by the police who are seeking evidence, not entry. Justice Kagan’s concurring opinion, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, argued that the police conduct in this case violated the defendant’s reasonable expectation of privacy, as well as his property rights.

- Maryland v. King

. . . the Court upheld DNA testing of arrestees without the need for individualized suspicion. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy characterized DNA testing as an administrative tool for identifying the arrestee and thus legally indistinguishable from photographing and fingerprinting. Applying a rule of reasonableness, he then ruled that the state’s interest in proper identification outweighed the minimal intrusion of a DNA swab. Finally, Justice Kennedy emphasized that Maryland’s law prohibits the use of the DNA sample for any person other than identification. In dissent, Justice Scalia argued that the only sense in which the DNA sample is used for identification is to identify the arrestee as a suspect in an unrelated crime. Because this purpose is part of normal law enforcement it must, in his view, be supported by individualized suspicion linking the person arrested to the unsolved crime. Summing up, Justice Scalia wrote: “I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of or liberties would have been eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

Self Incrimination

- Salinas v. Texas.

. . . the Court ruled that a defendant who does not expressly invoke his Fifth Amendment rights when questioned by the police prior to arrest or other custodial interrogation cannot object when the prosecution comments at trial on his failure to respond to police questioning. Justice Alito’s plurality opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy. In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia would have gone further. In their view, the Fifth Amendment never prevents the prosecution from commenting on a defendant’s silence – including a defendant’s decision not to testify at trial – and the Court’s past decisions to the contrary were wrongly decided.

Double Jeopardy

- Evans v Michigan.

. . . the Court held that a trial court’s directed verdict of acquittal bars retrial under the Double Jeopardy Clause even if it is based on a misinterpretation of the governing statute or, as here, a misunderstanding of the elements of the offense. Writing for the majority, Justice Sotomayor explained that a jury verdict of acquittal based on legally erroneous instructions still triggers the Double Jeopardy Clause, and found no meaningful distinction for double jeopardy purposes between a jury verdict and a directed verdict.

Is remaining silent prior to arrest an admission of guilt?

Apparently the court has never ruled on this before. Now they have the chance.

Last week the US Supreme Court heard Salinas v Texas, which originated in Harris County and pitted one of Harris County's district attorneys against a Stanford law professor.

The NYT describes the case here:

Salinas v. Texas, No. 12-246, addresses a major open question in the court’s Fifth Amendment jurisprudence: May the failure to answer a police officer’s questions before an arrest be used against a defendant at trial?

The Supreme Court has said the amendment’s protection against self-incrimination applies after arrest and at trial. But it has never decided, in the words of a 1980 decision, “whether or under what circumstances pre-arrest silence” in the face of questioning by law enforcement personnel is entitled to protection.

The case arose from the 1992 murders of two brothers, Juan and Hector Garza, in Houston. Among the evidence the police found were discarded shotgun shells.

They questioned Genovevo Salinas, who was said to have attended a party at the Garzas’ apartment. Mr. Salinas answered questions for almost an hour but would not say if a shotgun the police had taken from his home would match the recovered shells.

The question about the shells was the only one Mr. Salinas refused to answer. Instead, a police officer later testified, he “looked down at the floor, shuffled his feet, bit his bottom lip, clinched his hands in his lap, began to tighten up.”

Mr. Salinas was charged with murder after a friend told the police that Mr. Salinas had confessed. The jury deadlocked at his first trial. At a retrial, prosecutors again relied on testimony about the confession and ballistics evidence. They now also emphasized Mr. Salinas’s silence about the shells.

“An innocent person,” one prosecutor told the jury, “is going to say: ‘What are you talking about? I didn’t do that. I wasn’t there.’ He didn’t respond that way. He didn’t say, ‘No, it’s not going to match up.’ ”

Mr. Salinas was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In urging the justices not to hear the case, prosecutors in Texas said Mr. Salinas had effectively answered the question about the shells through his conduct. In any event, they said, the Fifth Amendment does not apply when “there is no official compulsion to speak.”

For more on the subject:

- ScotusBlog - Salinas v Texas.
- Grits for Breakfast.
- You can find the transcript of the oral argument here.

From the NYT: Why Do Innocent People Confess?

A great question:

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. What on earth could be the motive? To stop the abuse? To curry favor with the interrogator? To follow some fragile thread of imaginary hope that cooperation will bring freedom?

Yes, all of the above. Psychological studies of confessions that have proved false show an overrepresentation of children, the mentally ill and mentally retarded, and suspects who are drunk or high. They are susceptible to suggestion, eager to please authority figures, disconnected from reality or unable to defer gratification. Children often think, as Felix did, that they will be jailed if they keep up their denials and will get to go home if they go along with interrogators. Mature adults of normal intelligence have also confessed falsely after being manipulated.

False confessions have figured in 24 percent of the approximately 289 convictions reversed by DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project. Considering that DNA is available in just a fraction of all crimes, a much larger universe of erroneous convictions — and false confessions — surely exists.

The Future of Miranda Warnings

The recent arrest of the Times Square bomber has led some, and possibly even the Obama Administration, to call for limits to Miranda Warnings. Constitutional tests to the warnings are nothing new, and given the conservative slant of the court it is worth wondering how secure the warnings are. History tells us that in times of threat, civil liberties take a hit.

For my 2301s, this fits into our discussion of the constitution, as a document that defines and limits governmental power, the Bill of Rights, civil liberties, and how the Supreme Court defines constitutional language.

Links:
- Miranda Warnings.
- Miranda v. Arizona.
- Right Against Self Incrimination.
- Fifth Amendment.
- Due Process.
- Warren Court.
- Dickerson v. U.S.
- The Origins of the Public Safety Exception to Miranda Warnings.