Confessions, Truth, and the Law

Confessions, Truth, and the Law examines the law in the United States that governs police interrogation and the admissibility of confessions as evidence against criminal defendants. In the 1960s, the United States Supreme Court imposed new restrictions on police interrogation, thus making it more difficult for the prosecution to rely on confessions as evidence of guilt. This book takes the iconoclastic position that these new restrictions were misguided as a matter of policy and unwarranted as a matter of constitutional law. As the leading critic of the Warren Court's so-called revolution in American criminal procedure and the predominant critic of the Miranda Act, Joseph D. Grano presents a sophisticated analysis of both the relevant Supreme Court cases and the philosophical underpinnings of the concept involved. The author discusses a number of issues that bear on the normative judgments that must be made in cases of confession. Included are the differing coercive effects of offers and threats, the issue of causation, and the connection between unfair police practices and the issue of the voluntary nature of a confession. In these chapters, Grano explores some extremely interesting hypotheticals. His lucid and informative analysis of these hypotheticals illuminates our understanding of the difficult problems that arise in this area. Another theme is that policy analysis and constitutional analysis may lead to different conclusions. While the book takes the view that policy objections to many police interrogation strategies are ill-conceived, it also acknowledges that one's starting premises, which cannot be defended analytically, ultimately determine one's policy conclusions. Requiring a premise in the written constitution, constitutional analysis necessarily is, or should be, more limited. Grano's thesis is that whatever one's policy objections to police interrogation, the constitution, properly interpreted, does not yield the limits the Supreme Court has placed on police interrogation. Further to this thesis, Confessions, Truth, and the Law closes with a controversial argument that Miranda should be overturned.