Mitya Karamazov Gives the Supreme Court an Onion: the Role of Confessions

• Citation: Vol. 66 No. 3
• Publication year: 2015

Mitya Karamazov Gives the Supreme Court an Onion: The Role of Confessions

Amy D. Ronner

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Mitya Karamazov Gives the Supreme Court an Onion: The Role of Confessions

by Amy D. Ronner^*

I. Introduction

In The Brothers Karamazov,¹ Grushenka tells Alyosha a fable that she heard as a child:

Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her

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guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar . . . .²

After the fable, Grushenka confesses that she herself is that very "wicked woman," who, in her entire life, has "given just one little onion."³ In Dostoevsky's novels, characters, like Grushenka, have a propensity to self-incriminate. As J.M. Coetzee puts it, in Dostoevsky's writings, "confession itself, with all its attendant psychological, moral, epistemological and finally metaphysical problems, moves to the center of the stage."⁴ In fact, Dostoevsky implies that the whole human race

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is blessed and cursed with a confessant gene. In three parts, this Article, focusing on that blessed and cursed gene, discusses the novelist's posthumous contribution to criminal justice.

Part II summarizes seminal United States Supreme Court confession cases. The Court has a longstanding hate-love relationship with confessions: while it believes that such evidence can valuably assist the truth-finding process, it has at times questioned its reliability and mistrusted coercive methods used for extraction. The Court's express goal under the Due Process Clause⁵ and Miranda v. Arizona⁶ is to ensure that confessions are the product of a free and rational choice.⁷ Although the Sixth Amendment⁸ and accompanying case law explicitly aim to protect the integrity of the adversarial process, freedom and rationality also (but more subtly) undergird the reasoning.⁹ When it comes to confessions, the Court's modus operandi entails fixating on externalities, formulating safeguards, and regulating conduct. The focus tends to be on things peripheral to the confessant: typically relevant factors include the conduct of state actors, coercive techniques, or deliberate elicitation tactics.¹⁰

When it comes to confession, Dostoevsky is worlds apart, and Part III hones in on those striking differences. While the law's focus is on external forces, Dostoevsky essentially relegates those forces to the realm of irrelevance or at least sees them as least problematic. In his fiction, confession, an elusive phenomenon of infinite variety, pertains solely to the individual soul and psyche. For him, by its very nature, confession is divorced from free will and rationality; there exists in all Homo sapiens an inner-coercive drive to divulge a slew of true or false secrets. Dostoevsky, moreover, pokes holes in the notion that confessions can and should play a role in criminal prosecutions. For him, confession can minister to only one process: it is an incipient step in an individual's

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spiritual evolution, and interrogators, judges, or juries simply have no business meddling in that ineffability.¹¹

Any attempt to analyze all confessants in Dostoevsky's fiction is a virtual impossibility and would require coverage in a multi-volume treatise, one possibly rivaling Joseph Frank's unredacted biography.¹² This Article instead focuses on Mitya, one of the three Karamazov brothers, who tropistically leans towards a confession that would inexorably emerge without any poking or prodding on the part of legal agents.¹³

Part IV, the Conclusion-returning to this Article's origin-takes a closer look at what will become Mitya's "onion" and ends with a conjecture of what Dostoevsky (and Mitya) might say to the United States Supreme Court and legal scholars who have long struggled to make sense out of the senseless confession phenomenon.

II. Confession Jurisprudence

According to the United States Supreme Court and some legal scholars, a predominant law-enforcement goal is to obtain a free and reliable confession to introduce into evidence in a criminal prosecution.¹⁴ Here, an ever-evasive goal is to isolate what causes individuals to admit to things they did or did not do. The Supreme Court has proffered answers, but none of them would likely impress Dostoevsky.

A. United States Supreme Court

In its longstanding effort to discover the causes of a coerced and involuntary confession, the United States Supreme Court tends to indict external forces, mostly consisting of law-enforcement tactics. This focus is understandable in criminal procedure, which typically entails an imbalance of power in the combat between the state-with its enormous resources-and a vulnerable, relatively powerless, accused. The psychological wrangling between police and suspects in the interrogation

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room is not just the hackneyed drama of news and media, but often the substance of Due Process, Miranda v. Arizona, and Sixth Amendment confession cases.

1. Due Process: Totality of Circumstances. The Supreme Court initially relied on the Due Process Clause to ban the use of confessions extracted by physical torture and later expanded this to prohibit psychological coercion.¹⁵ While the policies behind Due Process decisions (and behind Miranda as well) are numerous and important, here the discussion confines itself primarily to doctrinal tests. In the Due Process calculus, the suspect's idiosyncrasies are relevant, but police conduct and the interrogation environment dominate. The trilogy, Ashcraft v. Tennessee,¹⁶ Spano v. New York,¹⁷ and Colorado v. Connelly,¹⁸ illustrates the Supreme Court's preoccupation with coercion from the outside, which typically manifests itself as interrogator tactics.¹⁹

In Ashcraft, the defendant, charged with having hired a man to murder his wife, was convicted as an accessory before the fact.²⁰ Ashcraft argued that his alleged confession that was "extorted" from him violated Due Process, and based on the totality of circumstances, the Court agreed.²¹ Police officers kept Ashcraft in custody for thirty-six hours without sleep or rest. Relays of experienced investigators and lawyers questioned him practically without respite from Saturday

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evening until Monday morning. The record reflected that the reason the officers worked in shifts was because they, exhausted, needed breaks.²² Similar facts existed in Spano, which involved a post indictment confession and a first-degree murder conviction of a 25-year old Italian immigrant.²³ While the Court noted that Spano had limited education and was "emotionally unstable and maladjusted," what mattered most were the tricks of experienced officers and prosecutors who spearheaded the investigation.²⁴ Questioning did not occur during regular business hours, but began in early evening and ended about eight hours later. Interrogators, persisting despite Spano's repeated refusals to answer on the advice of his attorney, ignored his requests to contact retained counsel.²⁵

On the Spano menu was deception: the interrogators instructed Bruno, Spano's buddy, who was a "fledgling police officer," to falsely inform Spano that his telephone call had caused him trouble, his job was in jeopardy, and loss of his job would be disastrous to his three children, his wife, and his unborn child.²⁶ Spano ostensibly buckled under pressure and lies.²⁷ The Court, "considering all the facts in their post-indictment setting," held that the "official pressure, fatigue and sympathy falsely aroused" were the culprits that overcame Spano's free will and made him talk.²⁸

Connelly, a post-Miranda decision, is on a different footing and would have most intrigued Dostoevsky.²⁹ The case entrenches what the Ashcraft and Spano decisions posit: what causes an involuntary and unconstitutional confession is coercive conduct on the part of state actors.³⁰ Unlike the situation in Ashcraft and Spano, in Connelly it was the defendant himself, "without any prompting," who courted police contact.³¹ Connelly walked up to an officer, blurted out that he had murdered someone, and said that he wanted to discuss it. When the

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officer read him his Miranda rights, Connelly stated that he understood them, but still needed to talk about the murder. After a detective reiterated the rights, Connelly told him that he travelled a long way to come clean and, while in police headquarters, gave details.³²

The next day, during an interview with a public defender, Connelly became disoriented and was sent to a state hospital for evaluation. Connelly told the psychiatrist that he was listening to the "voice of God" when he confessed.³³ In the suppression hearing, the psychiatrist testified that Connelly suffered from psychosis with auditory hallucinations that impaired his ability to make free and rational choices.³⁴

The Supreme Court, at odds with the Colorado courts, concluded there was no constitutional issue because no third party (state agent) made Connelly confess.³⁵ The Court found a lack of coercive or causal police activity, which is the "necessary predicate to the finding that a confession is not 'voluntary.'"³⁶ Chief Justice Rehnquist, the opinion's author, interpreted "the cases . . . over the 50 years since Brown v. Mississippi [as focusing] upon the crucial element of police overreaching" and wrote that while the defendant's mental state can be a "significant factor in the Voluntariness' calculus," it is not controlling.³⁷ The Court stressed that Connelly's "perception of coercion flowing from the 'voice of God,' however important or significant such a perception may be in other disciplines, is a matter to which the United States Constitution does not speak."³⁸ Dostoevsky, however, intrigued by that very "matter to which the . . . Constitution does not speak," finds...