Safeguards against illegal confessions

One vital function of our judicial system is to determine the guilt or innocence of suspects who have been accused of crimes. Confessions can play a key role in making this determination. Our courts have experienced the unreliability of inaccurate or involuntary confessions – such as that of the infamous police frame-up of the prison warder in the 1980s, which confessions had been obtained as the result of threats, trickery and torture. What are our legislators waiting for to enact laws to prevent untrustworthy confessions?

Confessions were always allowed as evidence in England, even when torture was used to elicit them. However, in the mid-18th century, judges in England started to admit only confessions that they considered trustworthy. To determine the trustworthiness of a confession, judges considered the circumstances surrounding it, whether a threat or promise coerced the suspect to confess and whether the suspect confessed voluntarily in the presence of lawyers.

We have seen many articles and letters written about the constitutional rights of suspects and how trickery into confession should be illegal. It is not considered unconstitutional, however, because suspects have the right to refuse to answer questions posed by the police but they don’t have a legal right to have a lawyer present during the interrogations. Nine times out of 10, if suspects demand the presence of a lawyer, their lawyer would advise them not to fall for the investigating officers’ lines of questioning.