High Court Allows Forced Confessions in Criminal Trials : Judiciary: A key pillar of constitutional law is upset. Justices, in 5-4 vote, rule that a coerced admission of guilt could be used if it amounts to a ‘harmless error.’

The Supreme Court on Tuesday knocked down one of the pillars of constitutional law--that a coerced confession never can be used against an accused person in court.

From now on, courts will not automatically overturn the convictions of defendants who were pressured by police officers into admitting their guilt. If there is enough additional evidence to justify the guilty verdict, the conviction will stand.

The ruling came on a 5-4 vote in an opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist that was endorsed by new Justice David H. Souter.

The chief justice pointed out that since 1967, the court has said that a violation of a suspect’s constitutional rights does not automatically require a reversal of his conviction if the error is minor and does not affect the outcome of the case.

Since then, Rehnquist said: “The court has been faithful to the belief that the harmless-error doctrine is essential to preserve the principle that the central purpose of the criminal trial is to decide the factual question of the defendant’s guilt or innocence.”

The court “promotes public respect for the criminal process by focusing on the underlying fairness of the trial, rather than on the virtually inevitable presence of immaterial error,” Rehnquist wrote.

Justice Byron R. White, reading a rare dissent from the bench, accused the court majority of abandoning “one of the fundamental tenets of our criminal justice system” by allowing use of coerced confessions in court.

“Ours is not an inquisitorial system of criminal justice” in which police and prosecutors are free to use “coercion to prove (their) charge against an accused out of his own mouth,” White said.

In decisions dating back to 1897, the court has said that any use of a forced confession in court violates the Constitution. The rulings were based on the 5th Amendment, which states that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”

Based on that clause, prosecutors had been forbidden to ever use a compelled confession in court. When the rule was violated, an appeals court would reverse the conviction and order a new trial.

Under the court’s new approach, coerced or involuntary confessions are still frowned upon but their use in court will not require an automatic reversal of a conviction.

Instead, the Supreme Court said, trial judges and appellate judges now must decide whether a forced confession used during a trial amounts to a “harmless error.” If it does, the conviction can stand; if not, it must be reversed.

For example, if prosecutors show a jury the knife owned by an accused killer, as well as his bloodstained clothes, a judge could conclude that his murder conviction should stand even though police forced him to confess and the prosecutor told the jury of his confession.

But if the judge believes that the jury’s verdict depended in part on the illegal confession, the conviction should be overturned, the Supreme Court said. That sort of error is not “harmless” under the ruling.

Criminal law experts said that the ruling marks a clear departure from the high court’s precedents but that its impact will depend on how judges apply the “harmless error” standard.

“This is a major change in the law,” said Charles H. Whitebread, professor of law at USC and a criminal law expert. “I think it shows they (the justices) are not just willing but eager to be on the side of law enforcement.”

“The message the police will take from this is that you can lean on them (suspected criminals) harder now and get away with it,” said William Greenhalgh, law professor at Georgetown University. Citing the recent beating of motorist Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers, Greenhalgh added: “That’s the wrong message to send, and it couldn’t come at a worse time.”

However, an attorney for the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers advised advocates of defendants’ rights to wait and see how the ruling is applied.

“This is an obvious retreat but we need to see how judges apply the ‘harmless error’ rule,” said H. Gerald Beaver of FayettevilleC. “If judges apply it rigorously, it might not be as big a chink in the Constitution as we think.”

In a brief to the high court, the Bush Administration had urged the justices to scrap the absolute ban on coerced confessions.

Government prosecutors argued that it makes no sense to throw out the conviction of an obviously guilty defendant because a judge concludes after the fact that a confession was illegally obtained.

They noted that in most cases, coerced confessions are not beaten out of suspects, but tend to involve situations in which a suspect was improperly nudged or pressured into confessing.

In the case decided by the court Tuesday, the justices concluded, on a separate 5-4 vote, that an Arizona prison inmate was “coerced” to confess to another crime because of a conversation with a police informer.

Anthony Sarivola, the informer, told the Arizona prisoner, Oreste Fulminante, that he might get “some tough treatment” from other inmates unless he told him whether he had indeed murdered his 11-year-old daughter, as had been rumored.

Fulminante admitted that he had committed the crime and the informer passed on the information to police. Later, after he was released from prison, Fulminante repeated the confession to Sarivola’s wife.

In 1985, both confessions were introduced as evidence at Fulminante’s trial--over his lawyer’s objections--and he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Last year, the Arizona Supreme Court concluded that his confession was improperly coerced and it overturned his conviction. Prosecutors appealed the case (Arizona vs. Fulminante, 89-839).

The Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Arizona Supreme Court but not before splitting on three separate conclusions.

First, the court concluded on a 5-4 vote that Fulminante’s confession was indeed coerced because it followed “a credible threat of physical violence.”

Justices Antonin Scalia joined Justices Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and White in this majority. The dissenters were Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Souter.

Second, five justices concluded that a coerced confession could be used at trial if it amounted to a “harmless error.” The majority for this conclusion included Rehnquist, O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Souter.

Third, still another five-member majority ruled that the use of Fulminante’s confession was not a harmless error and that the Arizona Supreme Court, therefore, was correct in reversing the conviction. White, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens and Kennedy formed this majority.

Dissenting, Rehnquist said that the use of the confession was a “classic case of harmless error” because the defendant also confessed to the informer’s wife. Scalia and O’Connor joined Rehnquist’s dissent. Souter did not record his vote on this point.

Tuesday’s ruling demonstrated for the first time the impact of Justice William J. Brennan’s retirement and his replacement with Souter, who was appointed to the high court by President Bush.

Brennan, the court’s longtime liberal leader, had insisted on excluding criminal evidence if a suspect’s rights had been violated. Although Souter did not explain his position, his vote created a majority for the position of Chief Justice Rehnquist.

Rehnquist has argued that criminal trials are designed to find the truth and the more evidence presented to a jury, the better.

In most instances, Rehnquist and White have agreed on their hard-line approach to crime. But the two justices obviously differed heatedly over the Fulminante case. They took turns reading parts of their opinions from the bench and White ended with a biting dissent to Rehnquist’s new rule on confessions.

“The majority offers no convincing reason for overturning our long line of decisions requiring the exclusion of coerced confessions,” White concluded.