Rehnquist Wins Confession Battle : Law: For years, the chief justice had fought rule that said forced admissions of guilt reversed convictions. His ‘harmless error’ standard now applies.

In December, 1952, a young law clerk fresh out of Stanford University urged the Supreme Court to adopt a new rule that would uphold some criminal convictions despite evidence that the defendant had been forced to confess.

For decades, the court had automatically reversed convictions if it concluded that a confession had been beaten or pressured out of a suspect.

But the young clerk, William H. Rehnquist, said that defendants who are as “guilty as sin” should not go free simply because of a “technical” mistake by prosecutors or police.

“The ivory tower jurisprudence . . . has weakened local law enforcement,” he wrote in a memo to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson, in the case of three confessed murderers brutalized by New York police. “It’s been a boon to smart criminal lawyers.”

“Let’s hope it has come to an end,” his memo concluded.

This week, it did.

Rehnquist, now the chief justice of the United States, won a five-member majority to impose the “harmless error” rule he had suggested nearly 40 years ago.

Under the court’s new approach, the conviction of a criminal who has been coerced to confess can be upheld if other independent evidence fully supports a guilty verdict.

Civil libertarians denounced the ruling as a shocking departure from well-established principles. In decisions dating back to 1897, the court had said that any use of a coerced confession in court violated the Constitution.

Prosecutors welcomed the ruling. They said that it makes no sense to reverse the conviction of an obviously guilty defendant simply because of a tainted confession that was not crucial to the verdict of guilt.

Memos by Rehnquist, contained in the late Justice Jackson’s papers in the Library of Congress, show how the chief justice’s view on this sensitive criminal justice issue has remained remarkably consistent over four decades.

His fellow clerks have commented that, as a young Stanford graduate, Rehnquist held strong and extremely conservative opinions that do not appear to have changed at all over the years.

The memos, along with this week’s ruling, also show how Rehnquist is determined not to allow constitutional rights--even solidly established ones--to singly stand in the way of upholding a criminal conviction. With the high court controlled by a conservative majority, perhaps for many years to come, this approach could have significant repercussions across a spectrum of law enforcement issues.

The New York case began on April 3, 1950, when a Reader’s Digest delivery truck was stopped by three men near the town of Pleasantville. The robbers stole a bag of cash and shot one of the drivers.

The police traced a rented truck used in the robbery and picked up three New York gangsters--Harry Stein, Nathan Wissner and Calman Cooper--for questioning. They also arrested and held in isolation Cooper’s father and Wissner’s wife, even though the two relatives had taken no role in the crimes.

After 12 hours of questioning over three days, the men confessed. A prison doctor who treated them later reported that Wissner “had a broken rib and various bruises and abrasions;” Cooper “had bruises on the chest, stomach, right arm and both buttocks” and Stein “had a bruise on his right arm.”

But the men did not testify at their trial, and they were convicted by a jury and sentenced to death. A New York appeals court upheld the convictions.

In an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, their attorneys compared their treatment to “the brutalities which were rife in the Elizabethan Age.”

In his first memo to Justice Jackson, Rehnquist said that the appeal should be turned down without a hearing because it was not clear that the men had been brutalized. The police firmly denied beating a confession out of the three.

But four justices--Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed--voted to hear the case. After arguments on Dec. 18, 1952, Rehnquist wrote a four-page memo to Jackson urging that the convictions be affirmed.

He complained that the defendants’ whole case was built on showing that their confessions had been coerced, rather than on proving that they were innocent. “The implicit premise is that if they can only show that the confessions were coerced, they can get a reversal even though they are guilty as sin,” he wrote.

He urged that the court adopt “the common sense standard” used by most of the states that would allow the conviction to stand if the illegal confession amounted to a “harmless error.”

But Jackson did not take the advice. He wrote an opinion for a 6-3 majority upholding the convictions but relying on the fact that the jury and judge did not believe that the men had been coerced to confess.

“Forced confessions will . . . void state convictions,” Jackson wrote in the case, but these confessions, he said, were not forced. Justices Black, Douglas and Frankfurter strongly dissented.

In the next decade, the high court took a much more skeptical view of confessions. In the Miranda case of 1966, the court required that police officers read suspects their rights and offer them a lawyer before questioning them.

In a case decided Tuesday, suspect Oreste Fulminante did not get his Miranda warning because he was questioned unknowingly by a fellow prison inmate who was also an FBI informant. Fearing attacks by other inmates, Fulminante befriended the informant and told him about a murder he had committed. He was later convicted and sentenced to death.

On appeal, the Arizona courts--unlike the New York court in 1952--ruled that Fulminante’s confession had indeed been “coerced” and reversed his conviction. Five members of the Supreme Court ultimately agreed with that conclusion and ordered a new trial.

But Chief Justice Rehnquist also put together a separate group of five justices to rule for the first time that a coerced confession does not require a conviction to be reversed if it amounts to a harmless error.