Word: escobedo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite the furor over Mallory, the Supreme Court last year tackled the interrogation problem at the state level with the now-famous decision in Escobedo v. Illinois. In its most controversial action yet, the court voided Chicago Laborer Danny Escobedo's murder confession because it was made after the police had refused to let him see his lawyer, who was actually waiting in the station house at the time. Though vaguely worded, the court's ruling indicated that the right to counsel begins when police start grilling a prime suspect-a plainly impractical proposition, declared dissenting Justice Byron...
Because 75% to 80% of all convictions for serious crimes are based on presumably voluntary confessions, police and prosecutors have been in a tailspin ever since. Does Escobedo apply only to precisely similar situations? Or does it mean that police failure to advise a suspect of his rights to counsel and to silence automatically invalidates his confession? If interrogation requires the physical presence of a lawyer, will he not obviously advise his client to say nothing? Worried police officers now fear that as a result even valid confessions will be virtually eliminated. The Supreme Court has let 13 months pass...
...Escobedo ruling highlights a critical vacuum in U.S. criminal justice: the lack of a complete set of rational standards to coordinate the thinking of police, judges, lawyers, law professors and informed citizens. The Supreme Court has done the pioneering work-work that it could not constitutionally avoid. But rule making by constitutional interpretation has limits; such rules tend to be confined to the happenstances in particular cases and are often more confusing than clarifying. The burden is now on Congress and state legislatures, which are ideally equipped for the fact finding required in so vast and varied a country...
...prestigious American Law Institute may offer a way out of the Escobedo impasse with a model code of pre-arraignment procedure that is being force-drafted by Harvard Law Professor James Vorenberg and dozens of eminent advisers. The drafters tend to approve police interrogation of suspects under proper safeguards. Though the precise formula is still being debated, one possible answer is that grilling should be made "visible"-if not to outside witnesses, then from the evidence of movie cameras or tape recorders...
...Principle. The confession problem stems from the court's own decision last June in Escobedo v. Illinois, which voided a Chicago murder confession because the police had refused to let the suspect see his lawyer. Escobedo seemed to establish a new principle: that a grilled suspect has a constitutional right to see his lawyer-and by inference, to be told he has a right to silence. But did the court's ruling mean that police must now advise all suspects of their rights to counsel and silence (a standard FBI rule), lest all voluntary confessions be automatically tossed...