Word: focused
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...handcuff police interrogation, they said. Don't forget society's rights and Benjamin Cardozo's words: "Justice, though due the accused, is due the accuser also." Don't abandon "totality of circumstances" in judging whether confessions are free or coerced. Don't assume that "focus" is workable as an objective test. Don't expect judges to reconstruct just when the focus point was reached or whether the suspect really waived his rights when he talked. Don't add such new confusion that ultimately the only solution will be a truly automatic test...
...constitutional rights will thwart the effectiveness of a system of law enforcement, then there is something very wrong with that system." Despite this manifesto, the basic Escobedo rule was actually limited. "We hold only," said the opinion, "that when the process shifts from investigatory to accusatory -when its focus is on the accused and its purpose is to elicit a confession-our adversary system begins to operate, and, under the circumstances here, the accused must be permitted to consult his lawyer...
Even that specific rule, with its insistence on the importance of the "focus" point, struck the four dissenters as all wrong. Not only is the rule unworkable "unless police cars are equipped with public defenders," declared Justice Byron White, but it "reflects a deep-seated distrust of law-enforcement officers everywhere." Said Justice John M. Harlan...
...year rap for holding up a Brooklyn dress shop in 1961. Vignera was fingered by a confederate, linked to stolen goods, and identified by his victims. He confessed after about twelve hours. To clinch the police case, he was then grilled far beyond "focus," and was not taken before a judge until roughly 24 hours after his arrest. He was not advised of his right to counsel; police also ignored New York's prompt-arraignment statute. The state's highest court upheld his conviction on "totality" grounds. ¶ Carl C. Westover, 44, the only federal defendant, was picked...
...confessions were apparently true and voluntary; most of the defendants probably could not have been convicted without their confessions. Yet the court is being asked to void all the confessions by reading into Escobedo a new standard: that police must warn all suspects at focus point that they need not talk, that anything they say may be held against them, and that they have a right to counsel, furnished by the state if necessary...