Word: suspects
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...police solve a string of burglaries committed by a professional who is never caught in the act? Not by fingerprints, wristwatch radios and brilliant deduction. What it takes is tedious, routine police work-hiring informers, watching known burglars, and questioning suspicious persons. Even then, a prime suspect may not confess and "clear the books" of all those unsolved burglaries until he is offered a deal, such as concurrent sentences equaling the rap for just one burglary. "Despite modern advances in the technology of crime detection," summed up the late Justice Felix Frankfurter, "offenses frequently occur about which things cannot...
...hope is that such questions will lead to voluntary confessions, which have always been highly valued in U.S. courts. Whether it is the spontaneous blurt, the "threshold" confession immediately after the crime or the arrest ("Officer, I just killed my wife"), or the eventual uncoerced admission made by a suspect, the voluntary confession usually needs no corroboration for conviction. It is "the highest form of evidence," the legal analogue of the religious confession, although it may lead to execution rather than absolution...
...Britain devised the famous "Judges Rules" requiring police to warn anyone suspected of a crime; questions must stop when police have enough evidence to charge the suspect. Today the rules are said to be widely ignored, and with crime soaring, some eminent Britons argue that the privilege against self-incrimination is outdated. The privilege does have old-fashioned roots. It originated in repugnance for such long-vanished torture methods as the rack and the screw. Now that British police are civilized, say the critics, why forbid them merely to ask questions-thus stacking the odds in favor of criminals...
...prove guilt by independent evidence, not by coercing proof out of the defendant's own mouth. So absolute is the privilege against self-incrimination in a trial that the defendant need not even take the stand. But what of police interrogation -the preliminary stage at which a suspect is pressed to make the very confession that may convict him at his trial...
...18th century when there were no police forces. At the time, the trial itself was the critical confrontation between the state and the accused. Mindful of the British Star Chamber, the Constitution's framers ringed American trials with safeguards-almost none of which serve to protect the suspect from the time he is picked up by the police until days or even weeks later, when he appears before a judge...