In Little v. U.S., decided on November 12, 2015, the issue was the constitutionality of the confession, which lead to conviction at trial with little or no collaborating independent evidence.
Little was picked up on an abscondence warrant and suspected of being involved in an attempted car robbery and was ushered to the interrogating room. Mr. Little’s cell phone was found inside the car, and although he vehemently denied involvement initially – eventually after several hours of interrogation confessed to the crime.
The issue on appeal was the voluntariness of the confession in light of the highly unconventional and aggressive tactics the detectives used to bring about the confession.
Detectives falsely claimed or suggested that his fingerprints were found at the scene. That he was identified by the eyewitnesses and also through photo array lineup. He may be inculpated in other robberies. He faced enhanced penalties for robbing a senior citizen.
But the two tactics/statements by the detectives that swayed the decision of the Court, that the detectives had crossed the line, had to do with Little’s latent request to involve his possible lawyer with a deal negotiations first suggested by the detectives, and the repeated insinuations that Mr. Little may be sexually assaulted at the jail given his age and disposition.
Specifically the detectives suggested “you know Wee Wee down at LeDroit Park? You know what happened to him when he got locked up?” Detective Crespo asked. “The day Wee Wee went to jail, you know he’s an adult now. Somebody sexually assaulted him. That’s not how you want to live your life. You ain’t no Wee Wee.” Wee Wee turned out also to be Mr. Little’s godbrother and thus these statements were particularly effective against him.
A confession is admitted in evidence if the government proves by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant’s statement was voluntarily.
“The test for determining the voluntariness of specific statements ‘is whether, under the totality of the circumstances, the will of the [suspect] was overborne in such a way as to render his confession the product of coercion.’
The Court also expounded that certain interrogations techniques particular to a suspect such as here and with suggestions of possible sexual assault in the prison “are so offensive to a civilized system of justice that they must be condemned under the Due Process Clause.”
The Court in reversing the conviction, suppressing the confession, and ordering a new trial held “where police were interrogating a teenage suspect who was chained to the floor in a small station house interrogation room, where they instilled in him a fear of being raped in jail, where they played up the risk that he would be prosecuted for myriad robberies they did not suspect him of committing, and where the suspect emphatically denied he had robbed anybody until police told him, when he inquired “So where my lawyer at?,” that he had to confess before he could arrange a meeting with his lawyer, the combination of the timing and the nature and intensity of these tactics leads us to the conclusion that the confession was not voluntary, that its centrality to the government’s case precludes it from being deemed harmless,16 and that Mr. Little should have a new trial at which his confession is excluded.”
This case is significant as it provides a legal precedent for cases in which Miranda warning was deemed waived first voluntarily and later as the interrogations persisted, determined to be too coercive to be held constitutional overall.
There was also no other corroborating evidence linking Little to the crime to provide independent basis for the conviction excluding the confession.
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