Beecher v. Alabama 8212 6497

• Decision Date: 26 June 1972
• Docket Number: No. 71,71
• Citation: 92 S.Ct. 2282,33 L.Ed.2d 317,408 U.S. 234
• Parties: Johnny Daniel BEECHER v. State of ALABAMA. —6497
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

408 U.S. 234

92 S.Ct. 2282

33 L.Ed.2d 317

Johnny Daniel BEECHER

v State of ALABAMA.

No. 71—6497.

June 26, 1972.

PER CURIAM.

In 1964 the petitioner was tried and convicted in an Alabama state court for first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death. The conviction was based in large part on written confessions that he had signed five days after his arrest. The petitioner objected to the introduction at trial of these confessions. But the trial court and the Alabama Supreme Court held that the confessions were made voluntarily and were properly received into evidence.

In 1967 this Court summarily reversed that judgment of the Alabama Supreme Court. Beecher v. Alabama, 389 U.S. 35, 88 S.Ct. 189, 19 L.Ed.2d 35. We said:

'The uncontradicted facts of record are these. Tennessee police officers saw the petitioner as he fled into an open field and fired a bullet into his right leg. He fell, and the local Chief of Police pressed a loaded gun to his face while another of- ficer pointed a rifle against the side of his head. The Police Chief asked him whether he had raped and killed a white woman. When he said that he had not, the Chief called him a liar and said, 'If you don't tell the truth I am going to kill you.' The other officer then fired his rifle next to the petitioner's ear, and the petitioner immediately confessed. Later the same day he received an injection to ease the pain in his leg. He signed something the Chief of Police described as 'extradition papers' after the officers told him that 'it would be best . . . to sign the papers before the gang of people came there and killed' him. He was then taken by ambulance from Tennessee to Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama. By June 22, the petitioner's right leg, which was later amputated, had become so swollen and his wound so painful that he required an injection of morphine every four hours. Less than an hour after one of these injections, two Alabama investigators visited him in the prison hospital. The medical assistant in charge told the petitioner to 'cooperate' and, in the petitioner's presence, he asked the investigators to inform him if the petitioner did not 'tell them what they wanted to know.' The medical assistant then left the petitioner alone with the State's investigators. In the course of a 90-minute 'conversation,' the investigators prepared two detailed statements similar to the confession the petitioner had given five days earlier at gunpoint in Tennessee. Still in a 'kind of slumber' from his last morphine injection, feverish, and in intense pain, the petitioner signed the written confessions thus prepared for him.' Id., at 36—37, 88 S.Ct., at 190.

We were led to 'the inescapable conclusion that the petitioner's confessions were involuntary.' Id., at 38, 88 S.Ct., at 191. For '(t)he petitioner, already wounded by the police, was ordered at gunpoint to speak his guilt or be killed. From that time until he was directed five days later to tell Alabama investigators 'what they wanted to know,' there was 'no break in the stream of events'. Clewis v. State of Texas, 386 U.S. 707, 710, 87 S.Ct. 1338, 1340, 18 L.Ed.2d 423. For he was then still in pain, under the influence of drugs, and at the complete mercy of the prison hospital authorities.' Ibid. Because the confessions 'were the product of gross coercion,' we held that their use at the petitioner's trial violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Ibid.

Only three months after this Court's decision, the petitioner was reindicted and retried for the same crime. Again, a confession was introduced in evidence. Again, it was a confession made by the petitioner shortly after he had been shot and arrested and shortly after he had been given a large does of morphine. Again, the petitioner was convicted and sentenced to death.

The confession used at the second trial...