Crane v. Kentucky, 85-5238

• Decision Date: 09 June 1986
• Docket Number: No. 85-5238,85-5238
• Parties: Major CRANE, Petitioner, v. KENTUCKY
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

476 U.S. 683

106 S.Ct. 2142

90 L.Ed.2d 636

Major CRANE, Petitioner,

v KENTUCKY.

No. 85-5238.

Argued April 23, 1986.

Decided June 9, 1986.

Syllabus

Prior to his trial for murder in a Kentucky court, petitioner moved to suppress his confession. Following a hearing, the trial court determined that the confession was voluntary and denied the motion. At trial, petitioner, who was 16 years old at the time of his arrest, sought to introduce testimony describing the length of the interrogation and the manner in which it was conducted. In attempting to introduce such testimony, petitioner hoped to show that the confession, which was the principal component of the State's case, was unworthy of belief. The trial court ruled that the testimony pertained solely to the issue of voluntariness and was therefore inadmissible. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. The Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed, rejecting petitioner's claim that the exclusion of the testimony violated his rights under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Held: The exclusion of the testimony about the circumstances of his confession deprived petitioner of his fundamental constitutional right—whether under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or under the Compulsory Process or Confrontation Clauses of the Sixth Amendment—to a fair opportunity to present a defense. Evidence about the manner in which a confession was secured, in addition to bearing on its voluntariness, often bears on its credibility, a matter that is exclusively for the jury to assess. The physical and psychological environment that yielded a confession is not only relevant to the legal question of voluntariness but can also be of substantial relevance to the ultimate factual issue of the defendant's guilt or innocence, especially in a case such as this where there apparently was no physical evidence to link petitioner to the crime. Respondent's argument that any error was harmless since the excluded evidence came in through other witnesses should be directed in the first instance to the state court. Pp. 687-692.

690 S.W.2d 753, reversed and remanded.

O'CONNOR, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.

Frank W. Heft, Jr., Louisville, Ky., for petitioner.

John S. Gillig, Frankfort, Ky., for respondent.

Justice O'CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.

Prior to his trial for murder, petitioner moved to suppress his confession. The trial judge conducted a hearing, determined that the confession was voluntary, and denied the motion. At trial, petitioner sought to introduce testimony about the physical and psychological environment in which the confession was obtained. His objective in so doing was to suggest that the statement was unworthy of belief. The trial court ruled that the testimony pertained solely to the issue of voluntariness and was therefore inadmissible. The question presented is whether this ruling deprived petitioner of his rights under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution.

I

On August 7, 1981, a clerk at the Keg Liquor Store in Louisville, Kentucky, was shot to death, apparently during the course of a robbery. A complete absence of identifying physical evidence hampered the initial investigation of the crime. A week later, however, the police arrested petitioner, then 16 years old, for his suspected participation in an unrelated service station holdup. According to police testimony at the suppression hearing, "just out of the clear blue sky," petitioner began to confess to a host of local crimes, including shooting a police officer, robbing a hardware store, and robbing several individuals at a bowling alley. App. 4. Their curiosity understandably aroused, the police transferred petitioner to a juvenile detention center to continue the interrogation. After initially denying any involvement in the Keg Liquors shooting, petitioner eventually confessed to that crime as well.

Subsequent to his indictment for murder, petitioner moved to suppress the confession on the grounds that it had been impermissibly coerced in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution. At the ensuing hearing, he testified that he had been detained in a windowless room for a protracted period of time, that he had been surrounded by as many as six police officers during the interrogation, that he had repeatedly requested and been denied permission to telephone his mother, and that he had been badgered into making a false confession. Several police officers offered a different version of the relevant events. Concluding that there had been "no sweating or coercion of the defendant" and "no overreaching" by the police, the court denied the motion. Id., at 21.

The case proceeded to trial. In his opening statement, the prosecutor stressed that the Commonwealth's case rested almost entirely on petitioner's confession and on the statement of his uncle, who had told the police that he was also present during the holdup and murder. Tr. 10-14. In response, defense counsel outlined what would prove to be the principal avenue of defense advanced at trial—that, for a number of reasons, the story petitioner had told the police should not be believed. The confession was rife with inconsistencies, counsel argued. For example, petitioner had told the police that the crime was committed during daylight hours and that he had stolen a sum of money from the cash register. In fact, counsel told the jury, the evidence would show that the crime occurred at 10:40 p.m. and that no money at all was missing from the store. Beyond these inconsistencies, counsel suggested, "[t]he very circumstances surrounding the giving of the [confession] are enough to cast doubt on its credibility." Id., at 16. In particular, she continued, evidence bearing on the length of the interrogation and the manner in which it was conducted would show that the statement was unworthy of belief.

In response to defense counsel's opening statement, and before any evidence was presented to the jury, the prosecutor moved in limine to prevent the defense from introducing any testimony bearing on the circumstances under which the confession was obtained. Such testimony bore only on the "voluntariness" of the confession, the prosecutor urged, a "legal matter" that had already been resolved by the court in its earlier ruling. App. 27. Defense counsel responded that she had no intention of relitigating the issue of voluntariness, but was seeking only to demonstrate that the circumstances of the confession "cas[t] doubt on its validity and its credibility." Ibid. Rejecting this reasoning, the court granted the prosecutor's motion. Although the precise contours of the ruling are somewhat ambiguous, the court expressly held that the defense could inquire into the inconsistencies contained in the confession, but would not be permitted to "develop in front of the jury" any evidence about the duration of the interrogation or the individuals who were in attendance. Id., at 28.

After registering a continuing objection, petitioner invoked a Kentucky procedure under which he was permitted to develop a record of the evidence he would have put before the jury were it not for the court's evidentiary ruling. That evidence included testimony from two police officers about the size and other physical characteristics of the interrogation room, the length of the interview, and various other details about the taking of the confession. Id., at 45-53.

The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and petitioner was sentenced to 40 years in prison. The sole issue in the ensuing appeal to the Kentucky Supreme Court was whether the exclusion of testimony about the circumstances of the confession violated petitioner's rights under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution. Over one dissent, the court rejected the claim and affirmed the conviction and sentence. 690 S.W.2d 753 (1985). The excluded testimony "related solely to voluntariness," the court reasoned. Id., at 754. Although evidence bearing on the credibility of the confession would have been admissible, under established Kentucky procedure a trial court's pretrial voluntariness determination is conclusive and may not be relitigated at trial. Because the proposed testimony about the circumstances of petitioner's confession pertained only to the voluntariness question, the court held, there was no error in keeping that testimony from the jury.

Because the reasoning of the Kentucky Supreme Court is directly at odds with language in several of this Court's opinions, see, e.g., Lego v. Twomey, 404 U.S. 477, 485-486, 92 S.Ct. 619, 624-625, 30 L.Ed.2d 618 (1972), and because it conflicts with the decisions of every other state court to have confronted the issue, see, e.g., Beaver v. State, 455 So.2d 253, 256 (Ala.Crim.App.1984); Palmes v. State, 397 So.2d 648, 653 (Fla.1981), we granted the petition for certiorari, 474 U.S. 1019, 106 S.Ct. 566, 88 L.Ed.2d 551 (1985). We now reverse and remand.

II

The holding below rests on the apparent assumption that evidence bearing on the voluntariness of a confession and evidence bearing on its credibility fall in conceptually distinct and mutually exclusive categories. Once a confession has been found voluntary, the Supreme Court of Kentucky believed, the evidence that supported that finding may not be presented to the jury for any other purpose. This analysis finds no support in our cases, is premised on a misconception about the role of confessions in a criminal trial, and, under the circumstances of this case, contributed to an evidentiary ruling that deprived petitioner of his fundamental constitutional right to a fair opportunity to present a defense. California v. Trombetta, 467 U.S. 479, 485, 104 S.Ct. 2528, 2532, 81 L.Ed.2d 413 (1984).

It is by now well established that "certain interrogation techniques, either in isolation, or as applied to the unique characteristics of a...