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Confessional Statement Utility In Criminal Trials (an Overview)
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“… Under the existing law the exclusion of a confession as a matter of
law because it is not voluntary is always related to some conduct on the
part of authority, which is improper or unjustified. Included in the
phrase ‘improper or unjustified’ of course must be the offering of an
inducement, because it is improper in this context for those in
authority to try to induce a suspect to make a confessionâ€.
This view
of the law would have left the accused without recourse in a case where
without any improper intent and perhaps even without realizing it, the
questioner created some fear of prejudice or hope of advantage in the
mind of the suspect.’ In such a case, the resulting confession might
well be involuntary, but under the Isequilla rule, would nonetheless be
admissible. In D.P.P .V. Ping Lin4, the House of Lords was called upon
to decide whether it was the state of mind of the questioner or that of
the suspect which was to control the question of voluntariness. The
House firmly held that it was the latter that governed the question of
whether or not the confession was voluntary, and that should therefore
also control the question of admissibility.
Indeed, the rules of admissibility applied only where the fear of
prejudice
or hope of advantage was excited or held out, or the oppression created
by a ‘person in authority’, The question of what persons were or were
not persons in authority, has, however, settled that a person in
authority must have, or reasonably be thought by the suspect to have,
some influence over his arrest, detention or persecution, or in other
words, be of a person from who a threat or inducement might appear
credible. The limitation of the rule in this way was not of great
importance, since the vast majority of confessions are made to police
officers and others who are undoubtedly persons in authority, and it has
been abolished expressly by the Evidence Act 1990. But it remains
germane to consider it in the light of the common law rule that the fear
of prejudice or hope of advantage must have been generated by the
person in authority, with the consequence that self-generated fears and
hopes would not destroy the voluntariness of the confessions. However,
the result is different under the new statutory rules, even though the
confession is made to a person who previously have been a person in
authority.
In addition to the rules governing admissibility, the
trial Judge had power to exclude a confession, in the exercise of his
discretion, where it had been obtained by means of or following a breach
of the
Judges’ Rules. The Judges’ Rules were rules of conduct and
procedure for the guidance of police officers and others concerned in
the arrest, detention and interrogation of suspects. They were fist
promulgated by the judges of the then king’s Bench Division in 1912, and
subsequently revised from time to time. The Rules were not rules of
law, and did not affect the legal principles of admissibility of
confession. However, in R. V. May6, Lord Goddard C.J held that the trial
judge might refuse to admit a statement if a breach of the rules
occurred. But the main importance of the rules always lay in the fact
that a breach of the rules might provide evidence that the resulting
confession was not voluntary
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]The confessional statement of an accused person is of great evidential value in the dispensation of justice. It represents the most important and most frequently encountered exception to the rule against hearsay in criminal cases.This piece of work is propelled toward examining the fundamental conditions of the admissibility in evidence against any person equally of any oral answer given by that person to a question put by a police officer and of any statement made by that person, that it shall ... Continue reading---
