The Law Relating to Police Interrogation Privileges and Limitations

Abstract

The papers in this symposium will focus on that phase of Criminal Law Administration which chronologically precedes the suspect's first contact with a judicial officer: the phase of police action against or upon a suspect. This is the most important phase of criminal procedure, for here, much more so than during trial, the case is to be won-or lost. We shall assume that there has been contact by a police officer with one suspected of having committed a crime or at least with someone believed to know something about a crime believed to have been committed. A police officer may now enter the picture under any one of three different circumstances. He may (1) be armed with a warrant of arrest, or (2) have the right to make an arrest without a warrant, or (3) he may not yet have reached the stage at which he has the right and duty to effect an arrest and thus may merely intend to elicit information from the suspect or source of information so as to lay the basis for a subsequent arrest and/or preliminary hearing, or to satisfy himself that his suspicion was unfounded and, thus, to clear the suspect. In situations (1) and (2) the problem of questioning is not very acute. The evidence which sufficed for issuance of the warrant or for an arrest without a warrant, e.g., testimony of witnesses, real evidence, etc., will be available at a preliminary judicial hearing, just as it was available when the duty to effect the arrest arose. Further evidence, produced by lawful routine police work, is likely to be added after arrest and certainly before the case reaches the grand jury stage and, in the ordinary course of events, the case is sewed up tight when it goes to trial-granting, of course, that troublesome cases do arise to disturb the