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With no clues, how can the police solve a string of burglaries committed by a professional who is never caught in the act? Not by fingerprints, wristwatch radios and brilliant deduction. What it takes is tedious, routine police work—hiring informers, watching known burglars, and questioning suspicious persons. Even then, a prime suspect may not confess and "clear the books" of all those unsolved burglaries until he is offered a deal, such as concurrent sentences equaling the rap for just one burglary. "Despite modern advances in the technology of crime detection," summed up the late Justice Felix Frankfurter, "offenses frequently occur about which things cannot be made to speak. And where there cannot be found innocent human witnesses to such offenses, nothing remains—if police investigation is not to be balked before it has fairly begun—but to seek out possibly guilty witnesses and ask them questions."
Highest Evidence. The hope is that such questions will lead to voluntary confessions, which have always been highly valued in U.S. courts. Whether it is the spontaneous blurt, the "threshold" confession immediately after the crime or the arrest ("Officer, I just killed my wife"), or the eventual uncoerced admission made by a suspect, the voluntary confession usually needs no corroboration for conviction. It is "the highest form of evidence," the legal analogue of the religious confession, although it may lead to execution rather than absolution.
For all that, added Frankfurter, the confession system has "manifest evils." One is "the threat that a police system which has grown to rely too heavily on interrogation will not pursue or learn other crime-detection methods, and the consequent danger that police will feel themselves under pressure to secure confessions." Only a short step away is the "third degree," which makes a mockery of "natural" confessions and undermines the integrity of the trial itself.
Overreliance on confessions has troubled common-law countries ever since the rise of police forces in the mid-19th century. The drafters of the 1872 India Evidence Act put the problem succinctly: "It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing pepper into a poor devil's eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence." Under the Evidence Act, all Indian confessions are inadmissible unless made "in the immediate presence of a magistrate" who has first warned the accused that he need not speak and that anything he does say may be held against him.
In 1912, Britain devised the famous "Judges Rules" requiring police to warn anyone suspected of a crime; questions must stop when police have enough evidence to charge the suspect. Today the rules are said to be widely ignored, and with crime soaring, some eminent Britons argue that the privilege against self-incrimination is outdated. The privilege does have old-fashioned roots. It originated in repugnance for such long-vanished torture methods as the rack and the screw. Now that British police are civilized, say the critics, why forbid them merely to ask questions—thus stacking the odds in favor of criminals?
The Double Standard. But all this assumes that police can be trusted, and lack of such trust underlies the entire