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But is it always the truth? Quite often, the defendant later recants, forcing courts to determine the voluntariness of his confession. The issue becomes a "swearing contest" between the scruffy confessor and three or four detectives who swear they never coerced him. Understandably, most judges and juries prefer to believe policemen; indeed, judges overlook trickery in the squeal room that would shock them in the courtroom.
Unseen Son. It was just such a swearing contest that created Escobedo v. Illinois, but in that case the nation's highest tribunal upheld the defendant —something that still awes Danny Escobedo, now 28 and long familiar with police stations. At his height, Danny hardly seems a threat to any healthy policewoman; yet he has managed to get himself picked up twice for "investigation" and arrested five times on charges ranging from assault to murder, including two arrests since his release for packing a pistol and selling barbiturates. So far, he has beaten every rap.
"I was never the ideal teen-ager," Danny wryly recalls. But he has always been fiercely idealistic about marriage, and often brooded about his sister Grace's troubled marriage to Manuel Valtierra, a key punch operator who was once arrested for stabbing Grace more than a dozen times. Danny himself fell in love with a pretty Irish-German girl of 17, and proudly claims, "I never touched her till we were married." Today, Danny is a father, but his wife has divorced him and disappeared. He has yet to see his son, who was born while Danny was in Statesville Penitentiary for killing Manuel Valtierra.
Handcuffed Client. Grace's husband was shot in the back as he arrived at his slum home on Chicago's West Side one cold January night in 1960. It was a typically clueless crime: no gun was found; there were no witnesses. But 80% of all murders involve friends or relatives, and with no warrant the police nabbed Grace, Danny and two of his friends, Bobby Chan, 17, and Benny Di Gerlando, 18. While detectives questioned them for 14½ hours at the city's ugly grey police headquarters, Chan's mother got in touch with Lawyer Warren Wolfson, who had once represented Danny in a personal-injury case. Because no one talked, Wolfson was finally able to get the whole crew released. By then, though, the cops had a theory: Danny & Co. had done Grace the favor of liquidating a hated husband.
But how to prove it? Typically, the police chose more interrogation. Ten days later, they persuaded Di Gerlando to finger Danny as the killer. Rushed back to headquarters along with Grace and Chan, Danny was hustled into an interrogation room with his hands manacled behind his back. No one warned him of his rights to silence and to counsel. Once more, Wolfson hurried to the station house. He and Danny got a brief glimpse of each other through a half-open door, but the police told the lawyer that Danny