EVIDENCE-POLICE REGULATION BY RULES OF EVIDENCE-RESULTS OF THE McNABB CASE

In McNabb v. United States the Supreme Court promulgated novel judicial legislation, the gist of which is that confessions or admissions of crime made while the accused is in custody without having been brought before a magistrate as required by law are inadmissible in evidence. That judicial pronouncement assumed that the utterances were made without compulsion, and prohibited their use solely because at the time they were made the officers of justice were themselves disregarding the law-the procedural requirement that persons arrested be taken immediately before a magistrate. In Justice Frankfurter's phrase, "a conviction resting on evidence secured through such a flagrant disregard of the procedure which Congress has commanded cannot be allowed to stand without making the courts themselves accomplices in wilful disobedience of law."