The Obsolescence of Voluntary Confessions in Maine

The would-be assassin lurks in the crowd that gathers outside the campaign headquarters building. In anticipation of the candidate's appearance, the television technicians hoist their videotape cameras and illuminate the scene with floodlights, as the gunman nervously fingers the automatic concealed in the pocket of his field jacket. Moments later, the candidate emerges from the doorway; the assassin rushes into the floodlit view of the cameras, takes aim at the startled politician, and hollers: "I've been planning this for years, and now I'm going to give you what's coming to you." His shots ring out as Secret Service agents converge upon him. If the gunman were tried in a Maine state court, the videotapes of his actions would almost certainly be admissible against him.

The sound tracks of those tapes which contain the gunman's words, however, might well be inadmissible. The explanation for this strange state of affairs lies in State v. Caouette, a recent Maine Law Court decision which held that a defendant's "involuntary" confession must be excluded from the evidence presented at trial even though the police to whom it was made had engaged in no misconduct whatsoever. The court ignored the original common law basis for the exclusion of confessions, the rejection of unreliable evidence, and abandoned the modern ground for such exclusion, fundamental fairness and the deterrence of police misconduct. Instead, the court forged a different rule: a confession will be inadmissible whenever it appears that the declarant was not "free from 'compulsion of whatever nature.'"