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Mitya Karamazov Gives The Supreme Court An Onion: The Role Of Confessions, Amy D. Ronner

Mercer Law Review

Part II summarizes seminal United States Supreme Court confession cases. The Court has a longstanding hate-love relationship with confessions: while it believes that such evidence can valuably assist the truth-finding process, it has at times questioned its reliability and mistrusted coercive methods used for extraction. The Court's express goal under the Due Process Clause and Miranda v. Arizona is to ensure that confessions are the product of a free and rational choice. Although the Sixth Amendment and accompanying case law explicitly aim to protect the integrity of the adversarial process, freedom and rationality also (but more subtly) undergird the reasoning. …