James Maharg v. Connecticut

The erroneous admission over objection of a defendant’s coerced confession at a criminal trial will require a retrial unless the reviewing court is “‘able to declare a belief that [the error] was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.’” Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 295 (1991) (quoting Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24 (1967)). Here, in a bench trial, the court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress testimony about his alleged murder confession— given in a hospital emergency room, two hours after he had collapsed in a seizure in the police barracks, thus ending a thirteen-hour overnight interrogation that the trial court separately held to be unconstitutionally coercive. In convicting the defendant of murder, the trial court expressly credited the testimony about the hospital confession, but to that finding dropped a footnote stating that the evidence established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt even in the confession’s absence. The trial court then found the defendant guilty of murder based on all the evidence presented. The Connecticut Supreme Court relied on the footnoted disclaimer in concluding that any constitutional error in admitting the confession into evidence would have been harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The question presented is: Whether, in a criminal bench trial for murder, a trial judge who admits over objection a defendant’s coerced confession to that offense may later insulate the constitutional error from meaningful appellate review by issuing a posttrial “finding” that the evidence would have established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at a trial conducted without the confession.