5th Amendment Pretrial Motions to Suppress Evidence of Criminal Confessions

This video explains 5th Amendment pretrial motions to suppress evidence of criminal confessions and how they are used to defend criminal charges. Visit https://www.gustitislaw.com for additional details about pre-trial motions to suppress confessions and criminal defense lawyers in Bryan-College Station, TX.

In this video, criminal defense attorney Stephen Gustitis considers when pre-trial motions to suppress evidence can be used to suppress confessions from a criminal trial. The video discusses some common situations where a confession is illegally obtained. For example, a confession following an illegal detention, involuntary confessions, and confessions obtained in violation of Miranda rights. The video is #4 in our series on pretrial motions in criminal prosecutions and discusses criminal pre-trial proceedings. Steve is a Texas Board Certified Criminal Defense Attorney practicing in Bryan-College Station, Texas. He has more than 27 years of experience in the field of criminal law and criminal defense in Brazos County. His videos cover a range of the best defense tactics and criminal defense strategies, including how to use pretrial motions to suppress confessions from criminal court.

Dangers Students Face in a University Disciplinary Hearing

What dangers do students face in a university disciplinary hearing? This video begins a new series on navigating a student disciplinary hearing in college. This video explains how to defend yourself in a student disciplinary hearing by utilizing a student's right to an advisor in a student conduct hearing.


In this video, Stephen Gustitis explains why a student charged with violating a university student code of conduct should hire a trained advisor. He also explains the unfairness inherent in the low burden of proof applicable in a student disciplinary hearing. Steve is a Texas Board Certified Criminal Defense Attorney practicing in Bryan-College Station, Texas. He has more than 27 years of experience in the field of criminal law and criminal defense in Brazos County. His videos cover a range of the best defense tactics and defense strategies, including defending allegations of a student code of conduct.

Speaking Now Required to Remain Silent

If you have the Constitutional right to remain silent and remain silent in the face of police interrogation, have you preserved your right or waived it? Well, in the recent U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) of Berghuis v. Thompkins, the Court ruled 5-4 that a suspect must speak in order to assert the right to remain silent.

Van Chester Thompkins was given his Miranda warnings and remained silent for almost 3 hours. During that time, the police continued the interrogation. Thompkins eventually made an incriminating statement. A lower federal court found Thompkins had successfully asserted his right to remain silent by actually remaining silent. Further, the lower court held that officers should have ended the questioning. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court.

The majority of the Supreme Court said if police give Miranda warnings to a suspect, they may begin questioning and continue questioning the suspect unless the person clearly and unambiguously announces he desires to remain silent or wants a lawyer. Police are not required to expressly ask a suspect to waive their rights. If the suspect shows incredible stamina (like Thompkins) and manages to remain silent through hours of intense interrogation, he "waives" his right to silence if he eventually caves in to pressure. Consequently, his incriminating statements can be used against him.

What's an Involuntary Breath Test?

During our last look into the coercive nature of the DIC-24 statutory warning, we noted the DWI suspect under 21 years old is informed by the police that if they give a breath/blood sample and the result is less than .08, they may still be subject to less severe criminal penalties than if they completely refused to take the test. Let's look how the Texas courts might evaluate a challenge to a breath/blood test result based on this coercive language.

By analogy, in order for a person's confession to be admissible, the confession must meet certain standards for voluntariness. Although the breath/blood test has been deemed "not testimonial" by certain Texas courts, using the confession analogy can help us fashion an argument to protect the record in a DWI prosecution where the accused is a minor and provided a breath/blood sample after being read the DIC-24.

The test of admissibility should be that a breath/blood sample was provided freely, voluntarily, and without compulsion or inducement. See Sossamon v. State, 816 S.W.2d 340 (Tex. Crim. App. 1991)(confession context). In this case, the Court of Criminal Appeals determined whether or not a confession was voluntary due to a promise. First, the court determined a promise must be of some benefit to the accused. (certainly, the promise of a less severe penalty than the accused might otherwise receive could satisfy this element.) Second, the promise was made by a person in authority. (police officers would qualify as persons in authority.) Finally, the promise was of such a character to likely influence the accused to speak untruthfully. (here's where the confession analogy breaks down somewhat)

As a general rule, the Texas cases on confessions stand for the premise that where a promise of leniency is exchanged for a confession, the resulting statement by the accused is not voluntary and inadmissible. Just like the cases on confessions, the literal language of the DIC-24 may be interpreted as a promise of leniency of less severe penalties if the suspect cooperates and provides a breath or blood sample to the police.

Next time we'll examine the need for the accused to rely upon the promise in the DIC-24 before voluntariness becomes an issue. Call a qualified Bryan-College Station DWI attorney for answers.

Phenomenology of Innocence

Confessions are devastating to the defense lawyer's case. I regularly watch my comrades in the defense bar battle over the admissibility of confessions. Most attacks upon confessions focus on either voluntariness or violations of Miranda and related state statutes.

The valuable work done in DNA exoneration cases utilized another strategy defense lawyers should consider - the false confession. Although a false confession is not necessarily inadmissible evidence, research in this area provides the criminal defense lawyer with ammunition to attack the weight given to such evidence. Dr. Saul Kassin argues that actually innocent people are apt to falsely confess because of their inherent trust in the criminal justice system. The following is an abstract from his recent research:

Recent DNA exonerations highlight the problems found in wrongful convictions, 15 to 25 percent of which contained confessions in evidence. I argue that actual innocence, and the phenomenology that accompanies it, harms people who stand accused of a crime across a sequence of pivotal decisions. The phenomenology of innocence may be rooted in a fundamental belief that the world, and it may also stem from of the "illusion of transparency," a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which their true inner states are detectable to others. Either way, innocent suspects, naively believing that truth and justice will prevail, and that they have nothing to fear or hide, unwittingly put themselves at risk by failing to realize that they are suspects not witnesses; waving their Miranda rights to silence and to counsel; sacrificing the protection afforded by a full eyewitness lineup; agreeing to searches, examinations, and lie-detector tests that are used against them; protesting their innocence and thus unwittingly triggering highly confrontational interrogations; and by succumb to police pressures to confess in the expectation that ultimate exoneration is forthcoming. As the criminal justice system does not afford adequate safety nets (e.g., police, judges, juries, and others cannot sufficiently distinguish between truth and deception, true and false confessions, or accurate and erroneous eyewitnesses), it appears that innocence is an enemy of the innocent confessor.

Thanks to Dr. Karen Franklin who brought this interesting research to light here where she wrote about the recent Interrogations & Confessions Conference in El Paso, Texas. The conference covered a variety of topics of interest to the Texas criminal defense lawyer.