Arizona v. Fulminante

Under the harmless error analysis, the Supreme Court had said that a trial procedure could be flawed, or some evidence could be illegally obtained, and a guilty verdict could still stand, if the mistake was merely a harmless error that did not outweigh all the other evidence of the case. But in a 1967 case, Chapman v. California, the Supreme Court had ruled that admission of a coerced confession was never a harmless error; any time a coerced confession led to a guilty verdict, the verdict had to be overturned.

In Arizona v. Fulminante, the Court voted 5-4 to uphold the Arizona court's decision: Fulminante would get a new trial and the confession would not be allowed. But in a verdict Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times called "unusually convoluted," the decision was broken into four parts, with justices shifting from the majority to the minority and back again. In the most stunning part of the verdict, the Court, agreeing with a brief presented by the Bush Administration, overturned the precedent set in Chapman. Now, the Court ruled, a coerced confession could be allowed as a harmless error under some circumstances.

Writing for the majority on that point, Chief Justice Rehnquist said, "The admission of an involuntary confession . . . is similar in both degree and kind to the erroneous admission of other types of evidence." If other evidence separate from the confession was strong enough to convict a defendant, the verdict should stand. For Rehnquist, only "structural defects," such as a biased judge or a defendant's lack of adequate legal defense, were absolutely excluded from the harmless error analysis.

Justice White strongly disagreed with Rehnquist, and in a rarity for the Supreme Court, White read his dissent in the courtroom. A coerced confession, he wrote, is "fundamentally different from other types of erroneously admitted evidence to which the rule [of harmless error] has been applied." White was dismayed that the Court was ignoring the precedents on coerced confessions. "Permitting a coerced confession to be part of the evidence on which a jury is free to base its verdict of guilty is inconsistent with the thesis that ours is not an inquisitorial system" of criminal justice.