"Third Degree"

Evidences of public disapproval of the so-called "third degree" multiply. In Vermont, Governor Billings has just signed a bill which provides that the "third degree" shall not be "administered" to a person suspected of having committed a crime until he has had an opportunity to consult counsel. It is further provided that a copy of this statute shall be placed in each cell of all penal institutions so that prisoners may be aware of their rights.

The "third degree" is the name popularly given to the extortion by the police of information from prisoners by means of protracted questioning combined with lack of sleep and starvation. The "first degree" is the arrest, and the "second degree" the taking of a prisoners to a place of confinement.

The police, as a body of officials, and some lawyers, as trained estimators of evidence, hold that the public criticism of "third degree" is unfounded. Said Major Sylvester, President of the American Associations of Chiefs of Police: "Volunteer confessions and admissions made after a prisoner has been cautioned that what he states may be used against him are all that there is to the so-called 'third degree'." And Professor John H. Wigmore of Northwestern University, probably the greatest living authority on the law of evidence, has written: "The attempts, legislative and judicial, to exclude confessions obtained by police questioning of persons arrested and in seclusion represent simply a misguided solution of the problem."

The suggestion in a well-reasoned article in the New Republic by Prof. Zechariah Chafee, Jr., of the Harvard Law School, is that "if interrogation before trial is essential to the proper discovery of crime," it should be "expressly recognized by the law and surrounded by proper safeguards."