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That is precisely why confessions are such powerful evidence of guilt. Without torture or threats of death or violence, it seems implausible that an innocent suspect would confess to a serious crime. When Miranda was written, a shift was underway to more "modern" methods of interrogation: isolation, deception, manipulation and exhaustion rather than beating. Asked how severely one defendant was whipped, the deputy in charge testified, "Not too much for a Negro not as much as I would have done if it were left to me."Ä«etween 19, the use of torture to extract confessions declined greatly, a major accomplishment by American courts and criminal justice reformers. Three suspects had been tortured for days. Mississippi in 1936, the first case in which the Supreme Court excluded a confession from a state court prosecution. Why would an innocent person ever confess to a murder or some other terrible violent crime? Do Innocent People Really Confess Without Torture? Fifty years later, we have seen hundreds of exonerations of innocent defendants who confessed to terrible crimes after they received Miranda warnings. In 1966, false confessions seemed like a rare problem. The first concern was to prevent confessions that are "unreliable"-that is, false. The earliest of these decisions prohibited violence and torture. Miranda was the culmination of 30 years of Supreme Court cases that were designed to protect criminal suspects from abuse in police interrogations. In that period, they have become so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget their origin and purpose. Arizona, the 1966 Supreme Court decision that required them-celebrated their 50th anniversary this week, on June 13. The Miranda warnings-named for Miranda v. And the second: "Anything you say can and will be used against you."