Lee v. Illinois (476 U.S. 530)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 3, 1986 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 476 U.S. 530 · 106 S. Ct. 2056
- Decided
- June 3, 1986
- Term
- October Term 1985
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Brennan
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Brennan delivered the opinion of the Court. Petitioner and a codefendant, charged with committing a double murder, were tried jointly in a bench trial. Neither defendant testified at trial. In finding petitioner guilty as charged, the trial judge expressly relied on portions of the co-defendant’s confession, obtained by police at the time of arrest, as substantive evidence against petitioner. The question for decision is whether such reliance by the judge upon the codefendant’s confession violated petitioner’s rights as secured by the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment. I In February 1982, police officers of East St. Louis asked petitioner Millie Lee to come to the police station to help identify a badly burned body that the police had discovered in an apartment in the housing complex in which Lee lived. While Lee was examining photographs of the body, a detective noticed that she began to cry. The detective advised Lee of her Miranda rights, and began to question her about the whereabouts of her aunt, Mattie Darden, with whom Lee shared an apartment. After giving a number of confused and conflicting accounts concerning when she had last seen or talked to her aunt, Lee finally admitted that she and her boyfriend, Edwin Thomas, had been involved in the stabbing of both Aunt Beedie and her friend,…
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