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er ' ! —5— help the state. In Russia the state still retains the upper hand. That one difference marks the large gap between that system and ours which the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments have created. Of all the criminal trials I have seen in Russia, there was none that truly involved a searching probe of the issue of guilt or innocence. That issue had been resolved in the long period of confinement and in the intensive investigation. The trial was usually in fact a trial to determine what punishment was to be imposed. Unlike France and Russia, Indian law makes it very difficult to obtain confessions from one suspected of crime. Section 24 of the Indian Evidence Act requires that confessions be excluded from evidence unless volun- tarily made. That rule is cast in terms similar to the numerous American decisions holding a confession inad- missible when it is the product of coercion, unduly per- sistent interrogation, or other overreaching. India’s innovation comes in sections 25 and 26 of the Evidence Act. Section 25 renders inadinissible all con- fessions made to a police officer. And section 26 bars all confessions mada ta any nerenn while the en FAL, 12 dene Gases C Gos o 3 Made to any person while the suspect 1 in police custody. unless the confession is given in the immediate presence of a Magistrate. These provisions were born of a distrust for the police and their treatment of those accused or suspected of crime, When Thomas B. Macaulay, one of the principal authors of the Indian Penal Code (which became law in 1860), went to India early last century, he found very harsh practices extant. including the use of red pepper * Section 27 provides an exception to these sweeping rules: any portion of a confession which leads to the discovery of corroborating evidence is admissible. The theory appears to be that the danger against which Sections 25 and 26 were designed to guard—use of possibly unreliable confessions—is not present when the confession, or part of it, is verified by other evidence. Only that part of the confession which is verified is admissible. See Sakar’x Law of Evi- dence 283-284 (11th ed. 1964).