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The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition

Massiah v. United States

by Thomas Tandy Lewis

Citation: 377 U.S. 201

Announced: May 18, 1964

Issues: Confessions; Exclusionary rule; Right to counsel

Relevant Amendments: Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth

Brief Summary: This U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the right to counsel expanded the exclusionary rule by disallowing the prosecution from using any evidence that the police had deliberately elicited from an indicted defendant when not in the presence of a lawyer.

A federal grand jury indicted Winston Massiah and a codefendant on charges of illegally trafficking in cocaine. Massiah retained a lawyer and was released on bail. Unknown to Massiah, his co-defendant agreed to cooperate with federal officers in exchange for a reduced sentence. In a private conversation with the codefendant, Massiah made incriminating statements that were overheard by an agent operating a transmitter.

At the subsequent trial, the judge allowed the agent to testify about Massiah’s statements, which were tantamount to a confession. Based on this evidence, the jury quickly decided that Massiah was guilty. In appealing the conviction, defense lawyers pointed to the precedent of Spano v. New York (1959), in which the Supreme Court had held that the prosecution may not make use of a confession that police officers obtained by intimidating a defendant who had already been indicted. In getting Massiah to confess, however, the police had used only trickery, not threats or other forms of coercion.

The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overturned Massiah’s conviction. Writing for the majority, Justice Potter Stewart held that once adversarial proceedings have been initiated, any statements deliberately elicited by government agents outside the presence of a defense lawyer must be excluded from a criminal trial, except if the defendant had explicitly waived his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The six justices in the majority made a linkage between this right and the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which they interpreted to mean that confessions not given voluntarily and intentionally are inadmissible as evidence. In this case, therefore, it was irrelevant that the police had not forcefully compelled Messiah to made incriminating statements to his colleague.

The Massiah decision applied only to statements obtained by law-enforcement officers after a person has been formally charged with a crime. Later that year, in Escobedo v. Illinois, the Court recognized that a suspect yet to be indicted has a right to counsel when in custody for the purpose of interrogation. The more famous case of Miranda v. Arizona (1966) obligated the police to inform suspects of this right before interrogation. The Court further expanded the prohibition against using trickery to elicit information from detained suspects outside the presence of counsel in Brewer v. Williams (1977). In United States v. Henry (1980), the Court suppressed a conversation in which an incarcerated defendant made incriminating statements to a cellmate cooperating with the police, even though the cellmate had simply listened and had not encouraged the defendant to discuss the crime.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Lewis, Thomas Tandy. "Massiah V. United States." The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=BOR2e_0377.
APA 7th
Lewis, T. T. (2017). Massiah v. United States. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Lewis, Thomas Tandy. "Massiah V. United States." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.