In the course of writing this book, we surveyed sources from many eras and in varied databases. Our methodology was, roughly, as follows. For the oldest sources, up to and including the Year Books and the Old Bailey records to the end of the seventeenth century, we tried to include or cite every relevant source that we uncovered. As the records became more plentiful, we included representative samples of the various approaches that we found. In America, cases are scarce until the late nineteenth century, and often the early American cases we included are the only ones of that type that we found. But the early American cases follow the English cases of the period so closely that we believe the American cases we present accurately describe the law of the time.
To minimize footnotes, we did not use multiple citations to the same work if it is easy to find the referenced page from an earlier citation in the same paragraph.
We owe debts to many. Though we will undoubtedly omit some, we would be remiss if we did not name the following: Paul Axel-Lute, Deputy Director & Collection Development Librarian, Rutgers University, Newark, Law Library, for invaluable help locating and understanding many exotic and esoteric documents; Karin Johnsrud, Head of Reference, Fordham Law School Library, for help locating nineteenth-century New York documents; Maureen Cahill, Student Services Librarian at the University of Georgia Law Library, for help researching the origin of an 1861 Georgia statute regulating interrogation; Paul Brand and David Seipp, for help with the Year Book documents; Fabio Arcila, Al Garcia, Adam Gershowitz, Mark Godsey, Peter Honigsberg, David Johnson, Greg Mark, Dan Medwed, Wes Oliver, John Parry, Larry Rosenthal, and Mark Weiner for helpful comments, Jared Eber, Monica Kaul, Rachel Gruenstein, Dan LeCours, and Henry Snee, for research help; and Bill Hilger and Mary Ann Moore for technical help. We would also like to thank Martin Tulic for indexing this book, India Gray for copy-editing and James Cook of Oxford University Press for his editorial guidance throughout the project.
We thank four reviewers appointed by the publisher—Donald Dripps, Mike Seidman, Andrew Taslitz, and an anonymous reviewer—for penetrating and extremely helpful comments. Finally, we thank three scholars and friends who blazed trails for us. Wes Oliver wrote extensively about a New York statute codified in 1829 that is crucial to our argument in chapter 4; while we ultimately disagree with the conclusion that he draws, his analysis helped sharpen ours. Bruce Smith alerted us to possibility that the English Indictable Offences Act of 1848 had the effect of facilitating the introduction of statements made to magistrates as well as informing the accused that he had a right not to answer the magistrate’s questions.
And a special thanks to our friend and mentor, Yale Kamisar. He blazed trails for those of us who have sought to understand police interrogation and the law of confessions. No one has been as influential or as wise.