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State v. McGarvey12/6/2005
nt evidence. McGarvey directs us to federal case law, arguing that " courts in the United States generally refuse to allow a conviction based solely on testimony that a defendant confessed." McGarvey first cites Opper v. United States (1954), 348 U.S. 84, 93, 75 S.Ct. 158, 164, 99 L.Ed. 101, 109, for the proposition that a defendant's confession may only serve as the sole basis for a conviction if the prosecution presents sufficient independent corroboration supporting the essential facts of the confession to justify a jury inference of its truth. As McGarvey notes, a decade later the Court explained the reasons for holding confessions to a stricter standard in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), 378 U.S. 478, 488-89, 84 S.Ct. 1758, 1764, 12 L.Ed.2d 977, 985: "We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of criminal law enforcement, which comes to depend on the 'confession' will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation." In United States v. Lopez-Alvarez (9th Cir. 1992), 970 F.2d 583, 589, 592, the Ninth Circuit developed a two-pronged test to address the problem of false confessions by requiring adequate corroboration of a defendant's admissions. The first prong of the Lopez-Alvarez test instructs the State to "introduce sufficient evidence to establish that the criminal conduct at the core of the offense has occurred," while the second prong instructs the prosecution to "introduce independent evidence tending to establish the trustworthiness of the admissions, unless the confession is, by virtue of special circumstances, inherently reliable." Lopez-Alvarez, 970 F.2d at 592. McGarvey correctly notes that Montana law encompasses the first prong of the Lopez-Alvarez test, but not the second prong. See §§ 45-5-111 and 46-16-215, MCA. McGarvey urges this Court to adopt the second prong-that is, require independent, corroborating evidence to establish the trustworthiness of a defendant's alleged extra-judicial confession.
We conclude that McGarvey's reliance on Lopez-Alvarez, as well as Opper and Escobedo, is misplaced. While these cases are useful for understanding why a confession obtained by law enforcement should be regarded with caution, they are inapposite to the circumstances of McGarvey's case. The Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit discussions that McGarvey cites deal with the trustworthiness of the defendant's confession when obtained by law enforcement, opposed to the reliability of a lay witness testifying to a defendant's confession. This distinction is important because of the policy reasons behind the federal decisions. "The requirement of corroboration [where the defendant has confessed to law enforcement] arises from the high incidence of false confessions and the resulting need to prevent errors in convictions based upon untrue confessions alone." Lopez-Alvarez, 970 F.2d at 589 (citation omitted). McGarvey does not ask this Court to address the reliability of a statement he made to the police, but rather, the credibility of two prosecution witnesses-both of whom did not want to come forward-claiming to have heard McGarvey confess. Because we conclude that the federal case law on which McGarvey relies is inapposite, we do not address the question of whether to adopt the second prong of the Lopez-Alvarez test.
Although we distinguish the federal case law on which McGarvey relies, we are still left to decide whether the District Court appropriately denied McGarvey's motion for a directed verdict given the evidence presented at trial. Viewing the evidence in a light most favorable to the prosecution, we must determine whether "any rational trier of
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