Story
The mysterious murder of three diplomats assigned to the Chinese
government’s educational mission in Washington stumped the local police and was front page news around the
nation in 1919. The men had been shot to death in cold blood, their
decaying bodies discovered two days later, and a $5,000 check was
missing from the mission's ledger. Acting on a tip, detectives soon zeroed in on young Ziang
Sung Wan, a sometime Chinese student living in New York who had
been seen at the death house
on the day of the murders.
Two officers were dispatched to New York to retrieve Wan, who was
sick in bed, a victim of the influenza pandemic. Without a warrant,
they searched his room, rifled through his personal effects and pressured him to return
with them to Washington, where he was
held incommunicado in a downtown hotel under 24-hour guard for a
week. He was permitted no counsel and no visitors and was
interrogated day and night. And his brother, suspected of
attempting to cash the stolen check, was subjected to similar
treatment. Both were badgered to confess, even after
they made it clear they did not wish to talk.
The
ceaseless questioning continued until an exhausted Wan confessed to one
of the murders, only, he said later, to stop the relentless
grilling. But Wan was jailed and tried for murder.
His trial was only the beginning of a seven-year journey through the
legal system that culminated in a landmark Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice
Louis Brandeis. The decision crystallized the principle governing the
admissibility of confessions in court and set the stage for the
famous Miranda v. Arizona case several decades
later. But the seminal Wan case was arguably the more
important of the two decisions.
In an era when police still mistreat criminal suspects and immigrants and minorities are still routinely denied their rights, it is a tale well worth retelling.
© 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 Scott D. Seligman