None of it surprised Marshall, who had seen enough such cases to know that in the South coerced confessions were more the rule than the exception. Even President Truman’s 1946 Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights acknowledged as much, with J. Edgar Hoover testifying that “lawless police action” against blacks was so commonplace in the South that at one particular jail “it was seldom that a Negro man or woman was incarcerated who was not given a severe beating, which started off with a pistol whipping and ended with a rubber hose.”
It took decades for these practices to gradually disappear.
