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cannot be settled by any fixed rule but must essentially represent a judgment, based on all the circumstances, as to whether the illegal government action or the voluntary act of the defendant is the primary motivating force behind the evidence. In the present case, petitioners' statements to the officers were not the products of illegal arrests or entries, but of their own voluntary, deliberate decision to speak.[1]
Nueslein v. District of Columbia, 115 F. 2d 690 (C.A.D.C.), held that, even though nothing was found after an illegal entry, certain statements made during the illegal entry were the result of the illegality and therefore inadmissible. Officers investigating only a misdemeanor, an accident in which a taxicab had struck a parked car, went to the home of the taxicab owner and entered the home without a warrant and without permission of the owner. The owner admitted that he had been driving the taxi and, since he appeared to the officers to be drunk, the officers placed him under arrest. The decision of the District of Columbia Circuit, in relating the admissions to the illegal entry when the illegal entry in no sense compelled the owner to talk, admittedly goes far, but it does hot go as far as would be necessary to go in the instant case of investigation of a narcotics felony. In Nueslein the admissions made by the taxicab owner were admissions of guilt as to the very act which prompted the officers to make the illegal entry, and those admis-
- ↑ The full and formal confessions by petitioners, which were wholly voluntary, were clearly admissible under the settled rule that a subsequent voluntary confession is not rendered excludable by a prior illegal arrest.
