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whether a confession six months earlier had been lawfully or unlawfully obtained. The Court said:
Of course, after an accused has once let the cat out of the bag by confessing, no matter what the inducement, he is never thereafter free of the psychological and practical disadvantages of having confessed. He can never get the cat back in the bag. The secret is out for good. In such a sense, a later confession always may be looked upon as fruit of the first. But this Court has never gone so far as to hold that making a confession under circumstances which preclude its use, perpetually disables the confessor from making a usable one after those conditions have been removed. The Silverthorne and Nardone cases, relied on by the Court of Appeals, did not deal with confessions but with evidence of a quite different category and do not control this question. * * *
We believe that it is the concept of an intervening independent act of a free will—the defendant, as a human being, can choose to speak or to remain silent—which furnishes the rationale for the rule (which pertains generally in state and federal courts) that a statement or confession voluntarily made during detention, without compulsion and without undue delay in arraignment, is not rendered inadmissible by the illegality of the original arrest. Smith v. United States, 254 F. 2d 751, 758–759 (C.A. D.C.), certiorari denied, 357 U.S. 937; United States v. Walker, 197 F. 2d 287, 289–290 (C.A. 2), certiorari denied, 344 U.S. 877; Gibson v. United States, 149 F.
