Chambers v. Florida (1940)

    As Marshall traveled in the deep South during the 1930s, he came to realize how unfair the criminal justice was for blacks. White policemen instituted a number of cruel and terrifying methods of forcing confessions out of black defendants, most commonly through beatings . Marshall argued a case known as Chambers v. Florida (1940), which was one of the cases demonstrating police brutality and violation of the due process laws. He lost the case in the local courts but won in the Supreme Court, where the decision was overturned because the use of a coerced confession was obvious. Marshall and his staff at the NAACP used the Chambers decision to reverse many other convictions that were based on coerced confessions.