WINSTON CHURCHILL once commented that a great deal could be learned about a society by examining how it treated persons accused of a crime. In the United States one might have assumed, merely from reading the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution, that the country treated accused criminals fairly, that its adversarial justice system—in which the state has to prove the guilt of the defendant—respected individual rights greatly.
But prior to the 1960s, the treatment accorded to a suspected criminal varied enormously from state to state. The Bill of Rights was originally applicable only to the national government, and persons accused of violating a federal criminal law did receive all of their constitutional protections. Many states had similar protections in their state constitutions, but actual practice bore little resemblance to constitutional guarantees. Starting in 1963, however, the U.S. Supreme Court “incorporated” the criminal provisions of the Bill of Rights so that they applied to the states as well as to the federal government. The Court set minimal standards that all states had to follow, and thus nationalized the rights of the accused. This so-called revolution in due process was not without its critics, who charged that the Court exceeded its authority and that its decisions hindered police work and coddled criminals. No case in this area was attacked more severely than Miranda v. Arizona (1966).
Around midnight on March 3, 1963, an eighteen-year-old woman finished working her shift at the concession stand at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Phoenix. She took a bus, and had just gotten off to walk the few blocks to her house when a car pulled out of a parking lot and almost hit her. The car stopped, the driver got out, walked up to her, and grabbed her. Telling her not to scream, he forced her into the back seat of his car. He tied her hands and ankles, and holding some sharp object against her throat, said, “Feel this.” She later testified that it all happened so suddenly that she did not have time to do anything.
The man then drove some twenty minutes and stopped in the desert just outside of town, untied her hands and feet, and told her to take off her clothes. When she refused he forcibly took off her clothes, undressed himself, and then raped her. She told the police, “I was pushing against him with my hands. I kept screaming, I was trying to get away but he was a lot stronger than I was, and I couldn’t do anything.” After the man had finished, he got dressed and drove his victim back to within a few blocks of her home, during which time she managed to get her clothes on. When he let her out of the car, he asked her to pray for him.
The victim, who lived with her mother and a married sister, arrived home shortly after 2:00 a.m., disheveled and hysterical. Her sister calmed her down long enough to discover what had happened and immediately called the police. Although the young woman, who was slightly retarded (she had the intelligence of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old), did not know her assailant and gave somewhat conflicting accounts of the event to the police, she did provide a description that the police matched up to twenty-three-year-old Ernesto Miranda.
On March 13 the police arrested Miranda and placed him in a lineup, where the victim identified him as the man who had abducted and raped her. In addition, another woman identified him as the man who had robbed her at knifepoint of eight dollars several months earlier.
Miranda’s father had emigrated from Mexico and worked as a house painter, and Ernesto grew up in poor but not desperate circumstances. His mother died when he was six, and his father remarried. He never adjusted to the stepmother who reared him, and did not have close ties to his father or brothers. He frequently skipped school, and dropped out completely halfway through the ninth grade. Once on the streets he soon ran afoul of the law.
Police arrested him in 1954 at age fourteen for stealing a car, and he spent six months in a reform school. He had barely gotten out when he was arrested and convicted for attempted rape and assault, but spent only a short time in jail. When Miranda was seventeen Los Angeles police charged him for being a Peeping Tom, but because of his youth he was placed on probation. Unable to get or hold a regular job, he proved no more successful as a criminal, and was arrested twice more, for armed robbery. He apparently escaped prosecution by enlisting in the army in 1958, but any hopes for a new start soon faded. He went AWOL from the army, and after getting caught peeping again spent several months in a stockade before the army gave him a dishonorable discharge. Back in civilian life he drifted until he was arrested while driving a stolen car, and this time he spent two years in a federal penitentiary.
After his release in early 1961, he met Twila Hoffman and moved in with her. She was several years older than he and had two children. Although separated from her husband, she could not afford a divorce. They moved to Phoenix to try to start fresh, had a daughter, and Miranda got a job driving a truck for a produce company. Things seemed to be going well, and his employer described Miranda as one of his best workers. Less than two years later he was charged with kidnapping and rape.
After the victim had identified him in the lineup, the officers investigating the case took Miranda to an interrogation room and told him that he had been identified, not only by the rape victim but also by the woman he had earlier robbed. At this point Miranda confessed to both the abduction and rape as well as the robbery, and his account of the events matched those provided by the two women. He signed a written statement that the confession had been made “voluntarily” and with “full knowledge” of his legal rights. He had no opportunity to see a lawyer, nor did he ask for one. The question of whether someone in his situation could waive his legal right against self-incrimination without the advice of an attorney would become the central issue of this case three years later when it reached the high court.
Initially pursuing an insanity defense, Miranda’s court-appointed attorney, Alvin Moore, requested a sanity hearing. The two psychiatrists who examined Miranda while he was awaiting trial agreed that he had normal intelligence, knew right from wrong, and understood the nature of the crimes at the time they had been committed. They also agreed that he had emotional disorders, but disagreed on their extent. Both reports proved consistent with the alleged rape, which psychologist Nicholas Groth classified as “power” rape. This is the most common form of sexual attack, and is motivated by feelings of inadequacy and the need to demonstrate one’s manhood. Neither of the two doctors, however, provided any groundwork for an insanity defense.
Moore needed a different strategy. At the trial, he called no witnesses, nor did he put Miranda on the stand; instead he focused entirely on trying to have the judge throw out the confession. In cross-examining the police officers who had interrogated Miranda, he asked, “Did you ever advise the defendant he was entitled to the services of an attorney?” They responded that they had not. The trial judge, Yale McFate, overruled Moore’s objection to the confession and allowed it into evidence. Moore also tried to discredit other prosecution witnesses, and, using cross-examination techniques no longer allowed today, accused the rape victim of not really trying to fight back. He ended his summation with an allegation that criminologists now dismiss as a myth, that a woman cannot be raped unless she permits it.
The jury deliberated for five hours and found Miranda guilty. On June 27, 1963, Judge McFate sentenced him to two concurrent sentences of twenty to thirty years, one for kidnapping and the other for rape. In a separate trial Miranda had also been convicted of robbery, for which he received an additional sentence of twenty to twenty-five years to be served after the rape sentence; all together Ernesto Miranda faced up to fifty-five years in prison. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the conviction, and rejected Moore’s claim that the confession should have been excluded. The judges unanimously ruled that it had been made voluntarily, and that Miranda understood his rights even without a lawyer present. Because Miranda understood his rights, the court did not have to examine the question of whether the police should have offered him the opportunity to consult a lawyer.
The Supreme Court accepted the case, along with similar cases from New York, Ohio, California, and a federal case from the Ninth Circuit, and heard oral argument on February 28 and March 1, 1966. The Miranda case gave the justices the opportunity to tie loose ends together from earlier cases that all explored the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel.
The case that began the Warren Court’s so-called “due process revolution” in criminal procedure was the landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). The right to counsel had been one of the first to be nationalized and applied to the states in Powell v. Alabama (1932), a case resulting from the infamous Scottsboro affair, in which nine black teenagers had been convicted of raping two white girls, and in which for all practical purposes the defendants were not represented by counsel. Ten years later, however, in Betts v. Brady (1942), the Court backed off and declared that the Fourteenth Amendment had not incorporated the specific guarantees of the Sixth Amendment. A majority held that counsel for indigent defendants did not constitute a fundamental right essential to a fair trial. Rather, the justices would make a case-by-case inquiry into the totality of the circumstances to see if the lack of counsel had deprived the defendants of a fair trial. Over the next twenty years the Court heard many cases alleging special circumstances, and in nearly all of them ruled that a lawyer should have been provided to ensure fairness. In Chewning v. Cunningham (1962), for example, the Court reversed a conviction under a recidivist statute (one adding extra penalties to repeat offenders), holding that due process had been denied because the legal questions in the case presented too great a potential for prejudice without a lawyer’s assistance.
By then a majority of the Court was ready to overrule Betts, and they chose to do so in Gideon. Justice Black, who had dissented in Betts, spoke for a unanimous Court in Gideon, which did away with case-by-case determination and held that the presence of counsel was a fundamental right essential to a fair trial. In his biography of Chief Justice Warren, Ed Cray wrote: “No tale so affirmed the American democracy. No story broadcast around the world so clearly proclaimed that not just the rich received justice in American courts.” The Court also took the unusual step of applying Gideon retroactively, so that states that had not originally provided counsel in felony cases either had to retry the defendants properly, or—as often proved the case, with witnesses dispersed and evidence cold—let them go. (Clarence Earl Gideon, with the benefit of a lawyer in his retrial, was found not guilty.)
The Fifth Amendment includes what has sometimes been called the “Great Right,” that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The origins of this right go back to objections against the inquisitorial proceedings of the medieval ecclesiastic tribunals as well as the Courts of Star Chamber. By the late seventeenth century the maxim of nemo tenetur prodere seipsum—no man is bound to accuse himself—had been adopted by common law courts and expanded to mean that a person did not have to answer any questions about his or her activities. The state could prosecute a person but could not require that he or she assist in the practice. The British colonies in North America carried this doctrine over as part of the received common law, and after the Revolution many states wrote it into their early bills of rights. James Madison included it as a matter of course when he drafted the federal Bill of Rights.
The privilege came under severe criticism from conservative groups during the 1950s Red Scare, when one witness after another, accused of having communist sympathies (and thus being “red”), refused to answer Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s questions about their activities on the grounds of possible self-incrimination. Many people associated the phrase “taking the Fifth” (i.e., relying on the Fifth Amendment’s protection against governmental abuse of power) with communists, believing that if a person were truly innocent, whether of being a communist or of a crime, he or she should have no problem telling the truth. Legal journals and the popular press carried articles on whether this constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination, which allegedly sheltered only guilty persons, should be amended or even abolished.
The Supreme Court had taken an expansive view of this right ever since the late nineteenth century, and had expanded the privilege against self-incrimination to apply to both criminal and civil cases in which testimony might later be used in criminal proceedings. The privilege is not absolute. For example, persons may not refuse to be fingerprinted; to have blood samples, voice recordings, or other physical evidence taken; or to submit to sobriety tests—even though all of these may prove incriminating. At trial, however, an accused has the right to remain silent, and any adverse comment on a defendant’s silence, either by judge or prosecutor, violates the constitutional protection.
Although people may not be forced to testify against themselves, they may voluntarily confess, and that confession may be used in evidence, as it was in Ernesto Miranda’s case. Over the years, the Court has steadily expanded the meaning of voluntary, and has thrown out confessions secured by physical torture such as whipping or psychological brutality, such as the case where police tell a suspect that thirty to forty people are waiting to “get him” if he does not confess.
Starting in 1964, the Warren Court connected the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel on the grounds that only if the accused had been properly informed of his or her rights, including the right to remain silent, could a resulting confession be valid and admissible. In a key case, Massiah v. United States (1964), the defendant had been indicted for smuggling drugs in violation of federal law. Winston Massiah had retained a lawyer, pled not guilty, and been released on bail. Unbeknownst to him, one of his codefendants, Jesse Colson, had decided to cooperate with federal agents and agreed to have his car wiretapped. A government agent in a nearby car overheard the conversation between the two in which Massiah admitted his guilt. The conversation was later admitted as evidence and Massiah was convicted. No doubt the “confession” had been voluntary, in that it had not been coerced out of him, and yet the Court held it inadmissible by a 6–3 vote.
In that opinion, Justice Potter Stewart held that the confession could not be admitted because if Massiah’s lawyer had been present he would have advised him not to talk to his codefendant or to anyone else about the crime. The key to the ruling seems to have been that Massiah had already retained a lawyer, and was therefore entitled to his advice from that time forward. By surreptitiously taping what Massiah thought had been a private conversation, he “was denied the basic protection of counsel when there was used against him at trial evidence of his own incriminating words, which federal agents had deliberately elicited from him after he had been indicted and in the absence of his counsel.”
Although the three dissenters had an easy time showing that the confession had not been coerced and that it, by previous standards, ought to be considered voluntary, the majority seemed intent on pressing home the point about confessions in the absence of counsel. Had the federal agents taped a similar conversation before Massiah had been indicted, or before he had asked for an attorney, that recording would have been admissible not as a post-arrest confession but as part of the evidence collected during an investigation. (This balance between thorough police investigation and eliciting confessions became a critical question after the Miranda decision.)
The Court’s majority seemed to be suggesting that the government should not rely so much on confessions to prove guilt—a concept alien to most law enforcement officials, for whom confessions were a time-honored mainstay of police work. Massiah expanded Gideon by requiring a lawyer’s advice not just at trial, but back to the time of indictment or even when an accused person first retained counsel. For the first time it also tied together the rights in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, linking the right to avoid self-incrimination to legal counsel. This became clear in the explosive case of Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), which involved murder, not just drug smuggling, as Massiah had. Justice Arthur Goldberg’s opinion for a 5–4 Court showed the majority’s apparent disdain for use of confessions as evidence in criminal trials, and to a lesser extent, for many contemporary police procedures as well.
Danny Escobedo had been brought in for questioning regarding the murder of his brother-in-law, and had asked to see his lawyer. The lawyer was already at the police station and demanding to see his client when Escobedo confessed. It appeared that Escobedo had not been coerced into confessing, but without one lie and an equally important bit of silence on the part of the police, Escobedo might not have confessed. In the interrogation detectives told Escobedo that he could go home if he implicated another man (the lie) but did not tell him that if he did implicate the other, he was in fact implicating himself as well, since under Illinois law the admission of complicity in a murder was legally as damaging as a confession of firing the fatal shots (the silence). Escobedo’s admission that his accomplice had committed the murder was, in effect, a confession of his own involvement.
Escobedo’s lawyer, picking up on the Massiah ruling, argued that police refusal to allow his client to see him during the course of an interrogation constituted a denial of the assistance of counsel assured by the Sixth Amendment and made mandatory upon the states by the Fourteenth, and thus any incriminating statements Escobedo made without a lawyer present could not be used in his trial. Illinois argued, as any state or local police department would have, that voluntary confessions are an essential police tool, and placing a lawyer in the process would reduce significantly the number of criminals who confess.
The Court agreed with the Illinois argument, but then noted that it cut both ways; it overturned Escobedo’s conviction because it underscored how critical the interrogation stage is to the whole criminal process. The right to counsel, if it is to mean anything, must attach at the critical stage of interrogation—otherwise a lawyer’s aid is useless. If this meant that, with lawyers present, there would be fewer confessions, then police would have to investigate cases more thoroughly. “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern,” Goldberg declared. “A system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.” Beyond that, “no system of criminal justice can, or should, survive if it comes to depend for its continued effectiveness on the citizens’ abdication through unawareness of their constitutional rights.” Once police moved from the investigating stage to the accusatory, the adversarial system at the heart of American justice comes into play and the accused person has the right to counsel.
Justices Harlan, Stewart, and White dissented, with White hitting the most important point—that in fear of forced confessions, the Court’s majority wanted practically to do away with them altogether. He found nothing in the Constitution to justify such an argument, and believed the remedy lay in what had been the Court’s practice for many years—case-by-case review utilizing a totality of the circumstances standard.
Following this decision the Los Angeles police chief claimed, “If the police are required . . . to . . . establish that the defendant was apprised of his constitutional guarantees of silence and legal counsel prior to the uttering of any admission or confession, and that he intelligently waived these guarantees . . . a whole Pandora’s box is opened as to under what circumstances . . . can a defendant intelligently waive these rights. . . . Allegations that modern criminal investigation can compensate for the lack of a confession or admission in every criminal case is totally absurd!” The Los Angeles district attorney, on the other hand, stated, “It begins to appear that many of these seemingly restrictive decisions are going to contribute directly to a more effective, efficient and professional level of law enforcement.” The former police commissioner of New York, Michael J. Murphy, charged that “what the Court is doing is akin to requiring one boxer to fight by Marquis [sic] of Queensbury rules while permitting the other to butt, gouge and bite.” On the other hand, former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia David C. Acheson, who by then was directly in charge of the Secret Service and the Bureau of Narcotics, observed, “Prosecution procedure has, at most, only the most remote causal connection with crime.”
Previous rulings of the Warren Court had prompted criticism in the political arena, but Escobedo, as one historian noted, “raised the storm against the Court to gale force.” Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater claimed that it was “no wonder our law enforcement officers have been demoralized and rendered ineffective in their jobs.” Cars sported bumper stickers that read “Impeach Earl Warren” and “Support Your Local Police.” As riots erupted in New York and Los Angeles, and student protest over the Vietnam War escalated, often into violent clashes with authorities, many people wondered if indeed there was a correlation between the Court’s alleged permissiveness and escalating crime and violence.
The reaction to Escobedo, however, paled in comparison to public response to Miranda v. Arizona, which, if not the most controversial decision of the Warren Court (that distinction belongs either to Brown v. Board of Education [1954], ending racial segregation in schools, or Engel v. Vitale [1962], prohibiting mandatory prayer in schools), was certainly the most controversial criminal procedure decision the Court had ever handed down. Gideon had required only five states to change their practices; Miranda would make all fifty states institute a new procedure.
The Massiah and Escobedo decisions clearly required some sort of remedial prescription, a step usually taken by legislatures. Congress, however, had its hands full with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society proposals, especially his “war on poverty,” while state legislatures, which normally enacted codes governing police procedures, showed little interest in responding to the Court. From what could be discerned, state legislators and their constituents seemed more than satisfied with what the police were doing. The prestigious American Law Institute undertook to propose a model code of pre-arraignment procedures, but even though it allowed police up to four hours to question a suspect without a lawyer present, it aroused little interest among the states. Both Massiah and Escobedo stayed in effect without any significant challenges from the legislatures, nor any effective implementing action either.
In the summer of 1965 Chief Justice Warren told his incoming clerks that given the failure of either Congress or the states to respond to the Court’s confession cases, “I think we are going to end up taking an Escobedo case this year.” In fact the Court took five, of which Miranda was the lead case. Part of the uproar over the 5–4 decision is the legislative nature of Warren’s opinion for the Court, which is, as many commentators have shown, rather weak on judicial precedent and strong on the type of specifics typical of statutes. The extensive reference to police manuals demonstrating how interrogators were to secure confessions might have made more sense if there had been proof that any of the police departments involved, or any of the detectives assigned to these specific cases, had in fact relied on those manuals. Of all the decisions of the Warren Court, Miranda most justifies charges of judicial activism and legislating.
Nevertheless, the majority did have good reason to push through a solution. From a jurisprudential standpoint, while the decisions in Massiah, Escobedo, and other confession cases had begun the process of tying together the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, many questions remained over just how the two actually worked together. When did the right to counsel begin? Were confessions absolutely forbidden? At what point could police begin questioning suspects?
The Miranda decision answered these questions. Early in the opinion Chief Justice Warren declared that constitutional rights attach when police begin custodial interrogation immediately after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his or her freedom. Police are free to question anyone about a crime, but once they detain a suspect, they have to follow certain procedural safeguards:
Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently. If, however, he indicates in any manner and at any stage of the process that he wishes to consult with an attorney before speaking there can be no questioning. Likewise, if the individual is alone and indicates in any manner that he does not wish to be interrogated, the police may not question him. The mere fact that he may have answered some questions or volunteered some statements on his own does not deprive him of the right to refrain from answering any further inquiries until he has consulted with an attorney and thereafter consents to be questioned.
The four dissenters—Harlan, White, Stewart, and Clark—protested against replacing the flexible totality of circumstances approach with what they considered to be rigid and inappropriate rules.
The decision certainly had an anticonfession cast, but far more muted than Goldberg’s Escobedo opinion, perhaps because Warren himself, a former district attorney, was less anticonfession than he was pro-professionalism. He once commented that “I think [the police] are a bunch of lazy people who aren’t getting their work done because they are too lazy to get it right.” He had, in fact, during his time in California upgraded the quality of police work in his jurisdiction, and rightly or wrongly, he believed that during his tenure the police and the prosecutors had been both professional and civil liberties conscious. Furthermore, he had the example of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI warned suspects of their rights and still got convictions. If the national government could do it right, then so could the states. As far as Warren was concerned, the Miranda warnings were cost effective; whereas lazy cops got convictions via confessions, professionals got theirs through serious detective work. Both got their man, but, he believed, the pro always got the right one.
In fact, Warren offered police a prophylactic method of making sure that evidence they gathered through interrogation, whether corroborating (i.e, supportive of a conclusion but not conclusive by itself) or confessional, would stand up in court, and here one can see the old district attorney at work. No prosecutor wants a case to fail at trial because the evidence the police have presented is flawed—due to lack of a search warrant or a less than voluntary confession. In essence, Warren told the police, take the fifteen seconds or so that it takes to read the warning, and then if the suspect still wants to talk without a lawyer, that confession is voluntary and admissible. Although both he and Goldberg seemed against all confessions, they did understand that in many cases the perpetrator, if not a habitual criminal, may want to confess, especially in many domestic violence cases. If Mary comes home and finds her husband in bed with her best friend, gets the hunting rifle out of the hall closet, and kills both of them, when the police arrive their problem is trying to keep Mary quiet long enough to read her the warning before she confesses, not trying to trick her into confessing. A professional killer is well aware that he should not talk; people like Mary, on the other hand, usually want to confess what they have done. The Miranda warnings would make those confessions admissible as evidence in court.
Predictably, police and political conservatives disagreed with the decision even more forcefully than they had with Escobedo. Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles condemned Miranda as “another set of handcuffs on the police department,” while Edmund McNamara, Boston’s police commissioner, complained that “criminal trials no longer will be about a search for truth, but search for technical error.” North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, a former state-court judge, charged that “enough has been done for those who murder and rape and rob! It is time to do something for those who do not wish to be murdered or raped or robbed.” The executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police complained that “I guess now we’ll have to supply all squad cars with lawyers.”
Yet within a very short time, despite all the screaming about the Court being soft on crime and handcuffing the police, Miranda embedded itself in the popular consciousness. The 1970s saw the comeback of detective programs on television, such as Hawaii Five-O, that made the Miranda warnings familiar to everyone. The main character, Steve McGarrett, viewed Miranda exactly as Earl Warren had wanted, as doing the police a service by making them more professional. It seemed to take no time for everyone from preteens on up to be aware of and to memorize the warnings.
The more progressive police departments in the country quickly realized the positive aspects of the decision, and some lost little time in announcing that they had been following similar practices for years. For police officers in these jurisdictions, adjustment meant little more than memorizing or carrying a card to make sure they used the right phrases. Felons who wanted to confess did so anyway; in other instances the lack of confession merely required more effective police work to find the guilty party. As to charges that the decision caused crime rates to increase, Attorney General Ramsey Clark explained that “court rules do not cause crime.” Many U.S. attorneys agreed, and one commented that “changes in court decisions and procedural practice have about the same effect on the crime rate as an aspirin would have on a tumor of the brain.”
In fact, in the years since Miranda, police departments have indeed learned to use enhanced investigative techniques to secure convictions, and crime rates have gone down in many cities. New technology has aided police immensely in carrying out the prophylactic purpose of the Miranda warnings. Nearly all police cruisers now carry video cameras to record what happens at the scene of a crime when the police arrive. These cameras can also be used to film officers reading a suspect his or her rights, thus allowing the ensuing comments, confessional or otherwise, to be admitted. A person taken into a police station is usually questioned with either a tape recorder or a video camera present, again confirming that the suspect has voluntarily agreed to talk, or has asked for a lawyer. In all instances, the affirmation of the Miranda procedure validates the evidence.
Over the years the Court has reaffirmed Miranda on a number of occasions, although it has carved out some commonsense exceptions, such as New York v. Quarles (1984). In that case, a woman ran up to a police car saying that she had been raped, and that her assailant had fled into a nearby supermarket. She also told the police that the man was armed. Police apprehended the suspect, but before reading him his rights asked him the whereabouts of the gun, to which Quarles replied, “It is over there.” The police retrieved a loaded .38-calibre revolver from an empty carton, formally arrested Quarles, and then read him his rights. He then said that he would answer questions without an attorney and acknowledged that the gun was his. He later appealed on the grounds that the police had interrogated him (asking him about the gun) before they had given the required warning.
The Court ruled against Quarles and found that the police had acted properly. Although the high court agreed that once police had apprehended Quarles he was in a custodial situation, the circumstances could not be ignored. There had been a concealed weapon, there might have been an accomplice, and reading the Miranda warnings immediately might have led the suspect to remain silent and thus endanger both the police and the public. Police officials had an obligation to control the situation, and retrieving a loaded weapon constituted their highest priority. It is a small carve-out to the rule, but one that does not endanger its basic holding.
In 2000 the Court reaffirmed Miranda in a rather unusual case. Shortly after the Warren Court had handed down its decision, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968, part of which explicitly aimed at overturning the ruling. Known as Section 3501, it essentially provided a very broad and loose definition of what constituted a voluntary confession in federal cases. No administration ever tried to use Section 3501, or even defend it in court, believing that it would not stand up to constitutional scrutiny. In the late 1990s, however, a conservative public advocacy group filed a friend of the court brief in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and a three-judge panel accepted the argument that Section 3501 overrode Miranda. In Dickerson v. United States (2000), Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had often been a critic of Miranda, nonetheless wrote for a 7–2 majority holding that Miranda was a “constitutional rule” and therefore not subject to a congressional override.
In the most recent case decided, a 5–4 majority held that even if the police read the Miranda warnings, the suspect must affirmatively invoke the rights involved, i.e., he or she cannot remain silent but actually say, “I do not want to talk.” The suspect must invoke his or her Miranda rights unambiguously. The Court’s then-newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor, strongly dissented, joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer. The decision, she charged, “turns Miranda upside down” (Berghuis v. Thompkins [2010]). Although critics have charged that this is another example of the Roberts Court chipping away at the constitutional rights of individuals, it is unclear yet just how this decision will play out in practice. Police departments have become used to dealing with Miranda as the Warren Court had intended, and since the results have been positive—more convictions based on more effective investigation—it is unlikely they will change those procedures.
After the high court decision of his case, Ernesto Miranda still remained in custody, because he had appealed only the abduction and rape conviction and not that of robbery. The prosecutor immediately announced he would be retried on the first two charges, and the hearings began in February 1967. The new trial replicated the first go-round, but without the introduction of the confession as evidence. The victim and her sister testified again, but the prosecutor had additional damning evidence. While Miranda had been in jail, his common-law wife, Twila Hoffman, had borne a child with another man. An incensed Miranda, who thought that after the Supreme Court decision he would be a free man, had written to social service authorities charging that Hoffman was not a fit mother. Scared of what Miranda might do if he were released, Hoffman agreed to testify that Miranda had told her while he was in jail awaiting the first trial that he had in fact abducted and raped the young woman. Again the jury found him guilty, and again he received concurrent sentences of twenty to thirty years.
He only served five years, and after his release from prison in 1972 on parole soon found himself again in trouble with the law. He served more time for violating his parole. He complained that he had been cheated because he had not made any money off the case, and tried to peddle autographed cards that had the Miranda warnings on them. In 1976 he was killed in a skid row bar in Phoenix in a fight over a three-dollar poker bet. The police read the Miranda warnings to his alleged killer, who then exercised his right to remain silent.
Berghuis v. Thompkins, 2010 U.S. Lexis 4379 (2010)
Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455 (1942)
Brown v. Board of Education, 337 U.S. 483 (1954)
Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428 (2000)
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962)
Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 U.S. 478 (1964)
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)
Massiah v. United States, 377 U.S. 201 (1964)
Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)
New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649 (1984)
For the case itself, see Liva Baker, Miranda: Crime, Law, and Politics (1983), and Richard C. Cortner and Clifford M. Lytle, Constitutional Law and Politics: Three Arizona Cases (1971). The broader context of the Warren Court is well examined in L. A. Scot Powe, The Warren Court and American Politics (2000), while Fred Graham, The Due Process Revolution (1970), casts a somewhat critical eye on the various Warren Court criminal decisions. A good article for the earlier cases is Arnold N. Enken and Sheldon H. Elsen, “Counsel for the Suspect: Massiah v. United States and Escobedo v. Illinois,” 49 Minnesota Law Review 47 (1964).