MIRANDA V. ARIZONA (1966) (amicus)

Miranda v. Arizona was the culmination of a series of Supreme Court cases going back over thirty years, pitting the Constitution’s promise of the protection against self-incrimination against a favorite tool of law enforcement: the confession. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936), the Court held that after being beaten, whipped, and strung up by his neck from a tree in a mock lynching, the defendant’s “confession” could not stand. From there, the Court continued to address the problem of coercion, honing in on a definition of what constituted a freely given confession: suspects could not be held for long periods of time without food, police could not lie about the possibility of leniency, and so on. Finally, with Miranda, the Warren Court declared that police custody was in and of itself inherently coercive, and that the Constitution not only guaranteed the right to refrain from self-incrimination, but demanded that individuals be informed of that right and given the opportunity to exercise it. Few other cases in jurisprudential history have had the impact of Miranda on cultural understanding or have contained such a specific interpretation of the Bill of Rights as the now ubiquitous phrase, “You have the right to remain silent.”

Representing Ernesto Arturo Miranda, the ACLU shepherded his case from Phoenix, Arizona, to the nation’s highest court, arguing that all individuals were not only entitled to the protections of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, but entitled to be made aware of those protections.