In Miranda v. Arizona (1966) the Warren Court adopted the now world-famous four warnings that changed legal procedure in America and thousands of television scripts as well--the latter educating Americans never arrested as criminal suspects about a fundamental rule of modern criminal procedure.
The Court Syllabus (summary) explained the rule & its rationale:
1. The prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way, unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination.
(a) The atmosphere and environment of incommunicado interrogation as it exists today is inherently intimidating, and works to undermine the privilege against self-incrimination. Unless adequate preventive measures are taken to dispel the compulsion inherent in custodial surroundings, no statement obtained from the defendant can truly be the product of his free choice.
(b) The privilege against self-incrimination, which has had a long and expansive historical development, is the essential mainstay of our adversary system, and guarantees to the individual the "right to remain silent unless he chooses to speak in the unfettered exercise of his own will," during a period of custodial interrogation as well as in the courts or during the course of other official investigations....
(d) In the absence of other effective measures, the following procedures to safeguard the Fifth Amendment privilege must be observed: the person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent, and that anything he says will be used against him in court; he must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation, and that, if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him.
(e) If the individual indicates, prior to or during questioning, that he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease; if he states that he wants an attorney, the questioning must cease until an attorney is present.
(f) Where an interrogation is conducted without the presence of an attorney and a statement is taken, a heavy burden rests on the Government to demonstrate that the defendant knowingly and intelligently waived his right to counsel.
(g) Where the individual answers some questions during in-custody interrogation, he has not waived his privilege, and may invoke his right to remain silent thereafter.
(h) The warnings required and the waiver needed are, in the absence of a fully effective equivalent, prerequisites to the admissibility of any statement, inculpatory or exculpatory, made by a defendant.
Put simply: (1) once a suspect is "in custody"--meaning, "deprived of freedom in any significant way"--the police must read the suspect the four Miranda warnings; (2) failure to do so, or failure to stop interrogation when requested by the suspect or defense counsel, renders statements made thereafter not admissible in court.
In effect, Miranda establishes what lawyers call a conclusive presumption that such a confession violates defendant's rights under the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment. Miranda supplanted the traditional "totality of circumstances" test, by which a court would look at all factors in deciding whether to admit a given confession or statement.
Cases can at time be tricky, especially as to what constitutes "custody" under the rule. You can be at home, and still be in custody if the police forcibly detain you there for questioning. And you can be in a police station, but if told you can leave at any time, not be in custody, as O.J. found out in Nevada when he answered questions and incriminated himself at the station house; the Juice was told that he could leave not only the station but even the Sate of Nevada, at any time. O.J. thus now is searching for "the real killer" in a Nevada jail (which narrows the search considerably compared to all those Florida golf courses).
In Dickerson c. United Sates (2000) the Supreme Court declined, 7-2, to discard the Miranda rule. In reversing a judgment by the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit (located in Virginia), the Court invoked the doctrine of stare decision--legal parlance for "let the decision stand."
The Court Syllabus summed up the rationale for declining to overrule Miranda, after 34 years:
Whether or not we would agree with Miranda’s reasoning and its resulting rule, were we addressing the issue in the first instance, the principles of stare decisis weigh heavily against overruling it now....While stare decisis is not an inexorable command,’particularly when we are interpreting the Constitution, even in constitutional cases, the doctrine carries such persuasive force that we have always required a departure from precedent to be supported by some special justification.
We do not think there is such justification for overruling Miranda. Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture....While we have overruled our precedents when subsequent cases have undermined their doctrinal underpinnings, we do not believe that this has happened to the Miranda decision. If anything, our subsequent cases have reduced the impact of the Miranda rule on legitimate law enforcement while reaffirming the decision’s core ruling that unwarned statements may not be used as evidence in the prosecution’s case in chief.
The disadvantage of the Miranda rule is that statements which may be by no means involuntary, made by a defendant who is aware of his rights, may nonetheless be excluded and a guilty defendant go free as a result. But experience suggests that the totality-of-the-circumstances test...is more difficult than Miranda for law enforcement officers to conform to, and for courts to apply in a consistent manner....
In sum, we conclude that Miranda announced a constitutional rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively. Following the rule of stare decisis, we decline to overrule Miranda ourselves.
Put simply: (1) Miranda is a Constitutional jurisprudential rule, which Congress cannot overrule by statute; (2) the Miranda rule is woven into the fabric of police procedure; (3) the police accept it & have learned to live with it; (4) while stare decisis is a rule of strong preference and not an absolute rule always applied, in this case the rule should be applied and Miranda thus left standing as the law.
A WSJ 5/15 editorial sees A-G Eric Holder "tinkering" with the Miranda rule in order to question terror detainees for a few days without giving the Miranda warnings, and without having statements thus made kept out of any subsequent legal proceeding. The editors note that hardcore terrorists may not cave in for weeks, or even months, and thus expanding the "public safety" exception to the Miranda rule, established by US v. Quarles (1984), allowing police to question suspects without giving the warnings if public safety or their own safety is at risk, will not suffice if lots of interrogation time is needed.
Bottom Line. As a pure proposition of judicial application, the Justices who declined to overrule Miranda acted defensibly, because it had become part of America's legal landscape. Yet post-9/11 creates situations where even US citizens might have intelligence of value in fighting terrorist groups. For such situations, Miranda is ill-suited, because the "public safety" rules cannot encompass the full range of potential situations we may encounter.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, National Security, Terrorism, Homeland Security, Supreme Court, Conservative Politics
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