Miranda Warning

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Miranda Warning

The Miranda warning has become one of the most visible protections of Americans civil rights. Because the warning protects suspected criminals at the point of arrest, the warning has provoked debate about the benefits of protecting individual rights at the cost of impeding police investigative powers. The warning only protects a person from self-incrimination, and it does not deter the police from making an arrest, only interrogating a suspect. Movies, television police dramas, and "real" cop shows, have done much to inform the public of the protection offered by the Miranda warning. Tom Hanks even delivered a (mercifully abbreviated) rap version of the warning in the 1987 movie Dragnet.

The case of Miranda v. Arizona began with the 1963 kidnapping of a young Phoenix, Arizona, woman. The kidnapper took her into the desert outside of Phoenix, raped her, and brought her back to the city.

The police apprehended Ernest Miranda and questioned him about the crime. The police didn't use third-degree tactics, and they advised Miranda of some of his rights as a criminal suspect, but they didn't tell Miranda about all of his rights. Miranda confessed to the crime, and was convicted. He took his case to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court heard Miranda's case, as well as the cases of four other convicted criminals who had similar complaints about not being warned of their rights.

In its 1966 decision, the Supreme Court said that suspects being questioned by the police were in a vulnerable position, and that if the suspect didn't know his rights, he was at risk of having those rights violated. Therefore, the Court required that the police inform suspects in custody that they possessed the following rights (these rights had been established in earlier Supreme Court decisions): (a) the right to remain silent, with the caution that whatever the suspect said could be used against him in court; (b) the right to have a lawyer present during the interrogation; and (c) the right to have a lawyer appointed for him if he couldn't afford one. After the Supreme Court decision in his case, Miranda got a new trial and was convicted again.

" Miranda v. Arizona was long remembered as the high point reached by the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren," according to Liva Baker in her book Miranda: Crime Law and Politics. But others argued that the Miranda decision was the low point of an activist Court which leaned too far in the direction of protecting criminal defendants' rights. In 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon, discussing Miranda and another Supreme Court case about confessions, said that "[t]he Miranda and Escobedo decisions of the High Court have had the effect of seriously hamstringing the peace forces in our society and strengthening the criminal forces."

The debate about the Miranda warning continued at the end of the twentieth century. Supporters of Miranda note that the warning protects the rights of criminal suspects and prevents psychological intimidation by the police. Supporters also contend that the warning has not deterred the police in their fight against crime, and that attempts to abolish the warning will divert attention away from long-term solutions to the crime problem, such as more resources and better training for the police, better judicial administration, and so on. Opponents of the Miranda warning say that the use of the warning has caused more criminals to clam up, reducing the number of confessions and hence reducing the number of crimes solved by the police. Each side in the debate brandishes statistics and rhetoric to back up its position.

In considering the effects of the Miranda decision on law enforcement, it should be borne in mind that the rule has its exceptions. The Court permits the police and prosecutors, under certain circumstances, to use confessions which were obtained without warning the suspect of his rights. The warning can be dispensed with in emergency circumstances—if, for example, the police ask the suspect to reveal the location of a dangerous weapon which might endanger the public. In certain cases, even when a suspect's statement is inadmissible because he did not get the Miranda warnings, police can pursue leads based on the statement, and the resulting evidence can be shown in court (e.g., under some circumstances, if the defendant gives the name of a witness, and the witness turns out to be useful to the prosecution, the prosecution can use that witness's testimony in court). Finally, suppose that the defendant takes the stand in his own behalf, and tells the jury a story which is different from his statement to the police. In some cases, the statement can be shown to the jury in order to attack the defendant's credibility, even if the defendant made the statement without getting a Miranda warning. In other words, the police have an incentive to get a confession out of a suspect without warning him of his rights, because there are indirect ways in which such a confession can be used against the accused. How often the police try to circumvent the Miranda rule is a controversial issue.

The Court's decision in Miranda contained another loophole: Congress or the state legislatures could abolish the Miranda warning, provided that the warning was replaced by some equally effective method of protecting the rights of criminal suspects. As part of its 1968 Omnibus Crime Control Act, Congress seemed to take up this implied invitation from the Supreme Court. The law Congress passed (which only applies to trials in federal court) declares that if the defendant has made a confession, the confession can be used as evidence "if it is voluntarily given," even if the defendant didn't get a Miranda warning. Contrariwise, if the police did give the defendant a Miranda warning, but the confession was involuntary, then the court must exclude the confession. This law has not been fully tested, with federal officials and courts preferring to use the Miranda rules. In February 1999 the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, decided that law enforcement officers in five states (Mary-land, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) no longer were obliged to inform arrestees that they had the right to remain silent. One of the panelists in the United States v. Dickerson, Judge Karen Williams, declared that "no longer will criminals who have voluntarily confessed their crimes be released on mere technicalities." But Larry Pozner, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers worried that the ruling could "take us back to the old days of ambush and trickery by the police," as reported on the Police Officer's Network. The future of the Miranda warning remained in question because constitutional scholars expect the United States v. Dickerson case to reach the Supreme Court.