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The Rise, Decline And Fall(?) Of Miranda, Yale Kamisar

Articles

There has been a good deal of talk lately to the effect that Miranda1 is dead or dying-or might as well be dead.2 Even liberals have indicated that the death of Miranda might not be a bad thing. This brings to mind a saying by G.K. Chesterton: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up."4

(E)Racing The Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado

Michigan Law Review

It's been almost two years since I pledged allegiance to the United States of America - that is to say, became an American citizen. Before that, I was a permanent resident of America and a citizen of the United Kingdom. Yet, I became a black American long before I acquired American citizenship. Unlike citizenship, black racial naturalization was always available to me, even as I tried to make myself unavailable for that particular Americanization process. Given the negative images of black Americans on 1970s British television and the intra-racial tensions between blacks in the U.K. and blacks in America, I …

We Can Do This The Easy Way Or The Hard Way: The Use Of Deceit To Induce Consent Searches, Rebecca Strauss

Michigan Law Review

In October of 1995, Aaron Salvo was studying and living at Ashland College. College officials informed local FBI agents that they suspected Salvo of possible child molestation and related conduct based on incriminating electronic mail. FBI agents approached Salvo at his dormitory, asked to speak with him in private about the suspicious mail, and suggested they speak in Salvo's dorm room. Salvo agreed to speak with the officers, but declined to do so in his room because his roommate was there, and he did not want to get anyone else involved in the embarrassing nature of the upcoming conversation. Salvo …

Confessions, Search And Seizure, And The Rehnquist Court, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

About the time William Rehnquist ascended to the Chief Justiceship of the United States, two events occurred that increased the likelihood that Miranda would enjoy a long life.

In Moran v. Burbine, a six to three majority held that a confession preceded by an otherwise valid waiver of a suspect's Miranda rights should not be excluded either (1) because the police misled an inquiring attorney when they told her they were not going to question the suspect she called about or (2) because the police failed to inform the suspect of the attorney's efforts to reach him.

Although Burbine has …

Miranda'S Mistake, William J. Stuntz

Michigan Law Review

The oddest thing about Miranda is its politics - a point reinforced by the decision in, and the reaction to, Dickerson v. United States. In Dickerson, the Supreme Court faced the question whether Miranda ought to be overturned, either directly or by permitting legislative overrides. The lawyers, the literature, and the Court split along right-left - or, in the Court's case, right-center - lines, with the right seeking to do away with Miranda's restrictions on police questioning, and the left (or center) seeking to maintain them. The split is familiar. Reactions to Miranda have always divided along ideological lines, with …

Separated At Birth But Siblings Nonetheless: Miranda And The Due Process Notice Cases, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

Paraphrasing Justice Holmes, law is less about logic than experience. Courts and scholars have now had thirty-four years of experience with Miranda v. Arizona, including the Court's recent endorsement in Dickerson v. United States last Term. Looking back over this experience, it is plain that the Court has created a Miranda doctrine quite different from what it has said it was creating. I think the analytic structure in Dickerson supports this rethinking of Miranda. To connect the dots, I offer a new explanation for Miranda that permits us to reconcile Dickerson and the rest of the post-Miranda doctrine with the …

The Paths Not Taken: The Supreme Court's Failures In Dickerson, Paul G. Cassell

Michigan Law Review

Where's the rest of the opinion? That was my immediate reaction to reading the Supreme Court's terse decision in Dickerson, delivered to me via email from the clerk's office a few minutes after its release. Surely, I thought, some glitch in the transmission had eliminated the pages of discussion on the critical issues in the case. Yet, as it became clear that I had received all of the Court's opinion, my incredulity grew.

Miranda, Dickerson, And The Puzzling Persistence Of Fifth Amendment Exceptionalism, Stephen J. Schulhofer

Michigan Law Review

Dickerson v. United States preserves the status quo regime for judicial oversight of police interrogation. That result could be seen, in the present climate, as a victory for due process values, but there remain many reasons for concern that existing safeguards are flawed - that they are either too restrictive or not restrictive enough. Such concerns are partly empirical, of course. They depend on factual assessments of how much the Miranda rules do restrict the police. But such concerns also reflect a crucial, though often unstated, normative premise; they presuppose a certain view of how much the police should be …

Miranda, The Constitution, And Congress, David A. Strauss

Michigan Law Review

Are Miranda warnings required by the Constitution, or not? If they are, why has the Supreme Court repeatedly said that the rights created by Miranda are "not themselves rights protected by the Constitution"? If not, why can't an Act of Congress, such as 18 U.S.C. 3501, declare them to be unnecessary? These were the central questions posed by United States v. Dickerson. It is not clear that the majority opinion ever really answered them. The majority said that "Miranda is constitutionally based," that Miranda has "constitutional underpinnings," that Miranda is "a constitutional decision," and that Miranda "announced a constitutional rule." …

Questioning The Relevance Of Miranda In The Twenty-First Century, Richard A. Leo

Michigan Law Review

Miranda v. Arizona is the most well-known criminal justice decision - arguably the most well-known legal decision - in American history. Since it was decided in 1966, the Miranda decision has spawned voluminous newspaper coverage, political and legal debate, and academic commentary. The Miranda warnings themselves have become so well-known through the media of television that most people recognize them immediately. As Patrick Malone has pointed out, the Miranda decision has added its own lexicon of words and phrases to the American language. Perhaps with this understanding in mind, George Thomas recently suggested that the Miranda warnings are more well-known …

Identifying And (Re)Formulating Prophylactic Rules, Safe Harbors, And Incidental Rights In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Susan R. Klein

Michigan Law Review

The Miranda conundrum runs something like this. If the Miranda decision represents true constitutional interpretation, and all unwarned statements taken during custodial interrogation are "compelled" within the meaning of the Self-Incrimination Clause, the impeachment and "fruits" exceptions to Miranda should fall. If it is not true constitutional interpretation, than the Court has no business reversing state criminal convictions for its violation. I offer here what I hope is a satisfying answer to this conundrum, on both descriptive and normative levels, that justifies not only Miranda but a host of similar Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Court decisions as well. In Part …

In The Stationhouse After Dickerson, Charles D. Weisselberg

Michigan Law Review

Miranda v. Arizona established the high water mark of the protections afforded an accused during a custodial interrogation. During the decades that followed, the United States Supreme Court allowed Miranda's foundation to erode, inviting a direct challenge to the landmark ruling. In Dickerson v. United States, the Court turned back such a challenge and placed Miranda upon a more secure, constitutional footing. This Article explores the impact of Dickerson in the place where Miranda was meant to matter most: the stationhouse. As I have described elsewhere, Supreme Court decisions have influenced a number of California law enforcement agencies to instruct …

Deceptive Police Interrogation Practices: How Far Is Too Far?, Laurie Magid

Michigan Law Review

Virtually all interrogations - or at least virtually all successful interrogations - involve some deception. As the United States Supreme Court has placed few limits on the use of deception, the variety of deceptive techniques is limited chiefly by the ingenuity of the interrogator. Interrogators still rely on the classic "Mutt and Jeff," or "good cop, bad cop," routine. Interrogators tell suspects that nonexistent eyewitnesses have identified them, or that still at-large accomplices have given statements against them. Interrogators have been known to put an unsophisticated suspect's hand on a fancy, new photocopy machine and tell him that the "Truth …

Miranda'S Failure To Restrain Pernicious Interrogation Practices, Welsh S. White

Michigan Law Review

As Yale Kamisar's writings on police interrogation demonstrate, our simultaneous commitments to promoting law enforcement's interest in obtaining confessions and to protecting individuals from overreaching interrogation practices have created a nearly irreconcilable tension. If the police must be granted authority to engage in effective questioning of suspects, it will obviously be difficult to insure that "the terrible engine of the criminal law . . . not . . . be used to overreach individuals who stand helpless against it." If we are committed to accommodating these conflicting interests, however, some means must be found to impose appropriate restraints on the …

Confessions, Search And Seizure And The Rehnquist Court, Yale Kamisar

Articles

About the time William Rehnquist ascended to the Chief Justiceship of the United States, two events occurred that increased the likelihood that Miranda would enjoy a long life. In Moran v. Burbine,' a 6-3 majority held that a confession preceded by an otherwise valid waiver of a suspect's Miranda rights should not be excluded either (a) because the police misled an inquiring attorney when they told her they were not going to question the suspect she called about or (b) because the police failed to inform the suspect of the attorney's efforts to reach him.

The Warren Court And Criminal Justice: A Quarter-Century Retrospective, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Many commentators have observed that when we speak of "the Warren Court," we mean the Warren Court that lasted from 1962 (when Arthur Goldberg replaced Felix Frankfurter) to 1969 (when Earl Warren retired). But when we speak of the Warren Court's "revolution" in American criminal procedure we mean the Warren Court that lasted from 1961 (when the landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio was decided) to 1966 or 1967. In its final years, the Warren Court was not the same Court that had handed down Mapp or Miranda v. Arizona.

Remembering The 'Old World' Of Criminal Procedure: A Reply To Professor Grano, Yale Kamisar

Articles

When I graduated from high school in 1961, the "old world" of criminal procedure still existed, albeit in its waning days; when I graduated from law school in 1968, circa the time most of today's first-year law students were arriving on the scene, the "new world" had fully dislodged the old. Indeed, the force of the new world's revolutionary impetus already had crested. Some of the change that the criminal procedure revolution effected was for the better, but much of it, at least as some of us see it, was decidedly for the worse. My students, however, cannot make the …

The Law Of Pretrial Interrogation, Department Of Justice Office Of Legal Policy

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The existing rules in the United States governing the questioning of suspects in custody are based on the Supreme Court's five to four decision in Miranda v. Arizona. The Court in Miranda promulgated a new, code-like set of rules for custodial questioning, including the creation of a right to counsel in connection with custodial questioning, a requirement of warnings, a prohibition of questioning unless the suspect affirmatively waives the rights set out in the warnings, and a prohibition of questioning if the suspect asks for a lawyer or indicates in any manner that he is unwilling to talk. These …

The Warren Court (Was It Really So Defense-Minded?), The Burger Court (Is It Really So Prosecution-Oriented?), And Police Investigatory Practices, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

In one sense the Warren Court's "revolution" in American criminal procedure may be said to. have been launched by the 1956 case of Griffin v. Illinois (establishing an indigent criminal defendant's right to a free transcript on appeal, at least under certain circumstances) and to have been significantly advanced by two 1963 cases: Gideon v. Wainwright (entitling an indigent defendant to free counsel, at least in serious criminal cases) and Douglas v. California (requiring a state to provide an indigent with counsel on his first appeal from a criminal conviction). But these were not the cases that plunged the Warren …

Interrogation Without Questions: Rhode Island V. Innis And United States V. Henry, Welsh S. White

Michigan Law Review

In Rhode Island v. Innis, the Court defined "interrogation" within the meaning of Miranda; and in United States v. Henry, it defined "deliberate elicitation" within the meaning of Massiah. This article explores the implications of Innis and Henry, suggests readings of the new tests consistent with their purposes, and applies the tests to several situations where the scope of the fifth and sixth amendment protections remains unclear.

Taxpayer Rights In Noncustodial Irs Investigations After Beckwith V. United States, Curtis L. Christensen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The recent Supreme Court decision in Beckwith v. United States, holding that Miranda does not extend to noncustodial tax investigations, has important implications with respect to the News Release doctrine and the involuntary consent grounds considered in motions to suppress evidence. This article will examine Beckwith and its potential significance with respect to these other doctrines, discussing the factors which the IRS and the courts should consider in order to assure fair treatment of taxpayers during investigations.