Law Commons^™

Mr.Big: The Undercover Breach Of The Right Against Self-Incrimination, Adelina Iftene

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

At common law, the privilege against self-incrimination protects the accused solely against compelled testimony in formal proceedings. Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,1 the privilege received constitutional protection2 and a pre-trial right against self-incrimination was subsequently created. The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) stated in the early 1990s that the principle against self-incrimination is a principle of fundamental justice under s. 7,3 “perhaps the single, most important organizing principle of criminal justice”.4 This allowed for the protection of the accused against compelled confessions outside of the narrow context of formal proceedings.

Despite the significant developments of the protection …

Taking Confrontation Seriously Does Crawford Mean That Confessions Must Be Crossexamined, Mark A. Summers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dickerson V. United States: The Case That Disappointed Miranda's Critics - And Then Its Supporters, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

It is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss Dickerson1 intelligently without discussing Miranda whose constitutional status Dickerson reaffirmed (or, one might say, resuscitated). It is also difficult, if not impossible, to discuss the Dickerson case intelligently without discussing cases the Court has handed down in the five years since Dickerson was decided. The hard truth is that in those five years the reaffirmation of Miranda's constitutional status has become less and less meaningful. In this chapter I focus on the Court's characterization of statements elicited in violation of the Miranda warnings as not actually "coerced" or "compelled" but obtained merely …

Miranda's Reprieve: How Rehnquist Spared The Landmark Confession Case, But Weakened Its Impact, Yale Kamisar

Articles

June marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most praised, most maligned-and probably one of the most misunderstood-U.S. Supreme Court cases in American history, Miranda v. Arizona. The opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren conditions police questioning of people in custody on the giving of warnings about the right to remain silent, the right to counsel and the waiver of those rights. 384 U.S. 436. This ruling represents a compromise of sorts between the former elusive, ambiguous and subjective voluntariness/totality-of-the-circumstances test and extreme proposals that would have eliminated police interrogation altogether. But William H. Rehnquist didn't see Miranda that …

The Central Park Five, The Scottsboro Boys, And The Myth Of The Bestial Black Man, N. Jeremi Duru

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of The Search And Seizure Exclusionary Rule (Law And Truth - The Twenty-First Annual National Student Federalist Society Symposium On Law And Public Policy - 2002), Yale Kamisar

Articles

think Dean Pye's advice about casebook writing was sound,6 and what he had to say also applies to discussions and debates about such issues as the search and seizure exclusionary rule. We cannot (at least we should not) begin with Mapp v. Ohio. We need a prelude.

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 …

The Talmudic Rule Against Self-Incrimination And The American Exclusionary Rule: A Societal Prohibition Versus An Affirmative Individual Right, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Congress' Arrogance, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Does Dickerson v. U.S., reaffirming Miranda and striking down §3501 (the federal statute purporting to "overrule" Miranda), demonstrate judicial arrogance? Or does the legislative history of §3501 demonstrate the arrogance of Congress? Shortly after Dickerson v. U.S. reaffirmed Miranda and invalidated §3501, a number of Supreme Court watchers criticized the Court for its "judicial arrogance" in peremptorily rejecting Congress' test for the admissibility of confessions. The test, pointed out the critics, had been adopted by extensive hearings and debate about Miranda's adverse impact on law enforcement. The Dickerson Court did not discuss the legislative history of §3501 at all. However, …

Lilly V. Virginia Glimmers Of Hope For The Confrontation Clause?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In 1662, in The Case of Thomas Tong and Others, which involved charges of treason against several defendants, the judges of the King's Bench conferred on a crucial set of points of procedure. As reported by one of the judges, Sir John Kelyng, the judges agreed unanimously that a pretrial confession made to the authorities was evidence against the Party himself who made the Confession, and indeed, if adequately proved could support a conviction of that party without additional witnesses to the treason itself. But -- again unanimously, and quite definitively -- the judges also agreed that the confession cannot …

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 Three Threats To Miranda, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Miranda v. Arizona (1966) was the centerpiece of the Warren Court's "revolution" in American criminal procedure. Moreover, as Professor Stephen Schulhofer of the University of Chicago Law School has recently noted, a numbir of the Miranda safeguards "have now become entrenched in the interrogation procedures of many countries around the world." But Miranda is in serious trouble at home.

Lost Lives: Miscarriages Of Justice In Capital Cases, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

In case after case, erroneous conviction for capital murder has been proven. I contend that these are not disconnected accidents, but systematic consequences of the nature of homicice prosecution in the general and capital prosecution in particular - that in this respect, as in others, death distorts and undermines the course of the law.

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 …

Defending Miranda, Paul Marcus

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court And The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination: Has The Burger Court Retreated?, Paul Marcus

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Confessions, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

The entry for 'Confessions' in the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, 1983

A Defense Of The Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

Articles

The exclusionary rule is being flayed with increasing vigor by a number of unrelated sources and with a variety of arguments. Some critics find it unworkable and resort to empirically based arguments. Others see it as the product of a belated and unwarranted judicial interpretation. Still others, uncertain whether the rule works, are confident that in some fashion law enforcement's hands are tied. Professor Yale Kamisar, long a defender of the exclusionary rule, reviews the current attacks on the rule and offers a vigorous rebuttal. He finds it difficult to accept that there is a line for acceptable police conduct …

Is The Exclusionary Rule An 'Illogical' Or 'Unnatural' Interpretation Of The Fourth Amendment?, Yale Kamisar

Articles

More than 50 years have passed since the Supreme Court decided the Weeks case, barring the use in federal prosecutions of evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and the Silverthorne case, invoking what has come to be known as the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. The justices who decided those cases would, I think, be quite surprised to learn that some day the value of the exclusionary rule would be measured by-and the very life of the rule might depend on-an empirical evaluation of its efficacy in deterring police misconduct. These justices were engaged in a less …

Foreword: Brewer V. Williams--A Hard Look At A Discomfiting Record, Yale Kamisar

Articles

In recent decades, few matters have split the Supreme Court, troubled the legal profession, and agitated the public as much as the police interrogation-confession cases. The recent case of Brewer v. Williams3 is as provocative as any, because the Supreme Court there revdrsed the defendant's conviction for the "savage murder of a small child" even though no Justice denied his guilt,4 he was warned of his rights no fewer than five times, 5 and any "interrogation" that might have occurred seemed quite mild.6

'Custodial Interrogation' Within The Meaning Of Miranda, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

The primary conceptual hurdle confronting the Miranda Court was the "legal reasoning" that any and all police interrogation is unaffected by the privilege against self-incrimination because such interrogation does not involve any kind of judicial process for the taking of testimony; inasmuch as police officers have no legal authority to compel statements of any kind, there is no legal obligation, ran the argument, to which a privilege can apply. See, e.g., the discussion and authorities collected in Kamisar, A Dissent from the Miranda Dissents: Some Comments on the "New" Fifth Amendment and the Old "Voluntariness" Test, 65 MICH. L. REv. …

Police Interrogation And The Supreme Court--The Latest Round, Jerold H. Israel

Book Chapters

My first task is to explain to some degree the nature of the problem embodied in our title. This book has been designated as "Escobedo-The Second Round." What we will be discussing is a series of cases, decided in June, 1966, the most noteworthy of which is Miranda v. Arizona [384 U.S. 436 (1966)]. In these cases, the United States Supreme Court prescribed a new set of standards governing the introduction in evidence of statements obtained from the defendant through police interrogation. Actually, to a degree these standards were not entirely new. They had been suggested, at least in part, …

The Citizen On Trial: The New Confession Rules, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Commenting on why it has taken the United States so long to apply "the privilege against self-incrimination and the right to counsel to the proceedings in the stationhouse as well as to those in the courtroom" - as the Supreme Court did in Miranda v. Arizona - this author notes that, "To a large extent this is so because here, as elsewhere, there has been a wide gap between the principles to which we aspire and the practices we actually employ."