Are you feeling overwhelmed by the Supreme Court decisions this summer? You are not the only one. While most of the nation will be focused on the court's decision to set the clock on reproductive rights back to leave it to Beaver hour, there are other cases this week that have been mangled by a room full of partisan ideologues.
The famous Miranda v. Arizona case, popularized through several thousand cop-centered movies and TV shows, has found its way back into headlines this week. The court has reversed Miranda, according to many of the headlines. Others are too focused on the translation of the ruling to realize that it is a real service to everyone. If you were to search for Miranda on social media right now, you would find hundreds of posts saying the right to remain silent is dead.
It's very much alive. You have the right to refuse to talk to the police even if you don't want to. This week didn't change that. If the police don't read you your rights before questioning you, your lawyer should fight to have those statements thrown out. The nine justices gave police and prosecutors the go-ahead to use un-Mirandized confessions in court.
If a statement is introduced in court against you, even if your rights weren't read at the time of the interrogation, you won't be able to file a lawsuit. The right to remain silent, as any statements you make can and probably will be used against you in court, and the right to legal counsel, even if you can't afford it, are included in these rights.
According to the majority opinion in Vega, a defendants can still seek suppression at trial if they choose to. It's your right to remain silent again. That's a positive thing.
Everyone is freaked out if the most substantive provisions of Miranda are intact. This is a big victory for dishonest cops.
In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union supported the high court's dissent word for word: "While the court's decision does not as a formal matter reduce the police officer's obligation to issue Miranda warnings."
The issue at hand is whether receiving a Miranda warning is a right guaranteed to you under the Fifth Amendment, which states that people have a right not to be compelled to incriminate themselves. The purpose of the privilege was to protect innocent people from being coerced into answering questions that could implicate them in crimes they didn't commit. Many justice systems relied on torture to get confessions from people. By the 17th century it was common knowledge that you could get people to confess to anything if you used pain as an incentive.
Does the Fifth Amendment give you a right to a Miranda warning? The person for whom the warning is named was not born until 1941. The most famous phrase in television history wasn't decided until 1966. Even though we don't have a time machine to go back and amend a document, it doesn't mean it doesn't apply to things that happened in the past. The court has a responsibility to apply the meaning behind the text to any unforeseen circumstances. That is where the arguments begin.
Congress passed a law in the late 1970s that gave police officers the right to file lawsuits against anyone who deprived them of their rights. The Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable searches by the government. You can file a lawsuit if a cop enters your house without a warrant and finds your stuff. Miranda warnings may or may not share the same association with the Fifth Amendment that legal warrants share with the Fourth.
Miranda is not a right according to the Supreme Court. It is called a "prophylactic rule." It has nothing to do with condoms. Police are required to issue a Miranda warning in order to prevent the justice system from violating a suspect's right against self-incrimination. Miranda warnings are not required by the constitution according to the opinion. It is the prosecutors and not the police who would be violating this right anyways, which is very convenient because prosecutors are immune to lawsuits.
When the Constitution was written, police did not question people. It is a new development.
In the 1930s, police officers in Mississippi tortured three black men until they confessed to their crimes. The men were told that the beating would continue until a confession was made. After the case against them was thrown out by the Supreme Court, it was up to individual judges to decide if confessions had been coerced or not.
The decision was made that all police interrogations are coercive. That is correct today. Police are trained to use a wide range of psychological tactics. Most people don't handle this kind of pressure well, even if they've never committed a crime. We don't understand this as much as we did a half century ago, because hundreds of cases have been overturned because of false confessions. False confessions are not the same as those elicited under physical torture, and they are now an accepted psychological phenomenon.
The courts decided the least the cops could do was remind people that they have a right to keep their mouths shut. No matter the situation, you should take advantage of it.
The ruling that spurred this discussion found that receiving a Miranda warning is not a constitutional right because it was created to prevent the justice system from violating a preexisting right. It is about as clear as it can get.
You would not be alone if that sounded like you. Miranda is a requirement of the Supreme Court's liberal wing to make sure the Fifth Amendment isn't violated. The liberal justices found that the rule was non-segregable. The rule protecting the Fifth Amendment has collapsed into each other, according to the Dissenting justices.
Miranda is described as a "constitutional rule," a "constitutional decision," and a "constitutional guideline" in a case called Dickerson v. U.S. The conservative justices seem to think that the absence of the word "right" is deliberate.
The meaning is crystal clear, according to the liberals, who believe that Dickerson labels Miranda a rule stemming from the constitution. Miranda is so important to the Fifth Amendment that Congress can't pass a law that undermines it. Congress is able to pass laws to strengthen it, and could pass a law today to reverse the ruling.
The liberals don't accept the ruling on many grounds. The language of the law in question states that anyone who deprives another of their rights is guilty of a crime.
The right to remain silent is violated a lot. The court stripped people who had been deprived of that right of seeking a legal remedy for their harms.
It is a sad day for Miranda and the Bill of Rights.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
