§ 24.02 Miranda: Placing the Case in Historical Context

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 24.02 Miranda: Placing the Case in Historical Context

In a sense, the Miranda case tries to do two things at once: regulate police conduct during interrogations, and determine which statements made by defendants are presumptively compelled and therefore inadmissible under the Constitution's Self-Incrimination Clause.¹⁴ Thus, as you read through the history and policy behind this landmark decision, keep in mind that these two goals may sometimes lead courts in different directions, creating tension and even inconsistency in the doctrine.

Before Miranda, the police typically interrogated suspects in private. Defense lawyers were excluded from the interrogation room. The incommunicado nature of the process facilitated police brutality, which was not uncommon well into the twentieth century. By mid-century, as the result of public opposition to violent police practices and a judicial crackdown on the use of torture to obtain confessions, police departments shifted from physical force to psychological ploys to secure confessions from unwilling suspects.

The new procedures troubled some observers, who believed that they differed only in degree from those used in totalitarian societies.¹⁵ The authors of the police manuals, however, defended the new tactics on the ground that "[o]f necessity, criminal interrogators must deal with criminal offenders on a somewhat lower moral plane than that upon which ethical law-abiding citizens are expected to conduct their everyday affairs."¹⁶

The move from force to psychological pressures did not satisfy a majority of the Supreme Court, which viewed confessions "darkly as the product of police coercion."¹⁷The Court came to believe that encounters in the interrogation room should be more evenly balanced between suspects and the police. The justices' ultimate goal was to "protect those suspects who were the most vulnerable in police interrogations — minorities and the poor — by informing them of their rights and empowering them against coercive tactics."¹⁸

Moreover, by the early 1960s the Court had become thoroughly dissatisfied with the imprecise "voluntariness" test¹⁹ used by courts to evaluate the police interrogation techniques suggested in the police manuals. Based upon 30 years of struggle with the doctrine — with a test in which "[a]lmost everything was relevant, but almost nothing was decisive"²⁰ — the Court concluded that the totality-of-circumstance voluntariness test resulted in "intolerable uncertainty,"²¹ and that...