Miranda Memories

• Date: 01 April 2019

Published in Litigation, Volume 45, Number 3, Spring 2019. © 2019 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not

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Miranda Memories

PETER D. BAIRD

The author defended Ernesto Arturo Miranda on criminal charges after the 1966Miranda v. ArizonaU.S. Supreme Court decision.

In a distant sense, the famous Miranda decision—Miranda

v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)—started in 1637, on the eve of

the English Civil War, with the arrest of a cantankerous young

Puritan by the name of “Freeborn” John Lilburne. Charged with

the importation of heretical and seditious books into England,

Lilburne was taken to the Star Chamber for one of its indelicate

interrogations. For his refusal “to take a legal oath” and “to an-

swer truly,” Lilburne was whipped, pilloried, fined, and impris-

oned. G, T F A T (Harvard Univ.

Press 1955). Four years later, the House of Commons declared

Lilburne’s treatment illegal, and the House of Lords indemnified

him; the privilege against self-incrimination was born.

Ernesto Arturo Miranda most certainly had never heard of

John Lilburne, but he was to become a remote, and perhaps the

most famous, beneficiary of what Lilburne had done more than

300 years earlier. Miranda was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1941,

the fifth son of an immigrant house painter from Sonora, Mexico.

When Miranda was six, his mother died. Thereafter, his early

life was a succession of conflicts with his stepmother, truancies

from Queen of Peace Grammar School, and steadily worsening

disciplinary problems. See B, M: C, L 

P (Atheneum 1985).

An early watershed year came for Miranda in 1954, when he

finished his eighth (and last) year of formal education and was

convicted of his first serious crime. From then on, he became

the prototype of a practiced recidivist. It was one illegal act, ar-

rest, and conviction after another, with assorted incarcerations

between 1957 and 1961 in Arizona, California, Texas, Tennessee,

and Ohio. During one period of freedom, Miranda enlisted in

the U.S. Army but, true to form, he was dishonorably discharged

after going AWOL and then did hard labor at the post stockade

at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

L ov el y Tw il a

By 1962, Miranda was out of jail and back in the Phoenix area.

He had a job as a produce worker and lived with a “common-law”

wife named Twila Hoffman. A hard-luck case with two children

by a man she could not afford to divorce, Twila cohabited with

Miranda and gave birth to his daughter, Cleopatra. Five years

later, to Miranda’s rage and dismay, Twila would betray him by

testifying for the state in his retrial after the famous Supreme

Court victory.

Despite a job, family, and the appearance of momentary stabil-

ity, Miranda could not break one of his worst and most dangerous

habits—preying upon young women. According to the Phoenix

Originally published in our Winter 1990 issue.