Miranda v. Arizona 384 U.S. 436 (1966)

• Author: Leonard W. Levy
• Pages: 1741-1742

Page 1741

Miranda is the best known as well as the most controversial and maligned self-incrimination decision in the history of the Supreme Court. Some of the harshest criticism came from the dissenters in that case. Justice BYRON R. WHITE, for example, declared that the rule of the case, which required elaborate warnings and offer of counsel before the RIGHT AGAINST SELF-INCRIMINATION could be effectively waived, would return killers, rapists, and other criminals to the streets and have a corrosive effect on the prevention of crime. The facts of Miranda, one of four cases decided together, explain the alarm of the four dissenters and of the many critics of the WARREN COURT. The majority of five, led by Chief Justice EARL WARREN, reversed the kidnap-and-rape conviction of Ernesto Miranda, who had been picked out of a LINEUP by his victim, had been interrogated without mistreatment for a couple of hours, and had signed a confession that purported to have been voluntarily made with full knowledge of his rights, although no one had advised him that he did not need to answer incriminating questions or that he could have counsel present. The Court reversed because his confession had been procured in violation of his rights, yet had been admitted in EVIDENCE. Warren conceded that the Court could not know what had happened in the interrogation room and "might not find the ? statements to have been involuntary in traditional terms." Justice JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN, dissenting, professed to be "astonished" at the decision. Yet the Court did little more than require that the states follow what was already substantially FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI) procedure with respect to the rights of a suspect during a custodial interrogation.

The doctrinal significance of the case is that the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause became the basis for evaluating the admissibility of confessions. The Court thus abandoned the traditional DUE PROCESS analysis that it had used in state cases since BROWN V. MISSISSIPPI (1936) to determine whether a confession was voluntary under all the circumstances. (See POLICE INTERROGATIONS AND CONFESSIONS.) Moreover, the Court shifted to the Fifth Amendment from the Sixth Amendment analysis of ESCOBEDO V. ILLINOIS (1964), when discussing the RIGHT TO COUNSEL as a means of protecting against involuntary confessions. Miranda stands for the proposition that the Fifth Amendment vests a right in the...