Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

Full transcript

Bracketed page cites are shown here for checking and aren't read aloud. M = Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S.; D = Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. In the video, the dissenting opinions are read in a second voice.

Cold open

You know these words. "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law." You don't know the four justices who said no.

I'm your host, and this is Supreme Dicta: one decision, the majority and the dissent, side by side, straight from the opinions. Quick note: this is general information, not legal advice.

The case

The case is Miranda v. Arizona, decided June 13, 1966. Chief Justice Warren wrote the opinion of the Court. It actually decided four cases at once: Miranda's own, plus Vignera v. New York, Westover v. United States, and California v. Stewart. [M 436, 439]

The facts

On March 13, 1963, Ernesto Miranda was arrested at his home and taken to a Phoenix police station. A witness identified him. Police then took him to what the opinion calls "Interrogation Room No. 2" of the detective bureau, where two officers questioned him. The officers admitted at trial that Miranda was not told he had a right to have a lawyer present. [M 491]

Two hours later, the officers came out with a written confession signed by Miranda. At the top was a typed paragraph saying the confession was voluntary, made "with full knowledge of my legal rights." [M 491–492]

A jury convicted him of kidnapping and rape, and he was sentenced to twenty to thirty years. Arizona's Supreme Court affirmed, stressing that Miranda never specifically asked for a lawyer. [M 492]

The best case for the majority

The majority began with what happens inside an interrogation room. It quoted police interrogation manuals of the era, which advised questioning a suspect alone, keeping him off balance, and using tricks. In the Court's summary, police "persuade, trick, or cajole him out of exercising his constitutional rights." [M 455]

Even without brutality, the Court said, "the very fact of custodial interrogation exacts a heavy toll on individual liberty and trades on the weakness of individuals." [M 455]

The Court's answer was the Fifth Amendment, which says no person shall be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." [M 461] The majority held that this protection applies in the police station, not just the courtroom. In its words: "An individual swept from familiar surroundings into police custody, surrounded by antagonistic forces, and subjected to the techniques of persuasion described above cannot be otherwise than under compulsion to speak." [M 461]

Unless safeguards are used to dispel that pressure, the Court wrote, "no statement obtained from the defendant can truly be the product of his free choice." [M 458]

So the Court required warnings. Here is the actual language. A suspect "must be warned prior to any questioning that he has the right to remain silent; that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, that he has the right to the presence of an attorney, and that if he cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for him prior to any questioning if he so desires." [M 479] Unless the prosecution shows those warnings and a valid waiver, no evidence obtained from the interrogation can be used against him. [M 479]

As for Miranda's typed clause about "full knowledge" of his "legal rights," the Court said it "does not approach the knowing and intelligent waiver required to relinquish constitutional rights." [M 492] His conviction was reversed. [M 499]

The best case for the dissents

Four justices dissented in Miranda's own case, which made it five to four. Justice Clark wrote for himself. Justice Harlan wrote for himself and Justices Stewart and White. And Justice White wrote for himself and Justices Harlan and Stewart. In the California case, Justice Clark agreed with the result. [M 499, 504, 526]

Justice Harlan's first line was blunt: "I believe the decision of the Court represents poor constitutional law and entails harmful consequences for the country at large." [M 504]

His point was that the new rules don't target the real abuse. "Those who use third-degree tactics and deny them in court," he wrote, "are equally able and destined to lie as skillfully about warnings and waivers." [M 505] Instead, he said, the goal was "voluntariness with a vengeance." [M 505] And the Fifth Amendment, in his view, "has never been thought to forbid all pressure to incriminate one's self in the situations covered by it." [M 512] He would have kept the older due process test, which he called "an adequate tool for coping with confessions." [M 505]

Justice White attacked the Court's premise. It had never been suggested, he wrote, "until today, that such questioning was so coercive and accused persons so lacking in hardihood that the very first response to the very first question following the commencement of custody must be conclusively presumed to be the product of an overborne will." [M 535]

And he warned about the cost: "In some unknown number of cases the Court's rule will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him, to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him." [M 542]

Justice Clark took a middle path. He was "unable to join the majority because its opinion goes too far on too little, while my dissenting brethren do not go quite far enough." [M 499] He defended the police and warned that "such a strict constitutional specific inserted at the nerve center of crime detection may well kill the patient." [M 500] He would have treated missing warnings as one factor in the "totality of circumstances," and put the burden on the State to prove the confession was clearly voluntary. [M 503]

What happened next

Miranda didn't simply walk free. Arizona tried him again, and in 1969 the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his conviction on retrial. [State v. Miranda, 104 Ariz. 174 (Feb. 6, 1969)]

The fight over the rule kept going. Two years after Miranda was decided, Congress passed a law, Section 3501, that tried to make voluntariness the only test for whether a confession could be used. [D 432, 435]

In 2000, in Dickerson v. United States, the Court took that law on. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for seven justices: "We hold that Miranda, being a constitutional decision of this Court, may not be in effect overruled by an Act of Congress, and we decline to overrule Miranda ourselves." [D 432] He wrote that Miranda "has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture." [D 443] And he concluded that "Miranda announced a constitutional rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively." [D 444]

Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented. He called the decision "not a reaffirmation of Miranda, but a radical revision" of it, because the majority never said the law actually violated the Constitution. [D 444–445]

Close

So here are the two sides. The majority saw the interrogation room itself as the kind of pressure the Fifth Amendment guards against, and it wrote a clear rule to match. The dissenters saw a rigid rule that would cost reliable confessions, and they trusted judges to weigh each case on its facts.

Sixty years later, you still hear the warnings. Both opinions, plus Dickerson, are linked below, so you can read them and decide for yourself. I'm your host, and this is Supreme Dicta.