Ron Dungan

The Republic | azcentral.com

You have the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present during questioning by authorities. These constitutional rights, defined by the Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona 50 years ago, are more than a part of our criminal justice system. They have become part of our culture, standard fare in police dramas from “Dragnet” to “Law & Order.”

The Miranda case began with a rape charge in Phoenix in 1963. Three years later, on June 13, 1966, the high court issued its ruling, setting aside a conviction because the accused was not advised of his rights. Critics complained that the case handcuffed police and stacked the legal deck in favor of criminals, but it did not end confessions.

Legal experts offer a variety of explanations for this. People want to confess because they can't bear the guilt. Others just can’t help themselves — as comedian Ron White put it: “I had the right to remain silent … but I didn’t have the ability.”

Although most people associate Miranda warnings with protecting the innocent, Ernesto Miranda was convicted in a second trial and served about a decade at Arizona State Prison in Florence for his crime. He achieved some measure of fame for his role in the court ruling, a role that had almost as much to do with where his name fell in the alphabet as legal specifics of the case.

The story begins, and ends, with a routine case in Phoenix.

The detective

Detective Carroll Cooley didn’t have much to go on. He had a victim, an 18-year-old woman, bound and raped on a March night in Phoenix. He had a description of the assailant’s car. It was green. Or maybe gray. The victim described the car’s interior — the dark upholstery with stripes, the smell of turpentine — but Cooley quickly figured out that she couldn’t really tell one car from another.

About a week later, the victim’s cousin (one report refers to him as a brother-in-law) spotted a similar car cruising the neighborhood. He got a partial license plate number, DFL-something. The cousin knew a little more about cars than the victim and said it looked like a ’53 Packard.

Cooley ran the plate and found there were about a thousand DFL-somethings in the state. In those days, the police wrote things down in pencil and government agencies sorted paperwork by hand, Cooley said during a recent speaking engagement in Phoenix. Cooley had been a detective for only about a year and had been in the crimes against people division for only about a month, but he was about to get a lead in the case.

One of the license plates was attached to a ’53 Packard, which led him to Miranda, a man with a record, including arrests in connection with armed robbery and attempted rape.

A woman named Twila Hoffman answered the door, holding a baby. There were two children at the hem of her skirt, Cooley said during the speaking engagement. She woke Miranda, who came to the door shirtless and foggy and asking what he could do for the detectives.

“We’d rather not talk to you about this in front of your family,” Cooley said. Miranda got dressed, and police drove him to the station. They didn’t cuff him because he was not under arrest, Cooley said. They didn’t tell him he had a right to remain silent or to have an attorney. The law did not require that.

The Phoenix Police Department had several other unsolved crimes with suspects that fit Miranda’s description. A sergeant handed Cooley two of the cases and said to ask about them as well.

Police brought in the rape victim, Patricia Weir (a pseudonym used throughout the case), and a robbery victim named Barbara McDaniel. Both picked Miranda out of a lineup, which would lead prosecutors to file two separate charges. The whole process took about two hours.

But victims tend to say it looks like the guy. They rarely say that it is the guy, Cooley said. He thought Miranda was the person he was looking for, but he didn’t have much of a case.

Miranda asked how he had done, and Cooley told Miranda he had been picked out of the lineup, which was true. Then he asked Miranda to write a confession. Some have suggested that Miranda was harassed, said Cooley.

“They accuse me of telling him what to write, which is absolute BS,” Cooley said in an interview.

Miranda had only an eighth-grade education, but he could write. And so in neat, cursive handwriting began one of the most important Supreme Court cases in history.

“Seen a girl walking up street … ”

Ernesto Miranda

Ernesto Arturo Miranda is sometimes described as an indigent Mexican, but he was born in Mesa. (Some reports say he was born in 1940, but his tombstone says he was born in 1941.)

“A problem student in school, Ernie barely completed the eighth grade in 1955, a year that marked an important milestone in the young Miranda’s life: his first felony arrest,” Barry G. Silverman wrote in a 2006 story in Phoenix magazine.

After his next arrest, burglary, just a few months later, he was sent to the Arizona State Industrial School for Boys at Fort Grant. Not two months after leaving Fort Grant he was charged with attempted rape and assault. California police later charged him with window peeping and armed robbery.

He continued to rack up charges. In 1958, he enlisted in the Army, where he “lasted only 15 months,” Silverman wrote. He went AWOL, got busted on another window peeping charge and wound up "doing hard labor in the Post Stockade at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.”

He traveled: Kentucky, Arizona, California, Tennessee. There was a vagrancy charge in Texas. He stole a car in Alabama and drove it to Nashville, where he was charged with driving a stolen vehicle across state lines. That could have meant hard time, but he was sentenced to a year and a day at a medium-security federal reformatory in Ohio. He asked for a transfer to California to be closer to his family. Along the way, he was temporarily moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Silverman, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, interviewed Miranda several times and wrote an unpublished biography on the young inmate. In one of the meetings, Miranda said that he would have preferred to remain at Leavenworth because it had a better library, but he was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Lompoc, Calif.

“On the day before he was released, some friends visited Miranda," Silverman wrote. "As he waved goodbye to them, the electric gate slammed shut, chopping off the top one-third of his right index finger.”

He met Twila Hoffman soon after he got out of prison. He struggled to hold down a job at first, but settled down and became a model employee, Silverman wrote, trying to provide for his family. Hoffman had two children when they met, and the couple had a baby daughter, Cleopatra, as well. But when Miranda was sentenced in two separate trials to 20 to 30 years for robbery, rape and kidnapping, he had run out of second chances.

Even winning a famous Supreme Court case couldn’t keep Miranda out of prison. He remained in prison on the robbery charge. When he was retried on the rape charge that had been overturned in the famous decision, prosecutors brought in Hoffman as a witness. As it turned out, Miranda had confessed to her, too, and her testimony was allowed in a second trial. Miranda was convicted again.

John J. Flynn, the attorney who argued Miranda’s case before the Supreme Court, said in a newspaper article that "he wrote me a letter in which he stated he was ‘proud of the decision and proud of being part of it and of the name Miranda.’ ”

Silverman wrote that one evening, “while the inmates of Cellblock 2 were watching a police show, they heard a cop order his partner to read the ‘Miranda rights’ to a just-arrested car thief. Ernie told me that the entire cellblock burst into spontaneous applause.” Although “something of a celebrity in prison,” he was not “universally liked. … Rapists and child molesters often are singled out for ridicule and harassment, or worse.”

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Miranda's fame was based on what may have been "the luckiest break he ever had," Silverman writes. The Supreme Court reviewed 150 cases and selected a handful that examined when the right to counsel begins. Miranda’s headed the list because “his name came alphabetically ahead of his co-petitioners before the Supreme Court: Roy Stewart, Carl Westover and Michael Vignera.”

He was paroled in 1972 and took advantage of his celebrity and his freedom by selling autographed “Miranda warning” cards for a buck and a half.

“He would get them from the police officers. He would stop them on the street and say 'I’m Ernesto Miranda from the Miranda case,' ” Cooley said. At least, Cooley assumes that’s how he got them. Cooley never saw Miranda on the streets after his release from prison. Cooley was shot in the head while pursuing a robbery suspect about five months after he made the arrest that launched the famous case. He was later promoted to captain.

“If he had asked me for a card I would have given him one, and I probably would have asked him to sign one for me,” Cooley said.

A bar fight in the 'Deuce'

Miranda was paroled in December 1972. A parole violation sent him back to prison, but he was back on the streets of Phoenix by December 1975. About a month after his release he drove his brother’s Thunderbird downtown to the “Deuce,” a shabby neighborhood of bars, flophouses and warehouses along Second Street.

He stepped into La Ampola, where he played cards and drank beer most of the afternoon with a man named Fernando Rodriguez and a man known as Moreno.

A drunk was passed out on one end of the bar. The bartender tried to wake him by pouring cold beer and water over him, but he slept on. A light hung above the pool tables. There was a beer sign at the rear of the bar, a clock, a well-lit jukebox, and enough light for witnesses to see what happened, according to police reports.

The card game ended around dusk with harsh words and a flurry of punches. Accounts vary on what happened and who started the fight. Several witnesses had been drinking — one told police he had downed a fifth of wine before entering the bar. Most accounts agree that it was over a couple of bucks, maybe three.

One witness said that Rodriguez threw a few bucks at Miranda and said, “There’s your money,” and Miranda said, “No, it won’t be done that way.”

Everyone agrees that the fight ended quickly. Miranda knocked down Moreno with one punch and started pummeling Rodriguez, the bartender screaming for them to stop or she would call the police. So they did. Miranda went into the restroom to clean the blood off his hands. When he came out, Rodriguez was gone and Moreno had a knife. Cooley said Rodriguez had taken it from the sleeping drunk and given it to Moreno.

Moreno taunted Miranda in Spanish. Miranda tried to take the knife. There was a scuffle, the knife flashed a couple of times and Miranda dropped to the floor by one of the pool tables. Moreno ran out the door.

The jukebox had stopped playing and the bar was quiet. The bartender told someone to run down to the fire station. She had already grabbed a couple of dimes while the fight was going on and she called police.

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Miranda was unresponsive when paramedics arrived, and he “died on a dirty barroom floor,” Cooley said. By this time, Cooley was a captain and was not on the street the day Miranda died.

“So many officers just couldn’t wait to call me or come by and tell me that this guy had met his demise. I was never happy about it. I was never happy that he got killed,” Cooley said.

The police questioned Rodriguez and read him his rights, in English and Spanish.

They found Moreno at the Salt River Hotel. They read him his rights, too, questioned him and photographed him, but he denied that he was in the bar the night of the killing.

Later, they identified him as Eseziquel Moreno Perez (sometimes spelled Eseziquiel, or Esequelle, in police reports). When they showed a photo of Moreno to the bartender, she said he was the one who had stabbed Miranda. But by this time, he had already left the hotel.

They never found him.

“He’s still out there in the wind somewhere ...,” Cooley said. "He still out there, if he's alive."

Epilogue

In 1965, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney brought the Miranda case to the attention of Lewis, Roca, Scoville, Beauchamp and Linton, a Phoenix law firm. John J. Flynn, the firm’s “well-known courtroom warrior,” argued the case, Gary L. Stuart writes in "Miranda: The Story of America's Right to Remain Silent." John P. Frank, the firm’s “nationally renowned constitutional scholar,” and others, helped prepare the case. The Miranda case created some controversy within the firm, Paul G. Ulrich writes in Phoenix Law Review, in part because some attorneys "and their civil clients simply were unhappy with the firm representing a high-profile, and obviously guilty criminal defendant." The firm is now known as Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie.

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Twila Hoffman, Miranda's common law wife, distanced herself from Miranda while he served time. She changed her name and resisted his attempts to see his daughter. In 1973, Flynn wrote her a letter on Miranda’s behalf, asking for visitation rights. The response came quickly, scrawled in Magic Marker: “NO,” and the following typewritten passage: “This letter is very close to harassment. Any other correspondence as to this matter will result in Legal action. Twila Mae Spears."

Robert Corbin was Maricopa County attorney when Miranda was first prosecuted. When Miranda’s case was overturned in the Supreme Court, he successfully prosecuted Miranda in the second trial, bringing Hoffman as a witness, in spite of Flynn’s objections. Corbin was later elected Arizona attorney general.

Carroll Cooley has retired from the Phoenix Police Department and occasionally speaks on the Miranda case. He has also been known to autograph Miranda warning cards, though he charges nothing for them.

Landmark rulings on due process

The Miranda case did not occur in a vacuum.

The high court had touched on the right to counsel and a fair trial under the 14th Amendment's due process clause in Powell vs. Alabama. But subsequent cases provided little clarity. A few decades later, the court issued three landmark rulings on due process.

In Gideon vs. Wainwright, a breaking-and-entering suspect named Clarence Earl Gideon asked for an attorney but was told one would be provided only in capital cases. Gideon sent handwritten petitions from prison requesting an appeal, ultimately sending one to the high court, which took up the case. The court ruled that the right to counsel is a fundamental right essential to a fair trial under the Sixth and 14th amendments.

In Escobedo vs. Illinois, the defendant also asked for a lawyer. The police denied his request, even though the lawyer was in the police station, asking to see his client. The court ruled in 1964 that the police had violated the Sixth Amendment, which gives all Americans the right to legal counsel.

In Miranda, Flynn argued — and the court ruled — that defendants not only had a right to counsel, but that they also had a right to remain silent and not incriminate themselves under the Fifth Amendment, Gary Stuart writes in “Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent.”

“Arguably, no other cases in American legal history had a greater political impact than the trilogy of Gideon, Escobedo, and Miranda," Stuart writes.

Documents relating to the Miranda case are on file at the Arizona State Archives.