Ernesto Miranda, looking at the view on the roof of a Phoenix office building, is seen March 30, 1973, months after being paroled from prison. | AP Photo Supreme Court issues Miranda ruling, June 13, 1966

On this day in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Miranda v. Arizona that established the principle that all criminal suspects must be advised of their rights before being interrogated.

Miranda rights are now embedded in standard police procedure. The arresting officer must state: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you.” For many defendants, those words mean more than the cliché they have become in police television dramas.


Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former prosecutor, delivered the majority opinion of the court. In his dissent, Justice Byron White argued that the court had no “factual and textual bases" in the U.S. Constitution or in previous opinions of the court for the new rule.

“I have no desire whatsoever to share the responsibility for any such impact on the present criminal process,” White wrote. “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 ... ”

The Miranda decision is rooted in an event that occurred on March 2, 1963, when an 18-year-old Phoenix woman told police she had been abducted, driven into the desert and raped.

Detectives questioning her story gave her a polygraph test. The results proved inconclusive. However, tracking the license-plate number of a car that resembled that of her attacker’s brought police to Ernesto Miranda, who had a prior arrest record as a peeping Tom. Although the victim did not identify Miranda in a lineup, he was interrogated. Police officers left the interrogation room with a confession that Miranda later recanted. He was never told that he didn’t have to say anything at all.

His brief confession differed from the victim’s account of the crime. Miranda’s appointed defense attorney didn’t call any witnesses at the ensuing trial. Miranda was convicted. While Miranda was imprisoned, the American Civil Liberties Union took up his appeal, claiming the confession was false and coerced.



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After the Supreme Court overturned his conviction, Miranda was retried and convicted in October 1966. He remained in prison until 1972. Miranda died in 1976 after being stabbed to death in the men’s room of a bar after a poker game. A suspect was arrested, but, unlike Miranda, he exercised his right to remain silent. With no evidence against him, he was released.

In 2010, in Berghuis v. Thompkins, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, ruled that criminal suspects who are aware of their rights to remain silent and to access to an attorney, but nevertheless choose not to “unambiguously” invoke them, could find subsequent voluntary statements treated as an implied waiver of their rights.

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM

