Anything you say...

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Up next: The World History Book.

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court case that gave Americans their so-called “Miranda Rights.”

That list of rights so frequently heard, but rarely taken advantage of.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: You don’t have to be a police officer to have the Miranda Rights memorized.

PSYCH: You have the right to remain silent.

BLUE BLOODS: Anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

BROOKLYN 99: You have the right to an attorney.

LAW & ORDER: If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you at no cost.

When officers make an arrest, they have to make sure a suspect understands these rights before they can start questioning them. It comes from a longstanding tradition of voluntary confessions.

GEORGE THOMAS: We can go all the way back to Roman law.

George Thomas is a law professor at Rutgers University.

THOMAS: Even then it was not permitted to use an involuntary confession in a criminal case.

They believed that any confession obtained through coercion, physical or psychological, may not be the truth.

But “coercion” is hard to define.

THOMAS: I mean, there are obvious cases. There's a Mississippi case from the 1930s where they actually tortured confessions out of these black suspects. That's easy. But as you get away from torture, and police, of course, learn to do very sort of tricky kinds of interrogations, it became very difficult to decide what really is involuntary.

So, between the late 1940s and 1966, the Supreme Court heard about one case a year questioning whether a tactic should be considered “coercive.” Things like physical abuse, non-stop interrogations lasting over 36 hours, and threatening a suspect’s family or friends.

Then, in 1966, the Court heard Miranda v. Arizona.

JOHN J FLYNN: This case concerned itself with the conviction of a defendant of two crimes of rape and kidnapping.

In 1963, Arizona police arrested Ernesto Miranda and interrogated him for two hours. He signed a written confession that prosecutors used to convict him. But Miranda said his confession was involuntary because he wasn’t informed of his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, or his Sixth Amendment right to an attorney.

So, Miranda’s case became one of four consolidated cases that attorney John Flynn brought to the Court.

JOHN J FLYNN: A person in Ernesto Miranda's position needs the benefit of counsel, and unless he is afforded that right to counsel, he simply has, in essence, no Fifth or Sixth Amendment right, and there is no due process of law being afforded to a man in Ernesto Miranda's position.

Eve Primus is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She says that around this time, the court was heading into what’s known as the “incorporation era.”

EVE PRIMUS: When the United States Supreme Court starts to say things like, "Oh, you know the First Amendment right to free speech? That applies to the states too."

So, the court was already considering how to apply the amendments broadly. And for this case, the court reviewed police manuals with interrogation tactics.

PRIMUS: There were analogies to like ‘you are a hunter,’ right, ‘pursuing your prey,’ and the entire goal of the interrogation was to get a confession. 

The Supreme Court was really bothered by this approach to interrogation because the entire point of it is to subject the will of the suspect to the examiner, to break them down until they say what the examiner wants to hear.

Not necessarily telling the truth.

So the court decided they needed to give at least some control back to the suspect.

PRIMUS: And that's where the Miranda warnings came in.

LAW AND ORDER: You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney, anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law.

With a 5-4 decision, they baked those words into our legal system and made them a cultural touchpoint.

LAW AND ORDER: Just come away with us. Don't make me have to cuff you and read you your rights in front of your kids.

SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO: You have the right to remain silent. 

The effects off the screen have been controversial.

PRIMUS: Having the Supreme Court come in and say, "this is inherently problematic and you have to do something to fix it" is symbolically really important.

Primus thinks police powers have largely grown since the 1966 ruling. But she says there’s still power in the police reminding themselves that offenders have rights and in a suspect having that information—even if most people don’t use it.

PRIMUS: Upwards of 80 or 90 percent of people waive their Miranda rights and agree to speak with the police.

There are differing views on why.

Professor Thomas thinks most suspects assume it makes them look guilty when they don’t speak to the police, and that they can fool them. 

On the other hand, Primus says it’s because there is still a power gap.

PRIMUS: If you are ever in an interrogation environment and you want the interrogation to stop, the law on that is really clear that you have to quite clearly and unambiguously say, “I want a lawyer.” If you say "Maybe I should talk to a lawyer. Would it be a good idea for me to speak to a lawyer?" That's not clear enough.

But as soon as a suspect says those magic words, police must stop the interrogation until the lawyer arrives.

Some of the four dissenters in the Miranda opinion said they legislated from the bench, while others said that not everyone who is taken into custody and questioned is in an inherently coercive environment. 

Nevertheless, subsequent courts have continued to uphold that ruling—even as they interpret police powers.

In 2000, the Court considered a Congressional law that sought to overturn Miranda. Thomas says Chief Justice William Rehnquist had wanted to overturn the ruling since he joined the bench. He thought it restricted law enforcement in a way that isn’t outlined in the Constitution. 

But ultimately, Rehnquist voted with the majority to uphold it. He seemed to think overturning it would have caused instability.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: The fact that our post Miranda cases have made exceptions from its rule does not demonstrate that Miranda was not a constitutional decision. These decisions illustrate the principle not that Miranda is not a constitutional rule, but that no constitutional rule is immutable.

That’s this week’s History Book. I’m Mary Muncy.

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