Legal Docket - Asserting Miranda rights

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday, May 23rd and you’re listening to The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

The current Supreme Court term ends next month and that means a slew of opinions will be handed down between now and then. Big issues like abortion, gun rights, and prayer still to be decided.

Last week, two opinions came down.

The first one is a win for a sitting United States senator. Ted Cruz of Texas challenged an aspect of the campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold. That law capped the amount of personal loan money candidates can reimburse themselves using funds collected after election day.

A 6-3 decision said that rule violates the right to free speech. But the liberal justices criticized the majority opinion—for in their view ignoring the intent of the law which is to curb corruption.

Over the years, a few other provisions of McCain-Feingold already have been struck down as unconstitutional.

REICHARD: The second decision concerns immigration. A 5-4 ruling says regular courts cannot review factual findings made by judges in immigration courts.

This is bad news for a man from India in the United States for 30 years under a work visa. He didn’t go through the formal inspection process when he arrived in 1992. And he checked a box on an application for a driver’s license in 2008 that said “US citizen” when he was not.

Those things triggered deportation proceedings. The majority justices found such facts are not reviewable by a court.

EICHER: Okay, on to oral arguments.

Hang on to your seats, though, because we will hit highlights in five cases today, but within our usual time constraints. We’re going to go fast, so here we go:

Dispute Number One relates to the 1966 Supreme Court decision that gave us what’s been known ever since as Miranda rights. That ruling required police to advise suspects of their right to remain silent while in police custody and to obtain a lawyer before they’re interrogated.

Let’s flash back to February 1966. Here’s lawyer John Flynn. He represented Ernesto Miranda:

FLYNN: I believe the record indicates that at no time during the interrogation and prior to his oral confession was he advised either of his rights to remain silent, his right to counsel, or of his right to consult with counsel; nor, indeed, was such the practice in Arizona at that time, as admitted by the officers in their testimony. The defendant was then asked to sign a confession, to which he agreed.

A split court agreed that procedural safeguards are necessary to protect Fifth Amendment rights; people should be advised of their rights in order to assert those rights.

Fast forward 56 years to the question before the high court now: Just how far does Miranda go?

The facts are straightforward. Terence Tekoh worked at a medical facility in Los Angeles. Police officer Carlos Vega arrested him on suspicion of sexual assault of a patient—but Officer Vega didn’t issue Tekoh his Miranda rights.

Later on, a jury acquitted Tekoh of sexual assault.

Case closed? Not quite.

Tekoh then sued Vega for that failure to issue Miranda rights to him.

But is that failure by itself a sufficient basis for a federal lawsuit?

EICHER: It is not—to hear the lawyer for the federal government argue. Have a listen to this exchange between Assistant to the Solicitor General Vivek Suri and a more skeptical Justice Clarence Thomas.

SURI: Miranda recognized a constitutional right, but it's a trial right concerning the exclusion of evidence at a criminal trial. It isn't a substantive right to receive the Miranda warnings themselves. A police officer who fails to provide the Miranda warnings accordingly doesn't himself violate the constitutional right, and he also isn't legally responsible for any violation that might occur later at the trial. The Ninth Circuit's contrary decision should be reversed.

THOMAS: What if the police officer purposely lies in order to convince the prosecutor to use the statement?

SURI: We would still say that there is no Miranda claim, but I have to be clear that that issue is not properly presented in this case.

REICHARD: What stood out to me in this and several other arguments this term are comments from the justices about the role of the Supreme Court.

Listen to Justice Elena Kagan address the attorney for the police officer. She refers to what Miranda and subsequent case law has come to mean to Americans.

KAGAN: …that it, you know, was sort of central to people's understanding of the law and that if you overturned it or undermined it or denigrated it, it would be -- you know, it had -- would have a kind of unsettling effect not only on people's understanding of the criminal justice system but on people's understanding of the Court itself and the legitimacy of the Court and the way the Court operates and the way the Court sticks to what it says, you know, not just in a kind of technical stare decisis sense but in a more profound sense about the Court as an institution and the role it plays in society.

Alright, cases two and three both involve questions of procedure.

In one case, a man convicted of drug and firearm offenses appealed and lost. Then he tried to have the sentence vacated on the basis that he had a lousy lawyer.

But the crux of this case is based upon whether the judge was lousy, too: specifically, a mistake by the judge who found that the man missed a filing deadline, but in fact he really didn’t miss it.

So now the question is whether the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow courts to fix that problem.

Sounds straightforward. But it isn’t.

Listen to Justice Amy Coney Barrett opine that maybe both sides have this wrong.

BARRETT: You have the difficulty of distinguishing between fact and law, and then you also have the difficulty in identifying whose error was it? I mean, I think the government makes a good point, that it can be difficult to figure out if a legal error was by the litigant or by the court. It could be categorized as the counsel’s error. It could be categorized as the court’s error.

Justice Stephen Breyer acknowledged human error.

BREYER: Look, the judges do make mistakes. Give them a quick chance to do it, even if it’s one of law. Call it to their attention. Six of one, half dozen of the other because we have problems both ways.

The other procedural dispute involves two companies fighting over alleged fraud in a business transaction. They’d each signed an arbitration agreement to settle problems before an arbitration board in Germany.

But before arbitration can proceed, one company seeks discovery, that is, relevant documents and testimony, and wants a federal district court to compel the other party to provide it.

The question is whether federal district courts even have authority to make such an order.

Justice Kagan doubted one side’s interpretation of the law:

KAGAN: I mean, it all depends, right? And I guess my broader question is, like, really, what can you take from this language? I'm all for, you know, being serious about language when there's something to be serious about, but I don't know…

On to our fourth argument, a case captioned United States v Washington.

This one asks how state laws around workers’ compensation apply when federal contractors are involved.

Here’s the situation. The Department of Energy oversees cleanup of a nuclear waste site in the state of Washington. It’s expected to take 60 years! Some of those doing the work are federal contractors.

An old state law presumes health problems like cancer and lung disease will occur as a result of doing this kind of work. The law says that’ll trigger workers’ compensation benefits. The federal government contests that aspect.

After the Supreme Court took the case, Washington state changed that law, so now there’s an additional question of whether the case is now moot.

This dispute involves a doctrine called intergovernmental immunity. That prevents the federal government and state governments from intruding on each other’s sovereignty.

Lawyer for the state of Washington argued all this doesn’t matter anymore because the new law resolves the old problems.

But Justice Breyer wasn’t so sure about that.

BREYER: …if it’s a real problem, then I can’t say it’s moot.

OK, fifth and final argument today, this one about Chapter 11 bankruptcy and quirky laws governing bankruptcy in Alabama and North Carolina.

Those two states oversee corporate bankruptcies by the Judicial Conference and leave the appointment of trustees to handle the cases to the bankruptcy judges.

That’s different from the rest of the country. The US Trustee’s Office oversees Chapter 11 proceedings for the 48 other states.

There’re reasons for that. Too in the weeds for our purposes here, so I’ll spare you.

This is the point, though: The law requires payment to Trustees to come from the debtors’ estate.

A few years ago, Congress raised those fees up to $250,000. But that fee increase didn’t apply to Alabama and North Carolina.

Chief Justice John Roberts:

ROBERTS: What’s the reason? Why are there two different systems?

Very good questions, and whatever answers, we have a split in the circuits over this—meaning different circuit courts of appeals have answered differently and the Supreme Court needs to resolve that split.

As for the two different systems, the issue involves the way the fee increase is paid for. Companies in Chapter 11 bankruptcy have to pay it, but because Alabama and North Carolina aren’t in the same system of oversight, the US Trustee’s Office has to pony up millions of dollars in refunds to debtors. And it doesn’t want to, as you might expect.

Trustees say that disparate effect violates the Uniformity Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The problem is the Constitution requires bankruptcy laws to be uniform across the country, while federal law permits these different oversight systems.

Next week, we’ll complete analysis of all oral arguments this term.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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