The U. S. Supreme Court has agreed to review its Miranda Rights decision still again. This time, the question is whether an incomplete Miranda warning is sufficient. Although it will afford the court another opportunity to overturn the much maligned, and misunderstood, holding, most veteran court watchers doubt that it will do. The reason? Over the past 37 years the rule has been so emasculated by, first, the Berger Court, and, now, the Rehnquist Court, that it has become an anarchism and no longer relevant to most criminal cases.
Miranda was originally predicated on the common sense notion that you cannot assert your basic constitutional rights if you do not know what they are and that the police ought not be permitted to use your lack of knowledge to deny you your fundamental rights.
In the mind of the Warren Court, that authored the rule, the concept of fundamental fairness, embodied in the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel, required that before undertaking to question you in custody, the police were obliged to advise you of your basic right to remain silent; that anything you said to them could, and would, be used against you in court; of your right to have an attorney present during questioning; and, if you could not afford a lawyer, to have one appointed for you.
The very idea that ordinary people like you and me - and most especially poor, less educated, people - were entitled to actually be told what their basis rights were, and given an opportunity to exercise those rights, was extremely controversial and brought forth dire predictions that law enforcement would be hamstrung and crime would run rampant if the police, themselves, were actually required to obey the constitution they had sworn to uphold.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Miranda Rule never precluded police from arresting an accused, who had not been first advised of their rights, neither has it ever prevented police from questioning an accused who was not in custody, nor prevented the questioning of an accused who was in custody but who knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily consented to questioning after being advised of their Miranda Rights.
At its high-water mark, the Miranda Rule briefly applied as well to those who, while not formally in custody, were nevertheless "suspects" or the "target of police investigation". However, over the years increasingly conservative supreme courts have riddled the rule with exceptions, by progressively narrowing the definition of "custodial interrogation", while increasing the number of exceptions and instances of waivers, to the point that, today, the rule is honored more by its exceptions than by its application.
Except for occasional cases of gross abuse, the rule presently survives as a somewhat archaic litany from a bygone era and has little practical effect in most criminal cases where, where short of physical abuse, the police are generally as free to question today as they were in pre-Miranda times.
Unless the court should choose to do so for purely ideological reasons, there is little need for it to formally overturn the Miranda case. It died long ago.
4/22/03