Opinion Editorial | |
| Friday, August 21, 1998 | |
Three Decades of Miranda:A Durable Avenue to Escape JusticePete du PontFormer Governor of Delaware, is Policy Chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis |
Remember Ernesto Miranda? A 23-year-old 9th grade dropout with an arrest
record, the Phoenix police picked him up back in 1963 on suspicion of kidnapping
and raping an 18-year-old girl. After two hours of questioning, he voluntarily
confessed to the crime. Miranda appealed his conviction and it reached the Supreme Court, then
led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. In a landmark decision, the 5-4 majority
overturned Miranda's conviction on the grounds that police had not followed
its newly-created rules on questioning criminal suspects. Despite his victory, things did not go swimmingly for Miranda thereafter.
Retried, he was convicted without a confession because a former girlfriend
testified that he had told her about the kidnapping and rape. Paroled in
1972, Miranda was stabbed to death in a bar at age 34. Ironically, the
police unsuccessfully questioned a suspect in the stabbing and he was released.
No one was ever charged. During the 1960s, the Supreme Court revolutionized the criminal justice
system by carving out new rights for criminal suspects. Chief among them,
as virtually every viewer of TV cop shows knows, were so-called Miranda
rights. "You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can
be used against you in a court of law, you are entitled to an attorney,
if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you without charge."
The warning and waiver process for these rights was an extraordinary
stretch of our Constitution's 5th amendment, which reads in part, "No
person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against
himself." The Court admitted that there was no "overt physical
coercion or patent psychological ploys" and that Miranda's confession
was voluntary "in traditional terms." The reasoning was pathetic,
but as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong explain in their book The Brethren,
Warren rarely wrote his opinions; instead, he just told his law clerks how
he wanted the cases to turn out. Dissenting Justice Byron White angrily warned that "the Court's
new code would markedly decrease the number of confessions...To require
an express waiver by the suspect and an end to questioning whenever he demurs
must heavily handicap questioning." Explains Wisconsin judge Ralph
Adam Fine, Miranda's rationale was that it is bad for the police
to elicit perfectly voluntary statements "unless they first do all
they can to discourage the statements from being made." Has Miranda thwarted police efforts to solve crimes? Logic says
yes, and the evidence confirms it according to a careful new study by Paul
Cassell and Richard Fowles, both of the University of Utah, and recently
published by the National Center for Policy Analysis. They find that
Clearance rates fell sharply all over the country immediately after Miranda,
especially for crimes perpetrated by experienced criminals, and have remained
at these low levels ever since. The authors conclude, "Miranda
is marked as perhaps the single most damaging blow inflicted on the nation's
ability to fight crime in the last half century. It is time to consider
removing those shackles and regulating police interrogation in less costly
ways." Videotaping police interrogations, for example, can protect
the rights of the accused, insure that confessions are voluntary and still
promote efficient enforcement of criminal law. Language in the Miranda decision, necessary to get the fifth vote
back in 1966, gave Congress the green light to pass legislation to overrule
Miranda for federal crimes, letting prosecutors introduce any voluntary
confession into court-whether or not law enforcement followed Miranda.
In 1968, Congress passed such a law, little noticed at the time. After
languishing for years, federal prosecutors recently employed the law, but
the Clinton Justice Department put a stop to their efforts, claiming that
the statute is unconstitutional, an impossible position to sustain. And there it sits. A poorly thought-out ruling, hampering the conviction
of criminals. There are better ways to insure due process for the accused.
Miranda is not one of them. # # # # # The National Center for Policy Analysis is a public policy
research institute founded in 1983 and internationally known for its studies
on public policy issues. The NCPA is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with
an office in Washington, D.C. For more information: Jil Hicks, Dallas, TX 972/386-6272 Home | Support Us | All Issues | Social Security Debate Central | Contact Us |