Supreme Court Decision on Miranda Rights

 

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Carol Forsloff --Most people are aware of the Miranda Rights, the law allowing people their "right to remain silent"  But most don't know they have to ask for it.  How that might affect the less able is the question. 

 Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist once declared Miranda warnings are so "embedded in routine police practice" that they have become "part of our national culture."   So how will Americans learn that they have to ask for the right to remain silent by speaking, they can't just sit there and be silent.  Will that difference show up in a television drama since the recent Supreme Court ruling which holds that in order to maintain "the right to remain silent," a suspect must affirmatively invoke it? 

 

The whole thing came about because of a suspect by the name of Van Chester Thompkins.  He was arrested, charged with murder and read his Miranda rights, which said he had the right to remain silent.

 

Thompkins was then questioned for three hours and remain silent except to say his chair was hard and to ask for a peppermint.   Nevertheless, when interrogators continued asking questions, even though Thompkins refused to sign a statement indicating his right to remain silent, Thompkins gave minimal answers to other questions.  Those questions were "Do you believe in God" to which he answered "yes" and "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?" to which Thompkins also answered yes. 

 Prosecutors used these monosyllabic answers Thompkins gave as grounds to convict him of murder.. Thompkins then filed a suit alleging that his Miranda rights had been violated by the continued interrogation after he had invoked his right to remain silent by remaining silent. 

 

When the Supreme Court looked at this case, it did more than just uphold the ordinary interpretation of Miranda that honors one's "right to remain silent" by remaining silent.  It ruled in Berghuis v. Thompkins that remaining silent or failing to cooperate with an interrogation will no longer suffice as an invocation of Miranda rights. Instead, a suspect may now only be assured that his or her Miranda rights will be respected by affirmatively stating that he or she wishes to invoke them.

 

In other words a suspect has to know he or she must ask for those Miranda rights before they are given. 

This could pose problems for suspects who don't follow Supreme Court rulings. 

 

Justice Sonia Sotomayoropposed the ruling and was joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Stevens.  They wrote the decision "turns Miranda upside down. Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent, which, counter intuitively, requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results... find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded."

 

The opposing judges declared that the inconsistency of the Thompkins holding will undoubtedly be confusing and problematic for suspects who are unaware of it. 

 

Lawyers explain this further, by pointing out absent a clear and explicit invocation of one's Miranda rights will leave suspects vulnerable to endless interrogations.

 

The original Miranda decision indicates that a lengthy interrogation should ordinarily be interpreted as coercive and thus forbidden.  In this case the Court gives no guidance in Thompkins as to how long an interrogation can go on of a silent suspect who has not invoked Miranda.   In Thompkins, three hours was not considered long enough to be considered coercive.  Nor was the fact that the line of questioning  got Thompkins to speak after hours of silence was about his faith. 

The end result of this, attorneys say, is that many uninformed suspects will now likely have to endure lengthy interrogations and to their confusion why their silence has not led to the end of the questioning. 

 

The second problem attorneys say may likely occur is that suspects must specifically invoke their Miranda Rights.  In other words, they must know they have these rights and then ask for them.  Failure to do so will allow them to be manipulated.  This imperils the suspects right to avoid self-incrimination.

 

There are populations that will be specifically impacted by this decision involving what must be known by suspects before or during interrogation.  These populations include non-English speakers, juveniles, the illiterate and the developmentally disabled. 

 

This Supreme Court decision has not been covered in depth in the mainstream press nor has there been a television show that talks about these in the popular ways folks see the rights discussed as just "you have the right to remain silent."