"Miranda" update

The U.S. Supreme Court last Monday held that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, the Associated Press reported yesterday morning, a decision Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, said turns defendants' rights "upside down." [Berghuis v. Thompkins, 08-1470 ]

A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, but the Court has now added in the 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent in order to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer. The suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Michigan, saying little, occasionally answering "yes," "no,""I don't know," nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses, the AP article recounts. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for "shooting that boy down," Thompkins said, "Yes."

He appealed his conviction, saying that he had invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.

The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and threw out his confession and conviction.

The Supreme Court, however, citing Davis v. United States, held that "Thompkins' silence during interrogation did not invoke his right to remain silent. A suspect’s Miranda right to counsel must be invoked ‘unambiguously’….. There is no principled reason to adopt different standards for determining when an accused has invoked the Miranda right to remain silent and the Miranda right to counsel at issue in Davis."

Justice Sotomayor in her dissent, though, wrote, "The Court concludes that when mirandawarnings have been given and understood, "an accused’s uncoerced statement establishes an implied waiver of the right to remain silent… More broadly still, the Court states that, "[a]s a general proposition, the law can presume that an individual who, with a full understanding of his or her rights, acts in a manner inconsistent with their exercise has made a deliberate choice to relinquish the protection those rights afford.

"These principles flatly contradict our long-standing views that “a valid waiver will not be presumed . . . simply from the fact that a confession was in fact eventually obtained," Miranda, 384 U. S., at 475, and that “[t]he courts must presume that a defendant did not waive his rights,” Butler, 441 U. S., at 373. Indeed, we have in the past summarily reversed a state-court decision that inverted Miranda’s anti-waiver presumption, characterizing the error as “readily apparent.” Tague, 444 U. S., at 470–471. At best, the Court today creates an unworkable and conflicting set of presumptions that will undermine Miranda’s goal of providing “concrete constitutional guidelines for law enforcement agencies and courts to follow.." At worst, it overrules sub silentio an essential aspect of the protections Miranda has long provided for the constitutional guarantee against self incrimination."

A New York Times article yesterday also reported that Monday’s decision followed two in February that also narrowed and clarified the scope of the Miranda decision: Florida v. Powell, 08-1175, allowed police officers to vary the wording of the warning, while Maryland v. Shatzer, 08-680 allowed second rounds of questioning of suspects who had invoked their rights as long as after two weeks had passed after their release from custody.


The Washington Post, Law.com, and Wall Street Journal all have more information