Miranda v. Arizona

One of the Supreme Court's most divisive cases under Chief Justice Earl Warren was Miranda v. Arizona of 1966. The 5–4 decision was written by Warren himself, a former prosecutor. The ruling barred police officers from coercing confessions from a suspect unless the suspect explicitly waived the rights to remain silent and to consult with an attorney. Two major presidential candidates challenged the ruling in 1968, but it has remained the law of the land.

Ernesto Miranda was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1941, received only an elementary-school education, and compiled a record of theft and sexual assault. Police arrested him in 1963 on suspicion of robbery, kidnapping, and rape. While in police custody, Miranda's victim identified him and he signed his name to a confession, but on no occasion did he speak to a lawyer while being held. Largely on the basis of the confession, Miranda was convicted and received a 20-year sentence. He appealed on the grounds that he did not understand his Fifth Amendment rights to refuse to incriminate himself and to have a lawyer present during questioning.

The Warren Court had already restricted police practices and enlarged the rights of the accused in Mapp v. Ohio in 1961 and Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963. But four of the justices dissented from the Miranda opinion and predicted dire consequences, such as thousands of new appeals from imprisoned convicts who would claim they had been coerced into confessing.

Typical of his jurisprudence, Warren's opinion clearly stated that forced confessions violated more than the constitution. The practice was immoral too. He cited precedents from English Common Law, including a 13th-century biblical commentary on the Book of Judges. Warren pointed out that the suspects least likely to know about their rights were poor, undereducated, or a member of a racial minority. The most famous section of the opinion spelled out the words police officers should use to inform suspects of their rights: that they are under arrest, that they have the right to remain silent, that if they cannot afford an attorney the court will appoint them one. Police officers began receiving cards with the new language printed on them. After his retrial, conviction, and prison term, Ernesto Miranda became notorious for selling the cards with his autograph.

Warren's new rules quickly became a political rallying cry for conservatives, especially during the urban riots and violent anti-war protests of 1968. Presidential hopefuls Richard Nixon—who, as a private lawyer, had argued and lost his only Supreme Court case before the Warren Court—and Alabama governor George Wallace lambasted the Miranda decision. Wallace fumed that violent crime victims would spend more days in the hospital than their assailants spent in jail, and that police officers rather than criminals would face trial. Nixon promised to bring law and order to the streets. Contrary to dire predictions, over the years the American public grew accustomed to hearing the Miranda warning, which millions of television viewers could easily recite as a staple of cop shows.