Supreme Court to Reconsider Miranda Rights

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will revisit one of the best known legal battles of the 1960s and decide again whether the Constitution requires that crime suspects be warned of their rights before they are questioned by police.

The issue is back before the court, thanks to a long-forgotten provision in a 1968 anti-crime bill and a determined campaign by a conservative law professor from Utah. A case to be heard in March asks the court to decide whether the Miranda warnings must be given to suspects about to undergo questioning or whether they are merely suggestions that need not always be followed.

The 5-4 Miranda decision was the most controversial crime ruling during the court’s most liberal era.

Chief Justice Earl Warren said in the Miranda ruling in 1966 that police should give suspects this warning: “You have a right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.”

Its champions praised the “Miranda warnings” and said that they would help shield ordinary citizens from heavy-handed police tactics, including long interrogations behind closed doors.

Critics, including police, prosecutors and conservative politicians, maintained that the guilty would go free because of the warnings. They feared that police would be stymied because suspects would refuse to talk.

If the warnings are just guidelines, police could ignore them and confessions could be upheld even when suspects are not told that they have a right, for example, to consult lawyers.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has long made clear his disdain for the Miranda decision, saying that it goes far beyond what the Constitution requires. Justice Antonin Scalia, in recent opinions, has encouraged lawyers to attack the Miranda rule.

But some legal experts doubt that Rehnquist will persuade a majority of the court to overturn it.

“Scalia and [Justice Clarence] Thomas will go with the chief justice but I’m confident the majority of the court will uphold it. They don’t want to go back on 33 years of precedent,” said George Washington University Law Professor Stephen A. Saltzburg.

“The police are happy with Miranda because it is simple and easy. And most people waive their rights anyway,” he said.

The court, however, will go back 31 years to the summer of 1968, two years after the landmark decision.

Responding to urban riots and rising crime rates, Congress passed the broad Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. One provision said confessions that are “given voluntarily” can be used in federal courts, even if the suspect is not warned of his rights as required by the Miranda decision.

Conservative lawmakers made clear that they were determined to overthrow the 1966 ruling. Moreover, they said, the rule for generations past had been that confessions, if voluntary, could be used.

But this provision was ignored for three decades. Under presidents from Richard M. Nixon to Bill Clinton, top federal prosecutors assumed that the “voluntary confession” rule was unconstitutional. After all, Chief Justice Warren’s opinion in the Miranda case said that the warnings were needed to protect the right against self-incrimination found in the 5th Amendment.

A few conservative activists never gave up, however.

As a young lawyer in the Ronald Reagan administration and former clerk for then-Judge Scalia, Paul G. Cassell favored a direct attack on the Miranda ruling.

Calling Miranda “the worst thing that has happened to the criminal justice system in the last half-century,” Cassell has said that tens of thousands of criminals go free each year because of the ruling.

Cassell continued his anti-Miranda work while teaching law at the University of Utah. Last year he achieved a breakthrough in a friendly forum, the conservative U.S. court of appeals in Richmond, Va. In an unusual move, the judges there allowed him to intervene in a pending bank robbery case.

The case arose when Charles Dickerson, a Maryland man, was accused of being the getaway driver in a bank robbery. He denied the charge but, under questioning by FBI agents, said that he had driven a friend to and from Alexandria, Va., on the day of a bank holdup there.

However, a judge ruled that prosecutors could not use some of Dickerson’s comments during his trial because the agents had not warned him of his Miranda rights before questioning him.

In an appeal, Justice Department prosecutors said the judge was wrong. Agents had warned Dickerson earlier, they said.

Cassell, acting as a friend of the court, was given five minutes to argue that it did not matter. The Miranda rule was superseded by the 1968 law, he said.

In a surprising 2-1 ruling, the appeals court agreed and said that the Miranda decision merely set guidelines for police, not a rule mandated by the Constitution.

“Congress has the power to overrule judicially created rules of evidence that are not required by the Constitution,” wrote Judge Karen Williams for the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. “As a consequence, we hold that the admissibility of confessions in federal court is governed by Section 3501 [the provision in the 1968 law,] rather than the judicially created rule of Miranda.”

The Supreme Court had little choice but to take up the case (Dickerson vs. United States, 99-5525). Clinton administration lawyers already have said that they will defend the Miranda rule. University of Chicago Law Professor Stephen Schulhofer has battled with Cassell in academic debates over the impact of the Miranda rule. “Miranda was a very controversial opinion when it came down but it has worked remarkably well in practice,” he said.

A ruling is expected by July.