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Supreme Court revisits Miranda warnings
BY MELISSA RUSSANO AND MARGARET BULL
KOVERA, PHD
Florida International University
The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to
review whether issuing Miranda warnings to criminal suspects
is constitutionally required--a review that could raise
empirical questions of interest to research psychologists.
Before 1966, decisions regarding the
admissibility of confessions were based on the due process
voluntariness test: Judges examined the "totality of the
circumstances" surrounding the confession to determine whether
it was voluntary or coerced. Impermissible methods of police
coercion might include threatening physical harm or harsher
sentencing, deceiving the suspect or promising leniency.
That changed with Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S.
436 (1966), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to
protect against the inherent coerciveness of custodial police
interrogations, the police must inform suspects about their
constitutional rights to avoid self-incrimination and to be
appointed and consult an attorney. For self-incriminating
statements to be admissible at trial, suspects must
voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently waive these rights
before they confess. In addition, the Miranda decision shifted
the standard by which the admissibility of confession evidence
is judged from a case-by-case analysis of voluntariness to the
blanket exclusion of Miranda-violated confessions.
The Court based its ruling in Miranda on the
assumption that all police interrogations are inherently
coercive because police routinely use coercive methods, even
if they do not rise to the level of deception and trickery.
Indeed, researchers have established that a number of police
techniques create a coercive environment such that even
innocent persons may be compelled to confess to crimes they
did not commit (Kassin & McNall, 1991; Wakefield &
Underwager, 1998). Although Miranda was developed to correct
for these coercive practices, psychologists have demonstrated
that suspects may have difficulty comprehending the Miranda
rights that are read to them (Grisso, 1981). If suspects do
not understand Miranda warnings, how can these warnings
protect suspects from the coerciveness of police
interrogations?
Two years after the Miranda ruling, Congress
passed Title 18 Statute 3501, which appeared to override
Miranda and return to the voluntariness standard. The statute
states that as long as the confession is voluntary under the
due process voluntariness test, the confession is admissible
even if it was obtained before the subject was given Miranda
warnings. Courts have willfully ignored the statute for the
past 30 years, using Miranda as the predominating rule for
judging voluntariness.
A new case
The Supreme Court recently agreed to review
the proper test for judging the voluntariness of a confession
in U.S. v. Dickerson, Charles T., 166 F.3d 667; 1999 U.S. App.
LEXIS 1741. In this case, Dickerson confessed to committing an
armed robbery of an Arlington, Va., bank. He later claimed
that he had not been warned of his Miranda rights before his
confession and moved to suppress his confession. The state
argued that even if Dickerson had not been given his Miranda
warnings until after his confession, the confession was still
admissible under Statute 3501. The district court disagreed
and suppressed the confession on the grounds that it was in
technical violation of Miranda. However, the appeals court
ruled that 3501 should have been used when judging the
admissibility of Dickerson's confession.
The Supreme Court now faces the task of
delineating the boundaries of Miranda and deciding whether
Miranda or Statute 3501 dictates the admissibility of
confession evidence. If the court decides that Miranda rights
are constitutionally protected, then Congress does not have
the power to pass a law to override it absent a constitutional
amendment. But, if Miranda is simply a prophylactic safeguard
that augments the buffer between the people and coercive state
action, Congress may pass laws that abridge or overrule
judicial decisions involving matters of procedural law.
Implications for psychologists
Miranda and Dickerson raise a number of
empirical questions that may be of interest to research
psychologists. Can a confession obtained after the issuing of
Miranda rights be considered any more voluntary than a
confession obtained before the issuing of Miranda rights? If
the Court decides that the issuing of Miranda rights is
unnecessary, what other methods can be developed to minimize
police coercion and to ensure that suspects offer voluntary
confessions? Do all suspects respond to Miranda warnings in
the same manner? Might guilty suspects or first-time offenders
waive their Miranda rights more often than innocent persons or
repeat offenders?
In addition to the number of research
questions Dickerson generates, the upcoming decision may
affect psychologists' roles in the courtroom. If the Court
decides that Statute 3501 dictates the admissibility of
confessions, the system presumably will return to a
case-by-case analysis of voluntariness. Accordingly,
psychologists may be asked to testify as expert witnesses on
subjects such as the coerciveness of police interrogations and
forced confessions or be asked to judge the voluntariness of
individual confessions.
"Judicial notebook" is an effort by the
Courtwatch Committee of APA's Div. 9, the Society for the
Psychological Study of Social Issues, to encourage involvement
by psychologists in judicial decision-making. |
