“You Have a Right to Remain Silent:” The Famous Miranda Decision
The Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona, decided on this day, is one of the most important –and controversial– decisions among many controversial decisions by the Warren Court (1953–1969).
Famously, the Court held that a person who was arrested and in custody had to be advised of his or her rights before any police questioning. Those rights include the right to remain silent, that anything he or she says can be used in court, a right to an attorney, and that one will be appointed if he or she cannot afford one (see the Miranda below).
One irony of the case was that the majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren (born March 19,1891) who had been a hard line law-and-order prosecutor in Alameda County (Oakland), California, in the 1930s. After he was elected governor of California in 1942 and immediately became a leading Republican possibility as a candidate to challenge President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a result, he began to rethink his political views and he increasingly saw racial injustice as paramount issue for the country. This was one of the reasons why he also wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, 1954 holding racially segregated schools unconstitutional.
The famous “Miranda Warning”: “. . . the following measures are required. He must be warned prior to any questioning that he has the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, that he has the right to the presence of an attorney, and that, if he cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for him prior to any questioning if he so desires.”
Learn more: Liva Baker, Miranda: Crime, Law, and Politics (1983)
Listen to the oral arguments in Miranda: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1965/1965_759
Learn more about police accountability: Samuel Walker and Carol Archbold, The New World of Police Accountability, 3rd ed. (2020)