Reaffirm Miranda Rights

Forty years ago, Arizona police arrested Phoenix warehouse worker Ernesto Miranda on rape charges, took him into an interrogation room and shut the door. When they emerged two hours later, officers held Miranda’s signed confession. What they told Miranda and whether they threatened him or roughed him up is not entirely clear. They definitely didn’t tell him that the Constitution gave him the right not to incriminate himself. They didn’t tell him, before he confessed, that he was entitled to an attorney or that anything he told them could be used against him.

Four years ago, Tulare police arrested Kenneth Ray Neal, then 18, for the strangulation of Donald Collins, with whom Neal had lived. Detectives ushered Neal into a cell at the Porterville station. Nine times over the next 24 hours, Neal asked for a lawyer. Not only did detectives deliberately ignore him, they locked him up overnight without food, water or a toilet until he confessed.

Neal’s treatment seems far more egregious than Miranda’s, especially occurring decades after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Miranda’s conviction and required police to formally warn suspects that they could remain silent and have a lawyer present. One detective testified that he, like officers in other California police departments, was taught to often ignore suspects’ requests and continue questioning anyway.

The California Supreme Court, in a blistering ruling Monday, overturned Neal’s murder conviction and left no doubt that such an “unconscionable” practice must end. Justice Marvin R. Baxter wrote: “Our community must never be subjected to cynical efforts by police agencies ... to exploit perceived legal loopholes by encouraging improper interrogation tactics.”

Even though the Miranda limit on questioning has never been absolute, many police and prosecutors have long chaffed under it and have mounted direct challenges to the precedent. Monday’s state court ruling is a forceful contrast to the current U.S. Supreme Court’s willingness to condone outrageous departures from Miranda.

In May, for instance, the federal high court ruled that police officers who shot an Oxnard man several times did not violate his right against self-incrimination when they failed to warn him of his rights and instead tried to badger the severely wounded man into confessing to a crime both before and while emergency room doctors staunched his bleeding.

Next term, the U.S. Supreme Court considers three Miranda challenges, including a Missouri case testing whether police can deliberately violate the right to remain silent, as they did in the Neal case. The California decision should at least be part of the justices’ summer reading.