BackStory; You Have The Right to Remain Silent: A History of the Miranda Warning

major funding for backstory is provided by anonymous donor the national endowment for the humanities the universe to virginia the joseph and robert horner memorial foundation and the author of fighting davis foundations welcome to back story the show and explains the history behind the headlines amazing collie i enjoyed freeman if you're new to the podcast or all historians each week we explore the history of the topic it's been in the news for our minds to show starts with a crime there had been a kidnapping armed robbery and rape of a young lady but a name or patricia this is carol cooley he's retired now but he was a police officer in phoenix at the time this case crossed his desk in march of nineteen sixty three patricia had been coming home late from a job taking tickets at a local movie theater she got off the bus a few blocks

from her house very dark there was no street lighting there was no sidewalk she had to walk on the side of the street and suddenly a man pulled her into his car and drove her out into the desert area the police found physical evidence she'd been assaulted but remember this was nineteen sixty three for there was no dna testing the strongest lead was the description of the inside of the car the young woman had given to them she remembered an unusual pattern on the seat covers and a strange rope handle on the backseat i went home for the weekend and that was pretty much the idea next week there was a week after the attacks one of

patricia's relatives and started walking or as he would go down and walk her home because she was afraid to walk home as well she should have been and so while he was there waiting for her to get off the bus that left him at night he saw a car driving in the neighborhood and it was driving very small when he became a little suspicious the rally call the police and describe a car it took a few days but cawley and his partner found a car that matched what patricia and her relatives described parked outside the home of a couple in twilight hoffman and ernesto miranda the show man came to the door didn't have a shirt on or shoes it worker khakis and his hair was almost up it looked like he had been asleep which i'm sure it was

and he asked to sell what this was about and we told him well it was a place where he said will come in and then we came into the house and as we're standing there in his living room with his with twyla and those three kids at an inner with us watching us once again he wanted to know what we want to talk about it and we said well we'd rather not talk to here in front of your family would you volunteer or would you come with us to the police department and we can ask the question is there and if you're not involved in what we're looking into we will bring you write all he said yes mr maraniss trip to the police station that it was a park where the most famous supreme court cases of the twentieth century hajj today on the show

the president but first let's return to mr miranda at the phoenix police station in march of nineteen sixty three calling another officer asked them questions about the my patricia was attacked eventual e coli asked point blank if you re patricia on the night of march thirty you should know it wasn't me i was or not this is called attrition to other women who'd

been attacked and robbed in a similar way they asked him to come down and to look at a lineup all families will finally went back into the room and we sat down and i didn't say anything and learning he knew that we had had several people apparently look at him and they said how that i do and my response was ernie didn't do so good recently december tell me about it and i said yes i think you shouldn't or so inmates out a confessional song or departmental form time i'm renee montagne he's right

so the case went to trial with it and course in that case the patricia dunn of fighting in court of naturally and we introduce the river convention and he was convicted of that twenty five to thirty years and so i've had my eye when i was satisfied with what i had done i thought i had done a pretty good job of investigating and touched a line that confession that ernesto miranda convicted of rape and kidnapping and it would also take his case all the way to the supreme court first i found about it was in nineteen sixty six they said this case that i have worked hard to shrink were surprised that i was very surprised i knew we read the letter of the law we were very careful in what we did cooley was enroll when the detectives interrogating mr miranda nineteen sixty

three they had done everything by the book but by nineteen sixty six when his case made its way to the supreme court to his decisions have dramatically strengthen the suspects rights while they were in police custody but in nineteen fifty three gideon versus wainwright said that every defendant had the right to an attorney and even if they couldn't afford to hire one and the next year the supreme court ruled that he's called the veto versus italy is that a defendant must be allowed to consult a lawyer if they wanted to washington discussed that decision also said that a suspect had an absolute right to remain silent the miranda case of those new rights into play yesterday mr miranda had been formally a constitutional rights after he agreed to confess he wasn't totally have a lawyer present he also not been told his rights include the right not to speak with the police the court decided five four that the police have a spa civility to explicitly tell a suspect these rights standards when his confession

wasn't his involuntary his conviction was overturned there you are and as the beetle and miranda are part of a series of decisions in the nineteen sixties focused on reforming the criminal justice system the court at the time was known as the warren court after its very active chief justice earl warren to different parks in history were converging in the warren court's criminal procedure revolution that's legal scholar risa going off she says that in order to understand the court's thinking case but miranda we've got to step outside of the court and into two national debates that are in full swing in nineteen sixty six one on police and crime and the other about civil rights there had been a belief that

we legislate or is bright laws and then police officers enforce them and that there was no gap between the laws on the books on the laws as enforced and had major national surveys into policing and criminal justice system that revealed actually the police how our discretion they can decide not to arrest people they can arrest people who don't really deserve to be arrested and that that kind of discretion was really rampant you know it's now it's rampant at the moment of the first interaction what weird today think of maybe a stop and frisk and then it existed the moment of arrest and then the moment of charging and for going to trial or for allowing for plea bargains and then there is discrimination and discretion and abuse in the gathering of evidence so coarse confessions things like that right and then that's what they wore in court was really embracing in the nineteen sixties in the miranda is part of and the idea there was that guilt or innocence wasn't the only important aspect of the criminal justice system the criminal justice system also had to ensure that it was treating people with fairness with dignity

with equality and i think forced confessions had been an issue for a long time making statements that lawyer so he does not having a lawyer so if you think about miranda it only comes a few years after getting in versus wainwright where the core required criminal defendants who couldn't pay for lawyers to be provided lawyers felony cases so that so that's a big change in summary and it is really part of putting in place safeguards so that the people who are getting processed through the system are not only guilty or like the guilty or will be judged guilty but are also receiving all of the rights and procedural protections that our constitution he gets interpreted to provide without records only concern the civil rights movement happens you get massive arrests of civil rights activists and demonstrators and people seeing the police as the frontline of jim crow seeing the police as oppressors in a way that you know even at the g man in earlier decades of war heroes

and suddenly they don't look as much like heroes in certain circumstances as well as the recognition that policing is a civil rights issue that african americans are being policed differently from whites and that's something that you know goes back to the forties and beyond but it really becomes a much bigger issue during the sixties as well so would you feel comfortable describing the miranda decision of sixty six as part of the story of civil rights law like that it is an actual connection between what more conventionally think about is a rights movement and the miranda decision absolutely one i think the warren court clearly understood its criminal procedure revolution as part of the civil rights movement they understood that policing was racial lies they understood that so many criminal defendants were african american or people of color so i do think that they have a sense and they understood criminal justice in the context of race and then there was or decision use it yet even though an actually i mean when you look at a lot of the criminal procedure

cases they didn't always have an after american defend income adam york or chicago you know that that wasn't how it worked and who has often the case with the court ended the best example i can give of that is your ruth bader ginsberg when she was bringing cases for sex discrimination on to to create the sex discrimination doctrines that we know today most of those cases had male plaintiffs they were discrimination against manning and she was using them as ways of getting rights for women i actually think the court found it useful and attractive to make universal pronouncements that the justices knew would redound to the benefit of african americans so they wanted to be making civil rights change but there were times when they wanted to be able to do without saying that's what they were doing now we've explored the legal thinking that went into the miranda decision because another question to answer anything that was as well how did this decision migrate out of the courtroom and into pop culture

it's a good question and as it happens that are the story starts with a question what exactly are we supposed to say when we arrest somebody that's legal scholar ron steiner he says that the california attorney general but many prosecutors around the country wanted to insure confessions were not going to get thrown out because of this new supreme court decision and while the decision laid out specific rights it didn't have specific language so the attorney general took matters into his own hands he asked a local district attorney to break down the court's decision into a simple paragraph that could be easily remembered by both police and suspects the court wanted the suspect to know their rates remain silent the right to have an attorney there a cover for attorney fourteenth and he distilled that language into a credit card sized card police officers could carry heat on the site actually owned a print shop and you realize that everybody's been in

meetings and so pretty quickly stay on it and then even beyond that you started marketing the little record size are in the car and so you know this phenomenon that we now call you know reading him his rights was born but within months of the supreme court case cops across the country were carrying carol clearly remember scaring them when he was on the job years later he and his fellow officers sometimes ran into them and he detested interrogated back in nineteen sixty three the guy who started the whole court case in the first place by then an estimate and a character and of course to that is true he would ask police officers if they had a miranda warning cards and we would give him carte you know he used to sign that so he would sell them for about two bucks whatever you get for

it by nineteen sixty seven and he's one miranda card also ended up in the hands of a man named jack webb at the time the aranda says was handed down one of the most popular television shows on the very limited menu of shows you could watch was dragnet jack webb's landmark police procedural tv show and jack webb had this almost obsessive compulsive pattern of trying to get every detail right there was a sense of jack webb's commitment to realize and they went down to parker center in la police headquarters a funny story of him having his production assistance to get down on their hands and knees and count the flecks in that tile on the floor cause the tar was kind of a black and white tie with these different flecks immature little texture and you want to be able to match the floor tile exactly it's a detail that just can't matter right viewer but he wanted to get

every detail right and he's our man consultation with the police experts that he was working with that miranda matter and that of his officers that he portrayed were going to be going strictly by the book and doing everything right but they would need to give the miranda warning and a proper miranda warning each time somebody was being subjected to questioning after arrest and so he heard miranda written and it was it's always thought we will advise you of your constitutional rights who my daddy there's a rights to any statement you made to us five years ago as you go along you have the right to remain silent you have the right to the presence of an attorney he cannot afford one one will be appointed before a question you understand that that deficit in the meantime devastated that yeah i did i did so the american public suddenly became aware of this new step and police procedure and he continued that into his next police procedural show adam twelve psalm which was tell another generation of cops on the street in la

every week people were subjected to one or two readings of the miranda warning and the american public quickly became aware of the fact that when you been arrested and when you're being subjected to distill interrogation they're supposed to now read you your rights so miranda became a marker of a certain type of car show one committed to getting the details right like wasted eventually the war he became so ubiquitous on cop shows that scriptwriters really put more than the first line into an episode confident that a generation of viewers raised on shows like dragnet can fill in the rest so you have this sake a black seas of the miranda warning this port will sound familiar to anyone who's tv diet includes shows like long order for health screenings every year of their wells so

we move on but while miranda settled seamlessly into pop culture it was a controversial legal decision almost from the start many viewed around as protection for the guilty at the expense of police terrell cooley certainly feels that way well it was a very bad decision i should say for police work because much of what police do is to gather information and seek the truth and if you tell somebody doesn't i have to talk to you and then you tell him listen if yeah you have a right to an attorney if you can't afford one we will provide you want well attorneys told their clients don't talk to the police and so you know you know if a person is being question and he's told these mornings he'd do you so what a fool to not take advantage international's question is he gave an example of a case where

he felt that mirandizing a suspect may have allowed a guilty man to get away with a crime that crime was the murder of mr miranda himself around it was stabbed to death in a bar fight in phoenix in nineteen seventy six there was a fight between he and two other hispanic male silver car game they're the bar that was the biggest mistake of his life it was his he was dead twice once in the stomach through the heart and he died on that dirty for two men or question in the case one was eventually charge of the other suspects appeared after the police questioned him coolly feels that the second man escaped in part because he was mirandized and police couldn't get enough information to keep him in custody the one thing you should know that the guy that stabbing to death was questioned he was given

his rights and question but we didn't have a case on and he walked away and he still gone he still out in the wind but there are also plenty of critics who fought the marimba didn't go far enough absolutely so critics on the right who thought this was an infringement of police profession was a man and an overreaching by the courts over the police which was true for much of what the warren court did that it was perceived to be the core being to activists from the left it certainly seemed to many and i think to fewer at the time but more overtime that by providing say you know you just have to say that people have these rights that call miranda rights parade that people have these rates doesn't really help them very much it creates a formal rule and

then that once everybody except the role suddenly you say you've these writing area these rights and then if you talk to me it's all fair game and then what people do they still talk and so on so it's a formal advance but there's a really protect defendants in the end are suspects in the end does it really actually meaningfully changed the relationship between the suspect and the officer eventually legal controversies surrounding the miranda decision and miranda of the pop culture icon would meet in a court case called dickerson oversees the united states the question before the court today asks whether congress has the authority to legislatively over wall and reversed his court's decision in miranda the cheaters question turns on whether the requirements of miranda are constitutionally based and therefore it is a requirement that the issue is go through these are precise details and cautioning somebody is that

constantly record or is that just a good idea and if you don't do that most still possible claim that the testimony was voluntary and so the question of miranda's constitutional pedigree was squarely at issue and dickerson in a case that ended in a way that it had never been before but it's not that easy to get rid of my guess is and no decision for the court written by justice chief justice rehnquist court to announce a number ninety nine fifty five twenty five jefferson is the united states you have the right to remain silent anything you say could be used against all day long oh i don't think the details of miranda expand though he acknowledged that if he had to do it himself beginning from zero ground zero that he probably wouldn't and down the requirements as they were handed down then went on to say unfortunately maybe we're not writing on a blank slate this morning's police stations and on

television screens in the thirty four years since we decided a case of miranda versus arizona and in particular a decision about me more and i've been volunteering at me is in the midst of a few popular culture where everybody knows the miranda warning a sense and everybody expects that when they're now subjected to what the courts would call custodial interrogation when they're under arrest and they think first whether or not we would agree with miranda as resilient as resulting rule well we're addressing the issue in the first instance miranda has become imbedded in routine police practices to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture and so if we take the miranda warning away will confuse people and

subtleties expectations that people have and that's a problem and so the court relied on some basic common law concept of precedent which caught story decisive said latin or the previous decision stands not because we agree with it necessarily but because it would be too socially disruptive to try and reverse it make life imitate art in effect getting everything interesting way of a popular culture the court acknowledged the international culture expects it but we all know that they didn't say it but we all know that comes from jack webb and adam twelve merk and the rarest woods pursued rules over the years you can't take it away without confusing people and so i guess were actually reinforces the court but what's also not the end of the story your research is that a pretty striking observation back during the nineteen eighties you take a show like hill street blues and just in the way that girl rests on that show being portrayed you found that three out of four the arrests over seventy

five percent of the arrest and whole shoe blues included some element of miranda rights being read as part of the broadcast fast forward to the nineties and early two thousand the show nypd blue and over eighty percent of the arrests on the show do not have any miranda rights involved at all again this is from her own research with your team and is an amazing development because it's demonstrating that the popular culture is shifting the way in which miranda as part of a script enter the discussion as a plot device is really leaving a popular culture is there any sense of that may have an impact on what the future of miranda rights may be going forward i think that's exactly right questions so that the fact that we don't seem around anymore as much as we used to is important because if dickerson is serious if the court is serious and it's a miranda i was perhaps a flawed decision but we're going to live with it because people are so so

ingrained in people's mind her to be and then to stop showing it if that's true then what happens what's the next step in that analysis so we didn't do a study to find out how aware are people today of miranda yeah i can recite miranda more or less i love my kids can sober and has never tested them and they can have they get you know rich remain silent and then they become so how it stops at the point that's all they know yeah i'm of the generation of the law and order black out of world leaders and there was even though you know we did our study based on tv shows that one of the students who did the research with me pointed out and then the more recent movie twenty one jump street it becomes a plot joke that these young tops they themselves can recite miranda they

haven't seen enough shows them where the whole red warning given that they don't actually know it themselves do you even know the miranda rights yes the sermon its society of writers simon or an unarmed you have the right to remain attorney say you have a right to be in turning you do have the right to be an attorney would you say that the legacy is of miranda given its permutations both through the courts into popular culture i think rendered is of course a big part of the warren court there are reshaping of criminal procedure and the rights of criminal suspects and that's something that i think we perhaps they take for granted today we forget how bad it had gotten because there were no national constitutional standards judges and

prosecutors who in many cases are actually elected representatives have this overwhelming desire to get convictions i get the bad guy and if nobody stops them from going too far they go too far and the court saw that and the supreme court said unfortunately the only way we're going to get a lot harder in the police department and in the criminal prosecutions is if we tell the police look if you invade someone's privacy answers them illegally that evidence is useless so you still don't do it if you interrogate somebody into a confession that they went on to make a confession as useless as sotheby's and courts a low point on it if you want your convictions to standup do it the right way i did dr steiner is a professor of law at chapman university and co

author of the rise and four miranda warnings earlier we heard from calhoun retired captain with the phoenix police department we also heard from recent gotti dean of the university of virginia's law and author of the great nation least our constitutional change and the making of the nineteen sixties we need to address today but you have the right to keep the conversation going online and let us know if you thought of the episode will ask a few questions about history you'll find instead baxter revealed dot org or send an email the backstory of virginia dot edu russell on

facebook tumblr and twitter at backstory revealed and whatever you do don't be a stranger this episode of that story was produced by david steinhaus nina earnest finally get it and ramona martinez jamal military technical director of family into their digital editor and joey thompson of the researchers additional help in vermont agreed to shush sequoia carrillo korean thomas parties find yet an errant keeping our theme song was written by nick thorburn other music in this episode came from cancer paddington bear and his own special thanks this week to the phoenix police museum professor lucas poll at the university of texas and can you see it in irvine and as always thanks to the johns hopkins studios in baltimore back stories produced at virginia humanities majors afford to provide by an anonymous donor in ashland ahmed for the humanities the post office at universal virginia joseph cornell memorial foundation and author vadim davis foundations

brian balogh is professor of history at the university of virginia and is a professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of richmond john freeman is professor of history and american studies at yale university nathan commonly used by saddam's associate professor of history at the johns hopkins university he was jr as i've read them to you