Introduction

Miranda Warnings, Waiver, and Invocation

Introduction

The Fifth Amendment commands that no person shall be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."¹ Those words were written with the courtroom in mind, where a judge presides, a lawyer stands beside the accused, and a refusal to take the stand is visible to everyone present. The police station offers none of those protections. A suspect sitting alone in an interview room with two detectives usually has no one to explain that answering is optional, and the only people who later know what was said are the officers and the suspect. A trial court asked afterward whether a confession was coerced must choose between two accounts of a private event, which is a poor safeguard for a privilege whose purpose is to prevent compulsion before it produces a statement.

The Court's answer in Miranda v. Arizona was to move the protection to the front of the process.² It found incommunicado interrogation at odds with the privilege and reasoned that, unless adequate protective devices dispel the compulsion inherent in custodial surroundings, no statement can truly be the product of free choice.³ The holding is a limit on what the prosecution may use at trial: it may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, that stem from custodial interrogation unless it demonstrates procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege.⁴ Custodial interrogation means questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of freedom of action in any significant way.⁵ The safeguards are warnings before any questioning, a voluntary, knowing, and intelligent waiver if the suspect is to talk, and a halt to questioning once the suspect asks for a lawyer or, when alone, says he does not wish to be interrogated.⁶ Every Miranda problem therefore ends in the same question: may the prosecution use this statement?

The first two questions are the triggers. Without both custody and interrogation, the warnings are never required, and a statement is tested under other doctrines, such as the Due Process requirement that a confession be voluntary.⁷ The last three questions apply only when both triggers are present, and the fifth can reach back to affect a suspect who has already begun to talk, because answering some questions does not strip a suspect of the right to refuse further ones.⁸ The first body section starts with the Miranda rule itself and its basic structure, so that the individual triggers and safeguards can then be taken apart one at a time.