Q&A: Violation of Miranda rights isn’t the same as violating Fifth Amendment, Supreme Court says

For decades, most people have known about their rights against self-incrimination and to legal representation because of the 1966 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona. The subsequent Miranda rights require law enforcement to inform individuals of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights before interrogation. Civil rights advocates have been deeply disappointed with the current Supreme Court’s recent decision in a related case, which denies people the ability to seek compensation when government actors fail to meet that requirement.

Last month’s decision in Vega v. Tekoh was a result of an interrogation involving the use of an un-”Mirandized” confession in a criminal case. When a jury found the defendant not guilty, that defendant sued the police officer for violating his constitutional rights. In a 6-3 decision, however, the court determined that Miranda rights are simply rules designed to prevent a violation of constitutional rights and a failure to read someone their Miranda rights isn’t necessarily a violation of those rights.

Gary L. Stuart is a lawyer, professor and author of “Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent.” Stuart attended the University of Arizona and still lives in the state today, which is where the case began. He knew a number of the people involved in the case at the time, including his constitutional law professor, John P. Frank, one of the lawyers who argued Miranda before the Supreme Court. Stuart took some time to talk about the significance of this recent court decision and why he thinks the majority opinion got it wrong. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )

Q: What motivated you to write your 2004 book, “Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent,” and others, focused on this case and these rights?

A: John P. Frank was the lawyer responsible for Miranda. It was his genius, his backing, his brief, his history. He was a law clerk for (U.S. Supreme Court) Justice Hugo Black. In my last year of law school, the Miranda decision came down in June of 1966 and John Frank was the lawyer in the case. He didn’t make the closing arguments at the Supreme Court, one of his partners did, but Miranda belongs to John Frank and he was my constitutional law professor two months later. He was also a terrible driver. The dean of our law school said he was one of America’s finest lawyers and that someone from our law school class needed to pick him up from the airport and bring him to class because he didn’t drive well, so I became his driver. I learned a lot from him about the Miranda case — we all did — because that was his big win. Fast forward to the time I started thinking about writing a big, serious book about the law and I thought Miranda would be great because I knew John and he was still alive and well. When I started the research in 2002, I called him and asked to come to his office. He gave me all of his Miranda files, so I have all of his briefs with his handwritten notes in the margins, I have the longhand arguments he wrote out, and that gave me enormous entrée into what really happened. Ultimately, what really happened is clear in the decision itself, but it’s clearer in my book because I not only knew John Frank and John Flynn, I knew the judge, the prosecutor, and the people who were involved in the case. I had an inside track.

Q: The decision in Miranda v. Arizona included four different cases involving police interrogations in which confessions were given without any of the defendants being informed of their rights before the interrogations began. Can you talk about the general dynamic between law enforcement and people in custody before this case? And the ways in which these warnings altered that dynamic?

A: It’s not perfectly clear in the text of the opinion, but it is clear in the footnotes. The United States Supreme Court was looking for a case that had a defendant who was guilty of the crime, so that innocence wouldn’t be a problem, and a true confession that was given by a defendant who didn’t invoke his right to remain silent because he didn’t know that he had one. That was true of two out of every three defendants in the American justice system in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, before the Miranda decision came down. In particular, in the South, almost all criminal convictions (something like 90%) of Black people who were charged with a crime during that time, confessed to that crime. They were coerced confessions. Some of them were false, some of them were true, but they were nearly all coerced. That’s how the South enforced the law.

What the Court did was to take four cases from four different jurisdictions, with four different sets of facts, but all of them had this commonality: suspects gave confessions without knowing that they didn’t have to, and the suspects were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. That was the glue between all four. So, when it came time to hand this decision down, it’s the same decision in all of the cases.

(The Miranda case) changed the dynamic in the most dramatic possible way. If you compare the state decision to Miranda to the U.S. federal decision, based on the same facts or the same law, there are entirely different results. The reason was because when Miranda was arrested by a police officer in Phoenix, there was no “Miranda rule.” Police officers were not required to inform anybody of anything at any time. They didn’t have to say, “You don’t have to talk to me, you have a right to remain silent, you have a right to a lawyer. If you don’t have one, we’ll get one for you, and you can stop this interrogation any time you want.” That was not police protocol at all, anywhere. That’s what they changed, that particular protocol.

Q: What was your initial reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Vega v. Tekoh, stating that a person who is not given Miranda warnings and whose subsequent statements during interrogation are used against them in court, cannot sue the police officer who failed to inform them of those rights, including when a jury finds the person not guilty of the crime they were accused of?

A: I think it’s the worst Miranda ruling that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read them all since about 2002. I’ve gone back to D.C. twice just to listen to Miranda arguments at the Supreme Court for two other books. Between 1966 and 2000, there was a debate among the Court and the circuit courts about whether Miranda was a constitutional decision based in the constitution, and therefore constitutional law, or was it a prophylactic rule in criminal law? There are a thousand cases that deal with rules of court, rules of evidence, even statutory applications of criminal law, and they’re thought of as prophylactic cases where there’s just a warning that you should not be doing something one way, you should be doing it some other way. In “ Dickerson “ in 2000 (a case in which a defendant wanted his statement to the Federal Bureau of Investigation suppressed because agents failed to give him his Miranda warnings before interrogation), in an opinion written by (Chief Justice William) Rehnquist, he held that (Miranda) was a constitutional decision of the Court about a constitutional rule, the Fifth Amendment. So, it wasn’t a prophylactic case and to quit arguing amongst themselves about that.

Q: Part of what the Supreme Court said in this case is that the Miranda rights were meant to serve as a preventative measure against violating constitutional rights; breaking that rule by not reciting the Miranda rights, doesn’t necessarily translate to a violating a detainee’s constitutional rights. What do you think the potential implications are of this understanding of the Miranda rights?

A: A case from 2003 is Chavez v. Martinez. There, what the court held was that a coerced confession that violates the Fifth Amendment is actionable in a civil case filed under 42 U.S. Code, Section 1983, so long as the confessions were used at the criminal trial (Section 1983 is a federal statute stating that anyone acting on behalf of the state, who deprives a citizen of their constitutional rights, can be sued by the person whose rights were violated). What Justice (Samuel) Alito and the other members of the majority opinion in this (Vega) case did, was to overrule Chavez v. Martinez. That’s who they’re really overruling here, it isn’t just Miranda. There’s a lot of Section 1983 litigation out there and a lot of it is based on violations of the Miranda rule where the confession was admitted in evidence in a criminal case. Then, like in the Vega case, the jury rejected it and found in favor of the defendant, and that’s what happened here.

The 9th Circuit then solved the problem because they followed up on the Chavez case and held that the use of an un-”Mirandized” statement violates the Fifth Amendment and, therefore, may support a Section 1983 claim. What this particular decision in Vega does, is to weaken a long history of what you could do if you were found innocent by a jury and released. In a murder case, you can spend two to four years in jail before the trial, so what do you do with all that time lost? Reputation, business, and wives and husbands lost? That’s a Section 1983 case. It’s exactly why Section 1983 has been so popular — it allows us a civil remedy.

Q: Can you talk about why this Supreme Court decision is troubling, from a civil rights perspective?

A: What happens as a result of this case is that a defendant in a criminal case can’t file a Section 1983 case, but they can file a run-of-the-mill civil case in state court in every state. That’s not lost; but if you file a Section 1983 case in federal court, the burden of proof is much easier. You don’t have to prove that you were innocent as a matter of law. What you have to prove is that, under the “color of law,” your constitutional rights were violated. That’s a much easier standard than a state court or civil case with any damages for wrongful arrest, conviction or incarceration.

One of the consequences that I can see from this (Vega) decision is that now, as Section 1983 as a civil remedy is no longer available to defendants, there’s no real imperative to the police officer to give Miranda rights.

This is one of about a dozen cases where the strength and the heart of Miranda, the reason why it is so important, is weakened in case after case. I think we’re going to see Miranda continue to deteriorate because most of the decisions out of the conservative majority have been anti-Miranda. This one is particularly anti-Miranda because of the language of Justice Alito, who went out of his way to say things in stringent, harsh language. There are a lot of ways around this that he could have taken, and he didn’t, just like he didn’t in Roe v. Wade. There’s a mindset here that “We’re going to change the way that the American population is treated.” Whether it’s abortion cases or criminal cases, it’s the same mindset.