The Supreme Court: New Rules for Police Rooms

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"The cases before us raise questions which go to the root of our concepts of American criminal jurisprudence."

With that dry and cautious comment, Chief Justice Earl Warren gave fair warning that the decision he was about to hand down for an angrily divided Su preme Court was sure to echo through law-enforcement agencies across the land. For the court was reversing the' convictions of four confessed crimi nals: Kidnaper-Rapist Ernesto Miranda, Mugger Roy Stewart, Stickup Man Mi chael Vignera and Bank Robber Carl Westover. It was a decision that seemed to invite controversy, but Warren in sisted that the court was not offering any innovations. It was merely reaffirming any criminal defendant's basic constitutional right to the assistance of a lawyer and the freedom from any compulsion to testify against himself.

If it seemed late in the day for the Supreme Court to feel the urge to reaffirm those rights, the court itself was at least partially to blame. "We dealt with certain phases of this problem recently," Warren said, "in Escobedo v. Illinois." In that case, the court overturned a murder rap against Danny Escobedo (TIME cover, April 29) because Chicago police had extracted a confession from him after denying him access to a lawyer he asked for—a lawyer who was also in the police station asking to see him. The generalities with which the court disposed of that specific problem, said Warren, had opened the way for "spirited legal debate." "Both state and federal courts," he reported ruefully, "have arrived at varying conclusions" about the decision. It was high time, conceded the Chief Justice, for the court to "give concrete constitutional guidelines for law-enforcement agencies and courts to follow."

Speaking for a slim 5-to-4 majority, Warren made it clear that he, along with Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas and William Brennan, was convinced that questioning in the back room of a police station—the kind of questioning that led to all four confessions under consideration last week—is inherently coercive. Even if there is no physical intimidation, said the Chief Justice, the suspect in "police custody, surrounded by antagonistic forces, and subjected to the techniques of persuasion" that are the stock in trade of the modern interrogator, "cannot be otherwise than under compulsion." The very atmosphere of the police station carries its own "badge of intimidation."

Inherent Compulsion. To dispel that coercive atmosphere, "adequate protective devices" must be employed. The Fifth Amendment privilege against selfincrimination is so fundamental to U.S. justice, said Warren, and an adequate reminder of the privilege can be so simply delivered to suspects, that there is no excuse for failing to give it. Congress and the individual states, he stressed, should be encouraged to "continue their laudable search for increasingly effective ways of protecting the rights of the individual while promoting efficient enforcement of our criminal laws." As the search goes on, though, the right to silence and the opportunity to exercise it must be guarded.

With that, Warren's majority opinion laid down three specific rules: