WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it will consider further limitations on constitutional protections that are intended to ensure people know their rights before police question them.
In a case that could have broad implications for so-called Miranda warnings (“You have the right to remain silent,” etc.), the court will decide whether physical evidence obtained when police fail to give the warnings can be used at trial.
Already, the court has said certain kinds of evidence can be admissible in court despite Miranda violations. But in a strongly worded opinion three years ago in Dickerson v. United States, an overwhelming court majority reaffirmed Miranda’s basic principles.
Some court watchers say that the case the justices on Monday agreed to hear will test just how much the court is willing to water down Miranda’s protections without diluting them completely.
“In Dickerson, the court was really affirming Miranda as it has been qualified and riddled with exceptions, not as it was created in 1966,” said Yale Kamisar, a University of Michigan law professor and constitutional law expert. “The court has talked before about getting Miranda under control, making sure it didn’t interfere too much with police being able to do their jobs.”
Kamisar is not optimistic about what the court might decide. From the beginning, the court has chipped away at the Miranda protections, he said.
“And even though they said in Dickerson that Miranda was a constitutional rule, the odds are that won’t matter. The justices have said things that suggest they’ll push the exceptions to Miranda even further,” Kamisar said.
The case the justices will hear springs from Colorado, where Samuel Francis Patane was arrested outside his house in 2001 for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Police and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent had begun to read Patane his rights when Patane interrupted them, saying he knew what they were. The authorities then questioned him about a gun they had heard was in his house, Patane admitted to having it and permitted a search.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said the gun the police found couldn’t be used against Patane because it was the fruit of a search conducted without proper Miranda warnings.
But U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued that the appeals court was wrong, saying that because Patane voluntarily submitted to questioning, earlier court rulings would have permitted the use of the gun as evidence, and the Dickerson case didn’t change that.
Part of what the court will decide is how stringently to apply a legal doctrine that says the fruits of an illegal act by law enforcement are, themselves, illegal. So if police search a house without a warrant, anything found in the search can’t be used as evidence. If they beat a confession out of a prisoner, that confession – or anything learned from it – can’t be used in court.
Unlike other constitutional protections, Miranda has never enjoyed a strict interpretation according to that doctrine, and the court has little by little added exceptions. The court has never before addressed the use of physical evidence obtained after a Miranda violation, but it was assumed by many that it could be admissible, too.
Kamisar said the Dickerson case appeared to give some hope to proponents of more stringent Miranda rules, but that may have been wishful thinking.
“They didn’t re-examine the cases where they qualified the Miranda rule,” Kamisar said. “But it should have frozen all the exceptions in place at that time. They shouldn’t be adding more.”
Kamisar said that if the high court buys Olson’s reasoning, it will weaken what little influence Miranda already has over police conduct.
“You have no chance with police if you tell them it’s OK to violate Miranda because you can use evidence you get from it anyway,” Kamisar said. “I think there’s a respectable argument to be made in the other direction. The reason this rule exists is to prevent police from questioning people who may not know they don’t have to answer or that they can have a lawyer present. That’s an important reason, and we should do everything to make sure police take it seriously.”
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(c) 2003, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-04-21-03 1816EDT
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